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Penguin Books
0140235191
$15.00
It's probably a bad idea for the critic (me) to say straight out that they didn't understand a book, so I'll hedge: I'm not really sure I understood The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
For quite a while, I really didn't like Angela Carter. Really, really didn't like. She seemed to me like a bad female D.H.Lawrence, who I also strongly disliked.
More recently, I've come round to Lawrence. I am intrigued by his attempt to make language sensational in the sense of being bodily rather than of the intellect. I'm not sure he succeeds in such a paradoxical task, but what he was doing is so different to anything anybody is doing nowadays that it's definitely worth reconsidering.
And Angela Carter, too, has started to convince me.
I asked Ali Smith, who knew Carter and has read all of her work, to recommend me a book and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman was the one she came back with.
It is, to say the least, one of Carter's less well-known novels. First published in 1972, Doctor Hoffman is...
And this is where I am likely to get into trouble.
What I would like to say is, 'Doctor Hoffman is a picaresque adventure concerning the exploits of one Desiderio.'
But I would also like to say, 'Doctor Hoffman is a novel of ideas, taking the form of a picaresque adventure etc.'
And maybe even, 'Doctor Hoffman is a series of genre parodies, which at first sight appear to be a novel of ideas, taking the form etc.'
Though I am also tempted to reduce that to, 'Doctor Hoffman is a collection of Angela Carter's favourite literary riffs.'
So, let's start there. Here is a very recognisable riff, the overgrown garden:
Roses had climbed up the already luxuriant ivied walls and lodged in knots on the roofs where flowering weeds were rooted in the gaps between the mossy tiles while a great, unlopped elm with lice of rooks in its hair towered over the house as if about to drop its great limbs upon it, to smash it, while at the same time its roots clutched the foundations under the earth in a ferocious embrace. The garden had laid claim to the house and was destroying it at its arborescent leisure. Those within the house were already at the capricious mercy of nature.
The exquisite prose of this novel is, as you can see, similarly luxuriant. There is something wannabe fin-de-siecle about it, calculatedly rather than helplessly decadent.
Carter seems to want her reader to be enraptured but also detached. The events take place, at one and the same time, very close up and very far away. It's almost as if the characters are fleas in a flea circus or planets orbiting a far distant sun (or impossible flea-planet hybrids). There is something truly dreamlike about what happens: we care about it passionately while it is going on but also know that ultimately it is trivial. And that is also not a bad description of desire – the stated theme of the book.
Men, seen through Carter's eyes, are desire machines. Desiderio mechanistically pursues what he can never have:
'I must write down all my memories, in spite of the almost insupportable pain I suffer when I think of her, the heroine of my story, the daughter of the magician, the inexpressible woman to whose memory I dedicate these pages: the miraculous Albertina.
Her name is that of a lost Edgar Allan Poe heroine, and Carter's start-point is not far from Poe's famous statement:
The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world – and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.
Carter's aim, however, is to undermine rather than reconfirm this. Without giving too much away, her beautiful woman is not going to stand for being kept on ice.
Albertina is the literary younger sister of Proust's Albertine, who also disappears. Proust's novel was originally translated as Remembrance of things past. Doctor Hoffman begins, 'I remember everything.' Proust's novel was later known as In Search of Lost Time. And there is a chapter in Doctor Hoffman called Lost in Nebulous Time.
But the sense, throughout, is that this is a novel less about memory than about invention. Doctor Hoffman, who stands for much of the novel as deus ex machina, is a riff on the mad professor. He is Faust. He is Oz. He is Doctor Who gone bad.
What I love most about this book is its excess. It has too much meaning. As Desiderio says, 'good taste has always bored me a little.' The truth may be grotesque in its simplicity.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter is published by Penguin Books USA
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