| Title | : | The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0140235191 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780140235197 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 221 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1972 |
A satirical tale of magic and sex, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is a dazzling quest for truth, love and identity.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman Reviews
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Απολαυστικό και φαντασμαγορικό βιβλίο. Ανασυνθέτει με εξαιρετική μέθοδο γραφής και φανταστικής μεγαλοπρέπειας τη φύση μιας πολιορκημένης πολιτείας που γίνεται το βασίλειο του στιγμιαίου.
Επιστημονική φαντασία που εμπλέκεται στον κόσμο των ονείρων με ένα τρόπο οργιαστικού πανικού,
φαντασμάτων,ειδώλων,
εικονικής πραγματικότητας, τεχνητών ανασυνθέσεων και απομιμήσεις πρωτόγνωρων μορφών απο άλλες διαστάσεις χωροχρόνου που κατοικούν στην ίδια διάσταση με τους κατοίκους της "πολιτείας", με αποτέλεσμα,όλα τα απίστευτα κατακτούν την ανθρώπινη λογική.
Δίνουν την εξουσία στον αυθαίρετο χώρο του ονείρου και του ασταμάτητου κυνηγιού της ερωτικής ηδονής.
Ο Δρ. Χόφμαν ( θεωρώ προφανέστατη την συνωνυμία με τον Albert Hoffman ο οποίος ανακάλυψε το LSD) αποφασίζει να τροποποιήσει τη μορφή της αληθινής υπόστασης στην συγκεκριμένη πολιτεία αλλάζοντας την εξίσωση χώρου χρόνου.
Όταν αρχίζει ο πόλεμος της "πραγματικότητας", οι κάτοικοι της πόλης είναι απροετοίμαστοι και αμέσως κυριαρχεί το χάος.
Παραισθήσεις κατακλύζουν με ιλιγγιώδη ταχύτητα κάθε ανθρώπινο εγκέφαλο και η μεταφυσική γίνεται εκπλήρωση επιθυμιών κάθε είδους.
Η πόλη και οι κάτοικοι προσβάλλονται απο καρκίνο του πνεύματος. Είναι μάλλον ο ιός που εφηύρε ο Δρ. Χόφμαν,ο οποίος πολλαπλασιάζει ανεξέλεγκτα τα κύτταρα της φαντασίας.
Σκοπός του Υπουργού "πραγματικότητας"και ορκισμένου εχθρού του Δρ. Χόφμαν,είναι να βρει το αντίδοτο σε αυτόν τον ιό.Να επαναφέρει το κοινωνικό οικοδόμημα της πόλης του σε απόλυτη συμμετρία με την τάξη και τη ζωή.
Βοηθός του υπουργού είναι ο κυνικός και σκληρά ρεαλιστής Ντεζιντέριο. Ο ήρωας της φαντασμαγορίας μας. Απόγονος Ινδιάνων και ανεπηρέαστος απο την θηριωδία του παραλόγου γίνεται ο τραγικός θύτης που σώζει την ανθρωπότητα.
Ο Ντεζιντέριο ως νεαρός ζούσε στην πολιτεία αδιαφορώντας για τα πάντα,όταν ο διαβολικός Χόφμαν τη γέμισε χιμαιρικά είδωλα και τρέλανε τους πάντες.
Ένιωσε τον πρώτο καιρό του πολέμου,τις θυελλώδεις μέρες όπου διακυβεύονταν τα πάντα,να μετατρέπονται όλα σε λαβύρινθο κι οτιδήποτε μπορούσε να υπάρξει,γεννιότανε.
Όλα τινάχτηκαν στην ανυπαρξία και η πολιτεία παρά τη σύσταση του αστυνομικού Σώματος προσδιορισμού της αλήθειας και του υπουργικού συμβουλίου προστασίας, παραδόθηκε στην ανυπαρξία της στιγμής.
Αρρώστειας,πείνα,μιζέρια,
φτώχεια,ληστείες,βιασμοί,
τρομοκρατία και θάνατος κυριάρχησαν.
Ο Ντεζιντέριο φεύγει για ένα μυθικό ταξίδι με σκοπό να εξολοθρεύσει το Δρ. Χόφμαν,τον αστρικό ταξιδιώτη του ηδονικού σύμπαντος, τον γητευτή του υποσυνείδητου που πιστεύει πως το άγριο σεξ,οι βιασμοί,ο θάνατος,
ο κανιβαλισμός και η δύναμη του μεταφυσικού ελέγχουν την πραγματικότητα.
Σε όλους τους χωροχρόνους και τις διαστάσεις. Ότι καίει και πονάει είναι αληθινό και ο οργασμός πρέπει να απελευθερώνει τόση ερωτική ενέργεια ώστε να σταματάνε τα ρολόγια, να σπάνε.
Αυτή την τρέλα θα προσπαθήσει να σταματήσει ο Ντεζιντέριο και ξεκινά το ταξίδι απο τον Πύργο του μεσονυκτίου, περνάει στον λαό του ποταμού για να προστατευτεί απο επιτηδευμένους κινδύνους και γνωρίζει τη διαστροφή της σάρκας ως πηγή έμπνευσης.
Ακολουθεί το τσίρκο του έρωτα με τους ακροβάτες της επιθυμίας που ως Έλληνες Κένταυροι τον χρίζουν στην παγανιστική θρησκεία της φαλικής εξουσίας.
Μετά απο άπειρες περιπέτειες και καταστάσεις
αντί-πραγματικότητας ο ερωτικός ταξιδευτής φτάνει στην ακτή της Αφρικής, χάνεται στον κόσμο των νεφών και καταλήγει στο Κάστρο.
Κατά τη διάρκεια της περιπέτειας του Ντεζιντέριο οι ερωτικές σκηνές και πράξεις πέρα ή και όχι απο κάθε φαντασία πραγματοποιούνται ανηλεώς και ανελλιπώς.
Ο αναγνώστης τον συναντά εξ αρχής ως έναν θλιμμένο και ξεθωριασμένο γέροντα που γράφει τα απομνημονεύματα του, μια πράξη που κατά δήλωση του
του προσδίδει την πορνική ιδιότητα μέσα στα ιστορικά βιβλία.
Η δυστυχία του έγκειται στο γεγονός πως αναγκάστηκε να σκοτώσει την αγάπη της ζωής του.
Την Αλμπερτίνα Χόφμαν,που λάτρεψε απεγνωσμένα και ανέφικτα.
Αυτό το ταξιδιωτικό αφήγημα των ηρωικών και ηδονικών περιπετειών, μαζί με τα ακόρεστα δάκρυα του Ντεζιντέριο είναι αφιερωμένο σε Εκείνη.
Πονηρά διαβολικό βιβλιαράκι που αποδίδει εύσημα στους δολοφόνους των συστημάτων και τον αχαλίνωτο έρωτα.
•ΝΑ ΕΙΣΑΙ ΕΡΩΤΙΚΟΣ.
•ΝΑ ΕΙΣΑΙ ΜΥΣΤΗΡΙΩΔΗΣ.
•ΜΗ ΣΚΕΦΤΕΣΑΙ,ΚΟΙΤΑ!
•ΟΤΑΝ ΑΡΧΙΖΕΙΣ ΤΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ,ΧΑΝΕΙΣ ΤΟ ΝΟΗΜΑ.
•ΕΠΙΘΥΜΩ,ΑΡΑ ΥΠΑΡΧΩ!
Καλή ανάγνωση.
Σεμνούς και γλυκούς ασπασμούς! -
Is This the Thrill of Metaphysics?
"The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" ("TIDM") is a picaresque metaphysical thriller that is both intellectually stimulating and hugely enjoyable.
To the extent that it's philosophical, there's a risk that it might read like lecture notes. However, I never felt like I was being lectured to. The metaphysics was always absolutely integral to the plot, perhaps because it concerned the metaphysics of desire, and Carter's novel is primarily about desire.
Is This Indifference?
The first person narrator and protagonist, the 24 year old picaro, Desiderio ("the wished for or desired one"), is a low-ranking public servant in the Ministry of Determination of an unnamed South American country. He comes from an indigenous Indian background, his mother was a prostitute, and both parents are now dead. He is an outsider.
He describes himself as "indifferent", yet he is assigned the role of singlehandedly tracking down and killing Dr Hoffman, the mastermind behind a psychic war with the Ministry. Apart from one missing letter, the Doctor seems to be named after E. T. A. Hoffmann, the author of the fairy tale, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" (from which Tchaikovsky's ballet, "The Nutcracker", was adapted).
The Doctor is a former philosophy professor who is bent on implementing a radical liberation ideology of passion and desire. The Minister enlists Desiderio in a last desperate attempt to protect the world of rationality which has been crumbling rapidly under the Doctor's onslaught.
Is This Desire?
Between Desiderio and the Doctor comes the latter's daughter, the Proustian-named Albertina. When the Doctor realises he has fallen in love with her, he allows the two to make their way, chapter by chapter for eight chapters, towards the denouement in his Gothic castle, the supposed "powerhouse of the marvellous".
We learn from the first pages that Desiderio killed both the Doctor and Albertina. Fifty years later, as, like Proust again, he writes his account from memory ("I remember everything perfectly"), he warns us not to expect either a love story or a murder story. Instead, Carter pitches the novel as "a tale of picaresque adventure or even of heroic adventure".
This is only partly true. Rather, it is true, but the novel is much more than the baroque, science fiction, fantasy, proto-cyberpunk thriller it purports to be. It is both a profane and a profound meditation on the nature of desire, consciousness and existence.
Is This Suspended Disbelief?
Ironically, Desiderio only prevails over the Doctor, because at age 24 he did not feel adequate desire. He could not suspend disbelief. He clung to reason and never truly succumbed to passion and desire:
"In those tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of actualised desire, I myself had only one desire. And that was, for everything [the war] to stop...I became a hero only because I survived. I survived because I could not surrender to the flux of mirages. I could not merge and blend with them; I could not abnegate my reality and lose myself for ever as others did, blasted to non-being by the ferocious artillery of unreason. I was too sardonic. I was too disaffected."
Ironically, at a distance of 50 years, Desiderio realises that the Doctor achieved a tactical victory over him, because his desire for Albertina has actually grown since her death:
"...all the objects [in my world] are emanations of a single desire...to see Albertina again before I die..."
Of course, by killing the object of his desire (if not desire itself, and therefore his own being or existence), he has made it impossible to consummate his love and achieve his objective:
"...at the game of metaphysical chess we played, I took away her father's queen and mated us both, for though I am utterly consumed with this desire, it is as impotent as it is desperate. My desire can never be objectified..."
Of course, this assumes that Albertina, who changes guises several times during their journey, was not just a product of Desiderio's desire:
"...if Albertina has become for me, now, such a woman as only memory and imagination could devise, well, such is always at least partially the case with the beloved."
Is This Phenomenal?
TIDM was published in 1972. There's a lot of academic analysis of Angela Carter's fiction that describes her inflences in terms of philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan and Judith Butler (who explored various aspects of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism). However, it overlooks the fact that, apart from Lacan, a lot of their writings hadn't been written or translated into English before 1972. Carter actually wrote TIDM while living in Japan in 1970 and 1971.
This is not to deny their influence on Carter's subsequent fiction. However, TIDM itself suggests that her influences might have been earlier philosophical and psychoanalytical works.
The Doctor's Ambassador explains his philosophical differences with the Minister:
"For us, the world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world - the real world, if you like - is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structure is just as malleable."
The metaphysical structure is malleable, because of how consciousness perceives and understands the real world.
TIDM seems to be informed by a version of Phenomenology.
Is This Negation?
Various philosophers have suggested that we interpret the world through forms, categories or ideals housed in our consciousness.
The Doctor has created a set of samples that are "symbolic constituents of representations of the basic constituents of the universe." With them, the Doctor proposes to negate the reality controlled by the Minister of Determination:
"The symbols serve as patterns or templates from which physical objects and real events may be evolved by the process he calls 'effective evolving'...
"...the difference between a symbol and an object is quantitative, not qualitative...The universe has no fixed substratum of fixed substances and its only reality lies in its phenomena."
In other words, the Doctor proposes to conduct his war against reason at the level of phenomena in the mind, rather than in the real world of noumena.
Is This Mutable Time?
In this phenomenal world, only Time is immutable. The Doctor plans to begin with Nebulous Time, a period of "absolute mutability" during which "reflected rays and broken trajectories [of light] fitfully reveal a continually shifting surface, like the surface of water...a reflective skin [with] neither depth nor volume."
After the Doctor liberates the people:
"...when the sensual world surrenders to the intermittency of mutability, man will be freed in perpetuity from the tyranny of a single present. And we will live on as many layers of consciousness as we can, all at the same time."
Like cinematographic film, "Time is a serial composition of apparently indivisible instants" (or "moments", in the language of Hegel). Film allows us to "corral" Time, to retain it, not merely in the memory ("at best, a falsifying receptacle"), but "in the objective preservative of a roll of film":
"...the coil of film has...lassooed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification."
As the Doctor concludes, "everything depends on persistence of vision."
Is This Authentic?
The Doctor's student and friend, Mendoza (a Moor), shows him how to apply these principles to phenomena, eventually claiming that "if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine."
Thus, the "synthetic authenticity" of their artificial world is designed to rival and overturn the real world.
The samples are kept in a sack by the Doctor's former Professor (now, ironically, a peep-show proprietor in a carnival). For a time, Desiderio takes care of them, during which he illicitly pokes around, perhaps with a hint of humour on the part of Carter:
"From my investigations in the sack, I came to the conclusion that the models did indeed represent everything it was possible to believe by the means of either direct simulation or a symbolism derived from Freud."
Is This Hegelian?
Here we have an express reference to Freud. Apart from Plato and Aristotle, much of the rest of the metaphysical framework derives from Hegel:
"The pigeons lolloped from illusory pediment to window-ledge, like volatile, feathered madmen, chattering vile rhymes and laughing in hoarse, throaty voices, or perched upon chimney stacks shouting quotations from Hegel."
Albertina's interpretation of Nebulous Time sounds Hegelian:
"...all the subjects and objects we had encountered in the loose grammar of Nebulous Time were derived from a similar source - my desires or hers."
In "The Phenomenology of Spirit", Hegel asserts "Self-Consciousness is desire itself."
The Doctor's version of Descartes' cogito is:
"I DESIRE, THEREFORE I EXIST."
One character, the Sadeian Count, asks, "Am I the slave of my aspirations, or am I their master?"
Desiderio speculates about the true nature of his quest for the Doctor:
"...perhaps I was indeed looking for a master - perhaps the whole history of my adventure could be titled 'Desiderio in Search of a Master'."
Mind you, his intention was to kill him when he found him, hence he came not to worship his master, but to "jeer".
Is This the Enemy?
The functionality of the samples (in effect, what drives "the infernal desire machines") is not just adopted by the Doctor, a Satan who is rebelling against the God represented by the Minister. They are utilised by the Minister as well. Thus, it doesn't necessarily follow that Carter is presenting Hegel as the enemy.
Similarly, it's arguable that the Moorish Mendoza might represent Marx (whose nickname was "the Moor"). Thus, the forces of evil seem to be associated with Hegel and Marx, even though they (the Doctor and Mendoza) advocate, not the rule of reason, but the rule of unreason, the liberation of desire and passion. Some of Mendoza's more sexual theories even sound like those of Wilhelm Reich.
I suspect that Carter didn't see things in such black and white terms. Carter was reading a lot of Marcuse (whose "Eros and Civilisation" analysed both Freud and Marx and whose earlier "Reason and Revolution" had analysed Hegel) and Adorno in the early 70's.
Hence, it's possible that Carter's novel was more influenced by the Frankfurt School than Structuralism or Post-Structuralism.
Is This the End of the Tale?
It's possible that Desiderio's "indifference" reflected Carter's dual commitment to both reason and passion.
The desire of one individual is not necessarily consistent with the desire or will or welfare of another. It can present itself as an act of will or an exercise of brute force, especially in the case of the wilful abuse or rape of women by men.
Whatever the nature of Carter's stance, it was far more sophisticated than that of the countercultural hippy movement that had emerged in the 60's. It was definitely no endorsement of sexual liberation of men at the expense of women.
Liberation needs to be contained by some level of personal and social responsibility, as the indifferent Desiderio concludes, "a check, an impulse of restraint".
SOUNDTRACK:
PJ Harvey - "Is This Desire?"
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v93nQvWAZc8
Temple of the Black Moon - "Infernal Desire Machine" (demo)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEa8l... -
Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does.
So be prepared to throw your rationality and causality expectations overboard as you embark on this literary journey through a 'dangerous wonderland', following the peregrinations of one young man named Desiderio who tries to put a stop to the reality altering attacks coming from the renegade and possibly mad scientist, Dr. Hoffman. As an added incentive, Desiderio is also chasing a personal chimaera, the beautiful daughter of Hoffman - Albertina. Desiderio is chosen for this mission because he is apparently immune to the disruptive effect of the miracle machines, but in order to reach his destination he, and the reader, must abandon logic and succumb to the lure of the subjective, the absurd, the improbable:
Be Amorous!
Be Mysterious!
Don't Think, Look!
When You Begin To Think, You Lose the Point!
Objectify Your Desires!
I Desire Therefore I Exist!
If Dante's journey begins under the motto of abandoning hope, this masterful novel of Angela Carter is born under the signs of Robert Desnos' surrealism ("Les lois de nos desirs sont les des sans loisir."), the pataphysics of symbolist and anarchist Alfred Jarry ("Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, his measuring rod and his tuning fork.") and the modern philosophical relativism of Ludwig Wittgenstein who warns us that all definitions are misleading. All quotations chosen by Carter on the first page of the novel will bear fruit in the later developments, as Desiderio first has the reality of his city destroyed, later succumbs to his yearning for Albertina's love and finally must admit that wisdom and self-knowledge will come only when he sheds his own initial certainty and rigid values. The outcome of the quest is not a surprise, since Desiderio gives it away in the very first chapter, what is relevant is the internal personal journey as he goes from being an advocate of 'a barren yet harmonious calm' of a city that doesn't believe in magic and supernatural manifestations ( In those tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of actualized desire, I myself had only the one desire. And that was, for everything to stop. ) to an admission of the subjective, irrational and sensory determined nature - a fertile yet cacophonous tempest - of our experience of the world ( I was somehow, all unknowing, the instigator of this horror. ). There are enough literary elements present to make the journey of Desiderio a picaresque adventure: exploration of new lands and cultures, danger and earnest chases by reality police, cannibalistic pirates, extremely flexible acrobats, 'elderly and steatopygous' amazons, lustful centaurs or the Doctor's henchmen, natural disasters or thrilling philosophical debates with a peep-show owner or a decadent Lithuanian Count. Most important to the author though seems to be the exploration of sexuality and the dynamics of the gender roles, as Desiderio goes through constant changes: unimaginative and puritan conformist to rapist then subject of rape, romantic knight to decadent sensualist, egotist libertine to devoted partner. The feminine characters may appear in the beginning as victims and passive participants in the quest but, led by Albertina, they slowly get the upper hand and assert both their independence and their sexual liberation, a reaffirmation of the feminist principles that have coloured all the other novels by Carter I have previously read.
For a novel that concentrates on the mysterious, the unexplained and the surreal I feel it would be useless to attempt in my review to be structured and rational. I prefer to let myself go freestyle and underline some of the sparkles of metaphor and wit, the particularly beautiful turns of phrase that first attracted me to Carter's prose, leaving the plot details and the philosophical implications aside in favor of obscure desires, fanciful associations and grotesque encounters.
The journey starts in an obscure Latin American city that for a first impression and style of presentation reminded me strongly of "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino, another poet who likes to experiment with literary structures:
Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a wilfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter.
The author sometimes abuses a flowery, intricate phrasing, but in the next paragraph you can stumble on the concise and equally effective alternative sentence, which reminds me for some reason of Gabriel Garcia Marques:
Here they built a house for Jesus, a bank, a prison, a stock exchange, a madhouse, a suburb and a slum. It was complete. It prospered.
On this urban scene a war is waged between Desiderio's boss, the Minister, and the mad scientist, one of them trying to preserve the status quo, the other to open the doors of perception and let in all the nightmares of the subconscious. The Minister's work consisted essentially in setting a limit to thought, for Dr Hoffman appeared to me to be proliferating his weaponry of images along the obscure and controversial borderline between the thinkable and the unthinkable.
By his own confessions, Hoffman is a prophet of chaos:
I go about the world like Santa with a sack and nobody knows it is filled up with changes.
or: He dreamed of fissile time - of exploding the diatonic scale with its two notes, past and present, into a chromatic fanfare of every conceivable tense and many tenses at present inconceivable because there is no language to describe them.
Desiderio's first reaction, as most of the other citizens of the unnamed city, is one of panic:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown; I was afraid.
His way of dealing with the fear is to go out into the unknown and try to destroy it, armed with the certainty of his convictions and with an inflated sense of his own worth. Every following chapter can thus be considered his Hero's Journey in search of wisdom, gained through succesive violations of his self, both physically and mentally.
I've read a little about other pet projects of Carter, and I plan to read next some of her subversive modernized fairytales. One of the Easter eggs for me in the present novel is one such fable that adapts the classic Sleeping Beauty tale. It can be found in the "House at Midnight" chapter:
In the pure light of the morning, the fallen bricks, the exposed beams, the roses and the trees still seemed to sleep, murmuring and stirring a little as if a vague, unmemorable dream disturbed a slumber as profound as that of their mistress, the beauty in the dreaming wood, who slept too deeply to be wakened by anything as gentle as a kiss.
There may be more easter eggs or literary references like this that I have failed to detect, but I never let my lack of sophistication stop me from enjoying the text for itself. One of my favorite chapters describes a river journey in the company of a tribe of the original inhabitants of the country, a tribe of Indians with a special language and peculiar traditions that are mirror of their way of life: He did not think in straight lines; he thought in subtle and intricate interlocking circles.
Most of the later characters Desiderio meets argue the case of Dr. Hoffman and his efforts to negate the objectivity, the materialism of the world and to submit fully to the world of the senses. First the peep show proprietor and later the Count and Albertina try to convince Desiderio to join their cause:
The journey alone is real, not the landfall. I have no compass to guide me. I set my course by the fitfulness of fortune and perceive my random signposts only by the inextinguishable flame of my lusts.
Salvation comes to our hero at a tangent, not necessarily through the powers of reason so much as by the refusal of the physical world to be ignored and disconsidered:
Ocean, forest, mountain, weather - these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper.
Desiderio is ultimately saved by accepting the world as it is, accepting the need for change and growth but without throwing away all the hard won rules of social convenience, accepting the presence and power of physical desire but without becoming a slave to the senses, learning to care about other people as much as he cares about himself. The price he pays is high, leaving him to spend the rest of his long years as the celebrated hero of the war but without the passion and the devotion inspired by Albertina. My final quote is the attempt Carter makes to reconcile the two worlds, the chaos proposed by Hoffman and the stasis championed by the Minister, the ray of hope that is offered to each of us who try to make sense of the much too real, linear and indifferent future:
Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.
conclusion: a difficult, but very rewarding book.
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I'm baffled by the other reviewers calling this book "erotic" or "sexy." Yes, there's a lot of sex; but at least 90% of it is rape in one form or another, including some episodes of child rape. If you find this book sexy, there is something seriously wrong with you.
This book reminded me of Burroughs's
Junky or Cohen's
Beautiful Losers, in that it is sexually explicit in a fantastical and determinedly grotesque and cruel way. I get the feeling that writers like Carter, Burroughs, and Cohen are trying very hard to break through some kind of social boundary that just keeps receding in front of them, so they work themselves up into a froth getting more and more intensely grotesque and cruel in an attempt to shock. Writers, take note: this makes for deadly boring books (though often also disturbing, so I guess if making people feel crappy is your goal, go for it). Carter does manage to keep it interesting for a bit longer than either of those other two, but in the end it's still ridiculous and pointless.
I do really love a lot of Carter's short stories, which is why I picked up this book. They're much stronger, I suspect just because it's not as wide a field to develop that grotesquerie into something dull. -
3.5/5
...for now all changes would henceforth be, as they had been before, absolutely predictable.
My ongoing class of philosophy hindered as much as helped my reception of this, for I am as familiar with Big Name's rhapsodizing on freedom and reality and metaphysical stuff as I am sick of their standardized tools of female objectification and other exotification. I will likely reread this further on so as to ensure as careful attention to throughout as, in this initial encounter, only came forward in the final pages. It is unlikely, though, increased inception will lead to instinctive appreciation, for a piece that makes its point through the sensationalized culture is only successful within a very restricted morass of the world's reality. I see the composer of all these myriad violations (of more often than not that of women) is both female and operating through structured imagination overtly acknowledged by the tome itself, but not all imperialists are men.I would have hated him less if he had been less bored with his inventions.
Many a review of this mentions feminism, enough that the inherent theoretical nature of this particular working of "feminism" carries through clear enough, a dry and gaping maw memorized in classrooms and beholden to none living by virtue of its coagulated citations. As near as I can get at it, the machinations of rape and debasement work towards a critique of the patriarchy, on one side sterile order and the other side exuberant torture with nary a space for humanity in between. Lorde illustrated this better with her insistence on sensuality, a self that draws strength from its connections and derives meaning from holistic interweaving, avoiding completely the splintered categories of "work", "play", all the patriarchally ordained sunderings of pain and pleasure as founded on the Male. This "better" of mine, of course, hinges on her use of the valuing the personal rather than desecrating the impersonal, but my dislike of girlfriends in refrigerators is and will remain consistent.Therefore, every minute of the day, they were all, male and female alike, engrossed in weaving and embrodiering the rich fabric of the very world they lived in and, like so many Penelopes, their work was never finished.
Carter's critique came through the clearest from the land of the centaurs on, as much for its warning of what this category of desire desired as for the author removing herself from Japan and indigenous people and whatever ideological fodder she stabilized through her sampled appropriation. Here, finally, was an eye on the so-called "West", where pain and destruction are sacrosanct on a very specific dichotomy, founded by science and painless propagation, fueled by circular reasoning and centric pathos, always and ever foundered by destiny of might makes right. Here was the Catholicism I knew so well, part Houyhnhnm ideal of peace via genocide, part human that simply must live.
And now I understood they were not so much weaving a fabric of ritual with which to cover themselves but using the tools of ritual to shore up the very walls of the world.'But I know he was real enough because I killed him!'
As problematic as I found a great deal of parts, that fact that I am still writing shows how I wrestle with that conclusion still. The stereotypes I rail against are, at their heart, lazy and low quality writing, and this is not a piece of work that averages out to lazy and low quality. Blame the prose, blame the principles, blame my readerly gaze that only grew fully fleshed at the very end, but I am missing too much to resolutely reject the beauty's appeal. Perhaps those who more frequently remember their dreams will have better luck. My own only succeed in reaching the surface every month or so, and those few are always grotesque.
'What kind of proof is that?' -
A crazy quest book, the narrator is sent on a quest to defeat the fiendish Doctor Hoffman whose peculiar desire machines are sapping the life from the entire country.
Rather like Oblomov this is a circular novel with the narrator returning to the starting point. I had the feeling that this book is allegorical and I wondered whether it was about the construction of the self with the male and female leads representing the animus and the anima, in which case nothing really happens in terms of the exterior/outer/real world, the development and the journey would actually only be internal to the narrator.
Thinking about the novel as a journey through the self leading to the emergence of an adult personality one notes that he begins his quest in childhood, moves through his ancestry and heritage, has or rather undergoes sexual experiences, but finally is able to overcome the mind's obsession with sex to achieve selfhood. In which case desire is infernal and mechanical, a sticky hamster wheel.
In a way it is unsatisfying, a picaresque novel with explicit sex visited upon the narrator by Centaurs and a team of acrobats among others. Deeply Carterian in it's mixture of mind and explicit physicality. -
"I think, therefore I am," versus "I desire, therefore I am."
Attempting to write a critical review of a book as conceptually dense and hazy as this, is a ridiculous overestimation of one's ability to render pre-verbal images into an eloquent but static language of the commonplace. Don't believe me! Go read other reviews of this book! Not a single one was able to escape the putrefying stiffness that mundane language subjects the Unconscious to. That is what this book is about: the Unconscious unleashed upon the world, upending the spatio-temporal sanity of matter.
Oh and don't even get me started on how it is a glorified organic body of allusions and odes to philosophy , literature and the visual arts: Freud, De Sade, Surrealism, Rainer Fassbinder's cinema, Deleuze, Kafka, Swift, Lacan, Descartes. And these are only a few names that my bored reading of this book could salvage. I am sure there were several other references I missed. If I didn't love this book as much as I did, I would be tempted to call Angela Carter a pretentious impostor. Pretentious she is; verbose too. But nobody has ever used tacky gaudiness to unearth layers of sexual, psychological and social debauchery of humans as brilliantly as she does!
One reference that stood out most strikingly to me, and one I will now proceed to give my two cents about, was the undercurrent of Hegel running throughout the book. Or perhaps it would be more apt to say: the tension between the abstract immediacy of Cartesian cogito of the Minister, who was logical positivism made flesh, tasked with the herculean duty of protecting the Capital during the Reality War and the Hegelian self-consciousness as a mediated and concrete achievement in which our hero, Desiderio, is plunged into by Doctor Hoffman. Hence the fact that nobody has ever shut up about this book being a "picaresque journey:" a hero's ouroboros journey towards a complete selfhood.
Desire informs the ontological status of humanity. It is what moves us to action. It is what moved Desiderio to action - Desire made flesh in the elusive Albertina. The eight chapters in this book represent different planes of Desire peopled by different characters who are either themselves incarnations of Desire or a very conscious objectification of somebody else's. And then there's Desiderio travelling through a world turned feverish by the infernal desire machines of Doctor Hoffman: a quasi Proustian world that not only showed a cruel and liberating disdain towards positivist signifiers but blasted the Signifier itself into oblivion.
Clearly, I too couldn't escape the allure of turning pristine images into commonplace words. Anyway, I'm bored of this review now, so I will just say this: this is easily the best fiction book I have read this year. Yet it is not a book for everyone, or for your general everyday mood. It may be too offensive to your bourgeois sensibilities, or too jarring because of the casual use of rape, pedophilia, necrophilia, bla bla you get the philias. It also doesn't care about its characters in the conventional sense; you will feel no connection, no attachment to them, to the plot, to the story. So if that kind of thing is important to you, maybe this book isn't for you. It's all just a shimmering mess of concepts. And what a mesmerising mess it is! -
There was once a young man named Desiderio who set out upon a journey and very soon lost himself completely.
Ok, I’ll try to describe this book to you. It’s a fever dream, sexually disturbing psychedelic trip. (Interesting fact - Albert Hoffman is a father of LSD and research into psyhedelling mushrooms.)
Prose is lush and unnecessarily verbose, just as you’d expect from Angela Carter, but it somehow works for the style of this book.
The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils.
Nothing is ever certain or constant here. And also this book is obsessed with sex. All this bizarreness is powered by erotic desires.
And then Mohammed, the leader, took his head from his neck and they began to juggle with that until, one by one, all their heads came off and went into play, so that a fountain of heads rose and fell in the arena. Yet this was only the beginning. After that, limb by limb, they dismembered themselves. Hands, feet, forearms, thighs and ultimately torsos went into a diagrammatic multi-man whose constituents were those of them all.
Content warnings for everything: cannibalism, necrophilia, pedophilia, rapes. But because of the dreamlike feeling of everything that was happening and absence of crude and vulgar descriptions it just adds to this nightmarish quality. You're never sure what was a dream or reality.
Often it didn’t make any sense (at least to me) and still I couldn’t stop reading, I was mesmerized
They used the standard language with one another. His first words were: ‘I go to the city tomorrow and arrive there yesterday.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ replied Albertina. ‘Because the shadow of the flying bird never moves.’ They smiled. They appeared to understand one another perfectly.
‘Inside the reality modifying machines, in the medium of essential undifferentiation, these germinal molecules are agitated until, according to certain innate determinative tendencies, they form themselves into divergent sequences which act as what I call “transformation groups”.
Let me just quote the great and much smarter and well-read Ali Smith from her introduction:
But this is a work not so much layered with as organically formed by a shimmering body of allusion to the literary and visual arts. Try to pinpoint its influences (Kafka, Swift, Poe, Mallarmé, Freud, the Bible, cinema, de Sade, Shakespeare, Surrealism, Pope, Proust – and that’s just a surface skim) and it’s as if its author has swallowed literary and visual culture whole, from Chaucer to Calvino, de Mille to Fassbinder, Defoe to Foucault. [...] But the real triumph of Hoffman is that it was, and still is, a new kind of novel – the novel as mutable form – a meld of genres which results in something beyond genre; a hypnotic mixture of poetry, dilettantism and morality; half-fiction, half-lecture and, above all, a thing of beauty in itself (for, as Desiderio says at one point, gazing at Albertina, ‘I did not mind her lecturing me because she was so beautiful’). Its narrative and sexual postponement is Scheherazade-like. -
Reading various of Carter's stories, essays, and novels since being dazzled by the visceral/conceptual density of
The Passion of New Eve last fall, I'd enjoyed everything, but begun to despair of anything being so simultaneously compelling, fantastical, and symbolically loaded again. But fortunately this familiar-but-strange voyage across the haunted archetypal landscapes of desire could be even better. Angela Carter remaking classic stories is great, but forging her own from the detritus of centuries of signs and suggestions, she's completely stunning.
(a week passes, wherein I read the other six chapters of the eight)
On other hand, where The Passion gleefully inverts and muddles many of its gender archetypes to break down assumptions and wreak havoc with the power structures that Carter critiquing, here, the archetypes are recomposed somewhat more straightforwardly (though often weirdly and beautifully, and always cynically). Her goals here (as I just found myself commenting on Aubrey's rightly probing review) have to do with displaying how sheer imagination and the freeing of the unconscious are not necessarily incompatible with the same horrible power structures they're often assumed to oppose. An uncritical liberation may only free those elements of society who were free to begin with. It's an issue with surrealism (from someone who obviously loves many things about surrealism) and a disillusionment with 60s radicalism. The resulting images are often morally ambiguous and unsettling, but Carter has a determined and significant agenda, I think. -
Doctor Hoffman is a villain of the 'cold genius' variety, and for most of this novel his presence is only evident through his nefarious actions. He has launched an attack on a nameless city and his weapon of choice is 'actualized desire,' which rends deep tears in the fabric of daily life for the city's citizens. Reality morphs into a series of unreliable and upredictable forms. The narrator-hero of the story is Desiderio, secretary to the Minister of Determination. The Minister, a perfect foil to the Doctor, has been charged with organizing a response to the Doctor's assault, including the deployment of a squadron of Determination Police. The Minister eventually dispatches Desiderio to the countryside as a covert agent tasked with following up a lead on the Doctor. At this point Desiderio's path grows quite crooked and gnarled as he veers back and forth between his mission and total escape from his life heretofore. In following the current of his desires he comes close to death on a number of occasions. Eventually he falls in with a curious pair of travelers who will lead him to his destiny. Carter, in her inimitable way, weaves myth, human psychology, and the surreal into a compelling plot that can at times seem nonsensical but does lead to a pleasing form of retrospective clarity. To share too much would spoil the fun, so I will leave it there. For me, this book fulfilled all of the promise I found in
Heroes and Villains that didn't quite come to fruition. Not quite a 5-star book, but close. -
This is a beautiful surprise. I thought I knew what this book was from its reputation, but it's more than I expected. The book feels like One Hundred Years of Solitude at times, but it is completely unique in my reading experience. The way Angela Carter constructs sentences to present ideas and images blew my mind. A new one for the favorites shelf.
-
Warning: this book is not for the faint of heart. Warning (Pt. II): this book is not for the dull of wit. Well, I should rephrase. This is by no means a beach read, a rainy day read, a quick-n-easy read. As with most of Carter's work (well, all I've come across, anyhow), you'll likely scratch your head through most of the text, and hopefully come away with a dozen glittering nuggets of truth or beauty or profundity.
"Infernal Desire Machines" is a heroic-quest narrative, though as with any Carter, she's not going to allow such a narrative to remain unscathed. Desiderio is an unwilling hero, beset by ennui and strangely slavish to his desire for a seemingly impossible swan/woman/transvestite creature names Albertina. Dr. Hoffman has created a so-termed "Reality War" and is attempting to transform the world into a totalitarian system of actualized desire. He's destroyed space and time, erased the division between the abstract and the object, and left his 'subjects' in a state of mass chaos. As I said, if you don't like a book that will leave you dazed and confused, this isn't necessarily the book for you. Carter's engagement with theory is in full-force here, as she draws from Freud and Jung, Lacan--and either pulls from or pre-dates a lot of feminist and queer theory (particularly in terms of performativity and illusory identity). And I don't mean simply that she illustrates such theory, but that the book itself reads like theory at several points.
However, her prose never ceases to amaze, of course. Take this passage, for example:
"All, without exception, passed beyond of did not enter the realm of simple humanity. They were sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable, and part brute...Their hides were streaked, blotched and marbled and some trembled on the point of reverting completely to the beast...Perhaps that was why they kept them in cages...But, if some were antlered like stags, others had the branches of trees sprouting out of their bland foreheads and showed us the clusters of roses growing in their armpits when they held out their hands to us...All the figures presented a dream-like fusion of diverse states of being, blind, speechless beings from a nocturnal forest where trees had eyes and dragons rolled about on wheels."
That's but one brief moment of absolute genius in the novel--her style shimmers, is iridescent--and often, the strange thoughts Carter attempts to convey in her work have a similar effect. Which is why, at times, take her ideologies with a grain of salt, because I think Carter would cackle to think readers were taking everything seriously and intellectually.
The one issue I had with this book (and often have with Carter) is that her intellectual stance maintains an undercurrent of detachment between reader and text. I suppose this is a side-effect of her self-proclaimed "demythologizing" project; she doesn't want to allow the reader to nestle into pure escapism. And this doesn't discount the novel on the whole, but there were definite points where I was left a bit colder than at others. For example, I was wholly engrossed in the chapters "The River People," "The Acrobats of Desire," "The Erotic Traveler," and "The Castle." This is because those chapters feature settings and a cast I was more fascinated by; whereas, in some of the other chapters, the subject matter was less interesting, and because Carter maintains that detachment, I was less able to enter fully into them. Make sense? Carter remains one of my absolute favorite authors, though-so don't get me wrong. As I note in the little review option, I suggest you read this one if you love Carter, and/or if you love theory--particularly those pertaining to performativity, the processes of desire, the mirror image and Lacan's ideological imaginary/the Real, and semiotic theory.
Otherwise, I'd suggest you start with The Bloody Chamber or Nights at the Circus for an entrance into the wacky world of Carter. Either way, give her a shot. -
Ако решите да четете ”Адските машини за желания на доктор Хофман” на Анджела Картър, бъдете подготвени, че в нея ще попаднете на всичко, което не си позволявате дори да ви хрумне. Това не е удобна и "приятна" книга. В никакъв случай не е леко, "фантастично" читаво, което те увлича. Това е книга, която притеснява читателя. Нарочно. Тя се стреми да го изведе от зоната му на комфорт, от границите на съзнатото, от овладяването. Държи да му покаже гротескното, страховитото, отблъскващото, немислимото, невъобразимото желано. Насилието и желанието, жестокостта и невинността, науката и религиозният екстаз тук се сливат в едно.
"Адските машини" е издаден за първи път през 1972 г. Тогава критиката го обявява за един от най-добрите сюрреалистични романи на десетилетието. Не е бил предназначен за масовия читател – бил е странен и скандален. Сюжетът му се движи по тънката нишка между сън и реалност, като по-често губи баланс и пропада в съновидението, в желания кошмар на подсъзнателното.
Това е историята на Войната на сънищата – несъстоял се опит за революция на ирационалното в една измислена и неназована южноамериканска страна. Събитията оживяват в мемоарите на главния герой Дезидерио – млад чиновник със скучен сив живот и тъжно минало. Сивотата и просперитета на Града, в който той работи, са нарушени от мистериозния доктор Хофман – демоничен учен, гениален физик, който се увлича по метафизичните тайни и с тяхна помощ отприщва ада на ирационалното. Всички потиснати желания и фантазии на жителите му плъзват по улиците, часовниците спират да показват времето, пътищата всеки ден водят към различно място. Градът е пред унищожение. Единственият, който не се поддава на върлуващите навред фантазии е Министърът - аскетична фигура, поклонник на логиката и рационалното. Неговата дясна ръка е Дезидерио - циничен и язвителен, той е твърде отегчен от миражите, за да им се предаде. С изключение на един. Всяка нощ на сън му се явява тайнствената дъщеря на доктор Хофман - Албертина. За да я срещне и наяве Дезидерио се съгласява да изпълни рискована мисия – да открие на тайното скривалище на доктор Хофман и да го убие.
Сюжетът на "Адските машини" е изграден по всички правила на пикаресковия роман - историята се разказва от първо лице, събитията са нанизани хронологично едно след друго. Във всяка глава героят Дезидерио попада на ново място със странни обитатели: градът, превърнал се във военна зона, в която избуява тоталитарен режим, с оправданието, че това единственият начин да се запази някаква стабилност при атаките на ирационалното; потъна��о в сън и лепкави тайни, провинциално градче; затворено в ритуалите си и консервирано във времето индианско племе; пътуващ панаир, пълен с хора-аномалии; мистериозен литовски граф, с желязна воля, която пречупва и моделира реалността като пластилин; бордей, чиито жрици са пригодни да удовлетворят единствено и само най-нечовешките страсти; сурови пирати, които боготворят стомана; африканско племе канибали, с благи характери; митично племе кентаври, обитаващо свят на ръба на възможното време.
Стегнато, ясно и детайлно - така пише Картър, макар „научните” и теоретични моменти в романа й понякога да затрудняват. Нито за миг пъстрият свят на делюзиите не се изплъзва от простата й, но здрава структура. И все пак това е книга „на парчета”. Докато сте вътре в историята тя е логична и измамно хронологична, но погледнете ли я като по-голяма картина, осъзнавате, че е просто импресия, съставена от фрагменти и символи. Героите не са хора, те също са само парчета от човешкото и присъствието им цели да изследва именно светлите и тъмни страни на разума, егото, подсъзнанието, сексуалността, женствеността и всичко останало, което е присъщо само на човека и е негова отличителна характеристика. -
'Under all my indifferences, I was an exceedinly romantic young man yet, until that time, circumstances had never presented me with a sufficiently grand opportunity to exercise my pent-up passion. I had opted for the chill restraints of formalism only out of sharp necessity. That, you see, was why I was so bored.'
Don't be fooled: Desiderio is not a romantic hero! His odyssey is not so much a sprawling adventure or surrealist quest for identity; it is a consciously grotesque, picaresque pastiche. The coiled eroticism and sensuality of Carter’s later works here strays into the masochistic, starring frequent casual rape and sanctioned paedophilia. Her bold, brutal prose is certainly not for the faint of heart, but this novel would not serve anyone as comfortable reading.
In this narrative, reality is warped and interrogated, as is the power of liberating unconscious desire. Unsurprisingly, the result is a positively psychedelic tract that doesn’t compel a reader emotionally. This is Carter at her most repulsive, her most disturbing - and ultimately, this novel lacked the wonderfully unexpected sensibility with which her prose is often infused. It remains callous, perturbing and I was not engaged or enlightened. I think in this case, ‘subversive’ serves as a euphemism for ‘fucked up’.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman is astoundingly intelligent. Carter possesses the most acute command of language and comprehension of its nuances. The sheer volume of intertextuality, however, was enough to induce a headache and the interminable extended metaphors are more pretentious as opposed to illuminating. And most crucially, this richly intellectual strain never comes to a head: there is no pay off, no imparting message or thought. The novel is intrinsically unsatisfying because it never seems to achieve anything. The science babble and relatively incoherent plot make for a tedious and dense read. The delineation of the bizarre reality attack with which Desiderio’s city is under siege is absolutely fascinating. Why Carter chose to tear the focus away so soon, I don’t understand.
This was perhaps too niche for me. It’s inaccessible. Carter examines desire through a scientific and philosophical lens, rather than through an emotional or sensual avenue. I'm unsure whether this will be recognized as a valid criticism, but the sterile execution of rape/assault and the absence of acknowledging its complexity is what I felt was the most awful thing about this. It is unnecessarily disturbing. I think this surrealist novel is one of those that is best taken with a pinch of salt when considering Carter’s otherwise brilliant oeuvre. -
i read the last few pages of this book sitting on my front porch drinking a beer. it was pretty nice out and i was determined to get through this book, the first chapter and last chapter were compelling enough but the six chapters between were a mindfuck that i would have rather not read.
who wants to read about centaurs raping some lady? maybe some of the dan savage readers. maybe.
but the thing i will remember most about this book was on the last two pages. these two neighbor kids came out of their little scooters and got permission to go to the top of the block and then down to the bottom from their guardian.
they were gone for about 10 seconds and came racing back saying "brenda, brenda, guess what the sign says up the block?" and in unison they said "beware of dog" looked at each other and and laughed about talking in unison. brenda then told them that the sing means my neighbor to the north has a big dog that will eat them.
then they raced to the other end of the block and i continued reading. 20 seconds later one of the kids came back and stopped abruptly. the other kid went by him. then the one that stopped started yelling "javon, javon come back here quick. quicker, hurry!" and when javon came back the littler kid showed him an earthworm that had dried out on the sidewalk.
javon started yelling "earthworm down! earthworm down!" i laughed and then went inside because i had finally finished this very mediocre/not-worth-my-time book. unless you got javon, brenda, the little kid and a dead earthworm to help you through the last few pages i do not recommend reading this book.
and, seriously, no one has javon and brenda like i do. -
"DESEJO LOGO EXISTO"
"Tudo no mundo é mero acessório irrelevante de determinadas coisas simples. A derradeira simplicidade é o Amor. Ou seja, o Desejo. Que é gerado por quatro pernas na cama."
Para quem:
- é intolerante a descrições de violência;
- tem pouco sentido de humor;
- é puritano;
- não consegue abstrair-se da realidade e mergulhar num mundo completamente louco e surreal;
este livro será um Inferno.
Para os outros, será um Paraíso.
"as aberrações mais monstruosas estão condenadas a florescer em solo desinfectado da imaginação." -
Sorry. I think this is a specific case of me having needs that I wanted this book to fill, but that the book itself does not want to fill. I don't blame either of us. I have to admit that I started reading this book because a cute person on OKCupid had it in her book recs. (I think that is the real purpose of OKCupid btw.) It sounded sexy. What I even mean by "sexy book," though, is the big question.
Lately I'm given to think about literature as a form of dating, in which both reader and book have special needs and an agenda and are hoping to discover a blissful commonality. And simultaneously I'm given to think of dating as as process of browsing the first chapter of a person, trying to decide if you'd read the whole thing. (In the metaphorical context of which, OKCupid is a festival of gushy back-cover book blurbs & author photos, and Goodreads is some kind of creepy strip club where you tip the dancers with stars. Hmmm ...)
Therefore I can't help conceptualizing this as my first date with Angela Carter. I'm sad for both of us that it didn't work out. (Though the real difference is that the real Angela Carter doesn't give a fuck about me or what I think, and power to her.)
I kept trying to like it. Because Angela Carter's narrative style is kinda interesting. It's sort of a throwback to Victorian adventure novels, or perhaps Victor Hugo in translation. Very ornate and verbose, sensuously descriptive and lugubriously unfolded, in a past-admiring flavor that I expect was not the norm for freaky 1972. It matches Melville for minutia and for exercises in otherworldly-complex grammar ... and occasionally even for poetry ... but only occasionally. And that poetry is the thing I seem to need to enjoy a death-march through dense swampy thickets of such prose.
Also, it's meant to be sexy maybe? At least that was the insinuation made on Profile Page Of Sexy OKCupid Person. Sexy, or erotic, or perhaps zoorotic ... actually it's a fine example of Speculative Erotica, insofar as it proposes so many impossible or heretofore nonexistent forms of sex. (Centaur orgy, anyone?) But simultaneously as that is rather amusing, the author also lines up a series of old, musty racial and cultural stereotypes far less intelligent than Carter or her narrator might otherwise appear. These ethnic Others are ascribed aberrant sexual behaviors and curiously mechanical values. Each then becomes either villain or victim, then meets a grisly end, then -- lest ye judge, though one feels that might have happened already -- reality itself is observed to be a shifting surrealistic pillow under assault of constant fluffing by the titular machines of the titular Doctor, a pillow upon which all plot holes and questionable acts become light airy dreams to wake from. Upon waking, our rudderless hero Desiderio is swept helplessly along by the forces of fate to the next chapter, the next Other in his or her otherworldly setting, and the inevitable next round of Othersex.
There's no plot summary I could give while reading this that doesn't become obsolete one chapter later, as the book jerks from place to place. Think of it as just a set of loosely interconnected scenes starring a guy named Desiderio, his mission, his allegiances & his longing for a lady, co-starring said lady and misc other people. Scattered throughout are speculative-erotic sex episodes, some sadistic, some masochistic, some so dryly philosophical they require lube just to read. There's some pederasty, some rape, some general gayness ... in fact every single sex act is transgressive in some way, at least by 1972 standards. More often than not, our poor humble narrator is the trans who gets gressed. But there is no larger satisfying narrative here for me. And a tremendous amount of ink is expended in boring theoretical wankery -- "How is the Doctor able to use sex to warp reality? Here, let me explain in precise scientific terms ..." -- that is simply not meaningful outside the context of the book. Fine. If you like part of it you'd probably like all of it, but be forewarned: it doesn't get better, it just continues. -
It seems some editor thought War of Dreams is a better title for the Americas than The INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN which is the UK title...stupid editor!! My copy says "WAR OF DREAMS" but I am choosing to ignore it. bleaaa..
I can't say enough about this great book. I could fill up a book bubbling over this thing, but I will pull my horses to make these simple hopefully coherent snorts.
It's such a treat each sentance and every word. I rolled it over in my brain before digesting it. Let's say Shelly, Vance, Lautremont and Doyle wrote the Holy Mountain movie scriptryptich to that effect might come near where this book is. Dr. Hoffman (like Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD ?) has been altering shadows and later full blown reality with his war on 'the City'. He has turned what we know upsidown with his bizarre subconscious manifestations of rape and death. Reality police take people into custody to check if they pass for real. If it burns it's real!! The orgasm releases erotic energy that can stop clocks.
Everyone is employing the subconscious to realize warped versions of reality with the help of Dr. Hoffman's science. I dont really get a sense of a time period until a radio is mentioned or later on, helicopters. The science is not developed in here except in a strange passing intresting creation, reminding me of Poe or Shelly, but the characters are the main menu on this wonderful book.
Protagonist Desiderio goes from hunting Dr. Hoffman with his boss the important 'Minister' via clues, this madness must be stopped by any means. Later he is just trying to stay alive and out of jail with a mish mash of the wierd: The River People who paint their faces and have dead fish as dolls with their primordial verbal history. The Erotic Traveler who perverts the flesh using nature as an inspiration at his side; the syphillic faced Lafluer. The Acrobats of Desire who juggle their own limbs. Greek god centaurs whose well explained developed religion involves bowel movement (everyone can make the sign of god). Animal, root and meat faced prostitutes. It goes on. Angela Carter had a direct tap on the English language and her creative squirmbrain (unfortunately she's dead now) with this morsel and she really went nuts with it. It rallies the thoughts in directions I never thought possible with the endless acquisitions of more and more dementia as plot/anti-reality development.
This hidden gem of a book deep in dead trees I had never heard of. A friend picked it up randomly, read it, and then she threatened me with jagged eye slicing fish gills over my nose, and abstract geometric curse words until I read it. Glad I was easily threatened like this!!! I really owe my gill assassin some homage. Thank you Sharkface!
A great follow up to my Jeter read: "INFERNAL DEVICES", this one really is a masterpiece.
This review was originally posted on sfbook.com -
If you are a fan of fantastic (i.e. surreal, fabulist), transgressive literature (think Lautreamont's "Maldoror," a work duly referenced here), this is a must-read. Though my copy is missing the final pages (!), I was bowled over by the first 216 I read. A feminist cross between Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Kobo Abe's Secret Rendezvous (all three feature anthropomorphized horses, by the way), those looking for something shocking, intelligent, and entertaining will find much to appreciate here. The atmosphere of the book is truly indescribable. Stranger and more provocative than her short stories, one feels as if swimming through a viscous pool of debauched imagery, quirky references, and philosophical insights about the nature of reality, relationships between the sexes, religion/ritual, and so forth. Opening with quotations from Robert Desnos and Alfred Jarry, the work is very much influenced by Surrealism. (Says Doctor Hoffman: "By the liberation of the unconscious we shall, of course, liberate man".) I'd normally write a longer, more in-depth review, but I'm still digesting what I've read. Recommended.
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Relentless, bizarre image after bizarre image, sandwiched between descriptions of violent sexual acts, sprinkled with beauty and black humor. The writing was a heady combination of the formal and baroque. Truly unbelievable that such a variety of hideousness could be packed into so little space. Five stars for sheer audacity.
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Трябваше ми втори преглед на този роман, за да си събера наблюденията от прочетеното. Само който е чел книгата знае колко трудно се говори за нея. Аз имах проблем с ревютата, които четях предварително - от нито едно от тях не ми стана ясно за какво по дяволите е тази книга.
Докато я преглеждах за втори път се опитвах да извадя есенцията, която да разказва накратко случващото се в тези близо 300 страници.
Ключовата дума е "желание". Имаме главен герой, който се определя като "безразличен". Тази негова характеристика го прави специален, един вид "избрания" и му помага да се бори срещу антагонистът на историята - доктор Хофман. Ховман е антагонистът, защото със своята научно-фантастична технология "разлага" реалността с добрите намерения да освободи човечеството от неговите капани. Това обръщане на обществото и премахване на структурата му се приема като нещо страшно от хората и главният герой започва пътя си към войната с доктора. Безразличието на героят е неговият щит, но не за дълго. Стига се до сбъсък между протагониста и антагонистът и след този сблъсък има експлозия от изводи свръзани с ключовата дума на романа. :)
За изобилието от интердисицплинарни препратки ще си замълча, защото е замесено тлъсто уравнение от философия. -
All time favorite..Alfred Jarry meets Poe, Burroughs, and Swift and writes a collection of grotesque dreams detailing our anxieties...
-Adam -
Ревюто е публикувано за пръв път в онлайн списание
"ShadowDance".
Адските машини за желания на доктор Хофман на Анджела Картър най-вероятно ще бъде една от най-добрите книги на родния пазар за тази година. И то не просто във фантастичния жанр, а изобщо на книжния пазар. Мога да си позволя да напиша това, въпреки че не следя особено зорко българското книгоиздаване, просто защото книгата е твърде, твърде добра. Картър е сред най-значимите писатели на английски език за миналия век, а тази нейна творба е смятана за един от завършените образци на сюреализма и постмодерната литература. Най-хубавото в случая е, че книгата би се харесала както на интелигентния, но непретен��иозен фен на фантастиката, така и на отдадения изследовател на критическата теория. А конкретно за фантастиката, подобна книга е истинско съкровище – рядко някой автор успява да демонстрира такова умело сливане на невъзможното и странното с проницателен коментар на реалността и почти непосилна ерудиция, що се отнася до модерната хуманитарна мисъл и световното литературно наследство. Да не говорим, че смелостта на Картър наистина е стряскаща, а все пак става дума за роман от 70-те години на миналия век.
Адските машини за желания на доктор Хофман е историята на Дезидерио и войната срещу злия гений, доктор Хофман. Някъде по време на 20 век, в неназована южноамериканска столица, цялата публика на операта "Вълшебната флейта" е превърната в ято пауни. Следва нашествие от полуистински илюзии, които преобръщат Града и хвърлят в хаос страната. Гражданите са обзети от масова параноя и страх, огромната катедрала – символ на Града – е съборена, образите на мъртвите се явяват на най-близките им, гълъби се смеят дрезгаво и цитират Хегел... Под желязното управление на Министъра, човек с колосален интелект, липса на въображение и неизчерпаема вяра в човешкия разсъдък, Града започва съпротива срещу фантомите на доктор Хофман. След поредния неуспех Дезидерио, млад чиновник с наполовина индианска кръв, е изпратен в провинцията с тайната мисия да издири доктор Хофман и да го убие. Дезидерио обаче е измъчван от образа на Албертина, който се появява ненадейно в сънищата му и за пръв път в живота му успява да го пробуди от постяннто му безразличие. А Албертина е дъщеря на не кой да е, а на самия доктор.
Творбата на Картър следва доста ясно структурата на пикаресков роман, като най-сериозните намигвания са към Суифт и Пътешествията на Гъливер. В осемте глави на книгата Дезидерио прекосява най-разнообразни пътища, забърква се в невъобразими каши и среща едни от най-запомнящите се литературни герои. Пътешествието му е колкото търсене на доктора, толкова и търсене на Албертина, както и на собствената му самоличност. Аз-ът на Дезидерио постоянно се озовава в различни култури и семиотични системи, където бива претопяван и пресътворяван отново и отново. От сбърканата полу-реалност на Града, през призрачна готическа провинция, екзотиката на речните племена, ежедневната чудатост на пътуващия цирк, гротескната експозиция от плът в Дома на анонимността, въображаемите брегове на Африка, кентавърските царства и замъка на самия доктор. Картър умело изплита мрежи от знаци, символи, метафори и сравнения, в които разиграва проницателен и безмилостен обществено-психологически анализ на редица централни за модерната мисъл проблеми. Романът дава поле за дебати във всяка една област на литературната и културната теория: феминизъм, пост-колониализъм, куиър теория, психоанализа, райхианство, каквото си хареса човек. Мисля, че спокойно би могла да се използва като помагало в някой университетски курс по литературознание. Литературните алюзии също изобилстват, дотолкова, че да бъда сигурен, че съм изпуснал повечето. Приликите с Конрад, Борхес, дьо Сад, Пруст, Бъроуз и неколцина други големи имена са сред по-очевидните.
Нека обаче подобни тежкозвучащи списъци не ви стряскат. Наистина, книгата изисква много внимание и търпение, значително напъване на мозъка и страст към станното, но е написана, така че да удовлетвори и читателя без академични претенции. Световете, към които Картър ни повежда, са изумителни и многобройни, а красотата на писането й ги одухотворява върху невъобразимо ярки платна. Всяка една страница на романа съдържа многобройни перли, изречения, които бих изрисувал на стената си, само за да им се възхищавам. Майсторството на Картър й позволява само с няколко щриха да нарисува цяла една нова страна на чудесата или пък да ни запознае с поредния герой-шедьовър, а тя го прави постоянно. Няколко от тези герои са толкова живи и епични, че не се побират на страниците на книгата, илюстрирайки красноречиво мотото на книгата – всеки завършен предмет на изкуството може да се превърне в реалност. Героите на Картър са точно такива и успяват да привнесат епичност с космически мащаби в измамно простичката линейна история. И за да не са празни тези гигантски пространства, които книгата отваря, Картър се е погрижила да ги изпълни с не по-малко мащабни идеи. Къде наука и метафизика, къде езотерика и сатира, философията на доктор Хофман и останалите герои би могла да послужи за изписването на теоретически труд, или пък за полагането на метафизическите основи на куп светове, включително нашия. Едно нещо е гарантирано – книгата ще превърне главата ви в побясняло мисловно динамо.
Плюсове:
+ Прекрасен стил и невероятна образност.
+ Пребогата и сложна палитра от критически нишки, сатира, дълбочинна мисъл и литературни препратки.
+ Световете на Анджела Картър са много и са един от друг по-интересни.
+ Героите.
+ Книгата търпи, дори по-скоро изисква, повече от един прочит.
Минуси:
– Кулите от метафори, които авторката е изградила, са на места толкова големи, че има опасността човек да загуби от поглед основите им и те да се разпаднат под краката му. Опасността обаче не е твърде голяма, тъй като в малкото моменти, когато идеите станат твърде усложнени, на помощ идва прекрасното писане, което издърпва читателя във фантастичен транс.
Великолепна книга във всяко едно отношение. Мисля, че би се харесала на всеки непредубеден читател. Своебразен урок как се гради истински фантастична литература.
Забележка: Ревюто е писано по оригиналния текст на английски език. Българкото издание обаче е с превод на Ангел Игов, за когото съм чувал само хубави думи (наскоро излезе негов превод на Лирически балади на Колъридж и Уърдзуърт), така че би трябвало да е на нужното ниво. -
Подхващайки Адските машини, съвсем случайно, без дори да знам какво да очаквам, мога смело да кажа, че това беше една от най-интигуващите книги, които прочетох в последно време.
Тази книга съвсем нарочно се стреми да извади читателя от зоната му на комфорт. До колкото знам още при излизането си критиците го определят като един от най-добрите сюреалистични романи на десетилетието. Главният герой Дезидерио е описан толкова добре от Анджела Картър, че на моменти ти се струва, че оживява пред теб. Същото може да се твърди и за доктор Хофман. Присъствието на героите цели да изследва всичко от разума и егото до подсъзнанието и сексуалността.
Стила на писане на Картър ме очарова до такава степен, че веднага смятам да прочета още нещо от нея. Препоръчвам книгата с две ръце! -
Phantasmagoric trip into a battle between order/reason and chaos/desire
I'm afraid this book is far too difficult for me to do justice with given my meagre powers of analysis. Suffice to say it is a strange, unforgettable fever dream of disturbing and weird episodes, chockabloc with many high-level allusions to various literary greats and delves deep into the psychology of signs and symbols, so probably much of it went over my head, but nonetheless I really found it fascinating stuff, and Angela Carter's baroque and colorful writing remains a revelation. So I think it best I revisit this short but very tense tale again, it's something that you can gain more from a second or third reading. -
110915: somehow lost the original review- 2nd reading- first read this many years if not decades ago. original edition title in uk was 'war of dreams', which is exactly what this is about. if you have vivid, powerful, transgressive dreams. i was blown away...
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Angela Carter horniest intellectual on the planet! The Bloody Chamber is so gothic and poetic and refined but this is absolutely loosey-goosey whimsical wacky storytelling. Every chapter is a self-contained little fantastical episode on Desiderio's journey-- there's a chapter where he joins a traveling circus, a chapter where he's kidnapped by pirates and taken to a cannibal colony, a chapter where he is initiated into a centaur society, etc., all strung together by his overarching quest to shut down Doctor Hoffman's horniness machines (editor's note: they are not called horniness machines) which are disrupting the metaphysics of the universe. That is a storytelling structure which I love and which absolutely DID remind me of A Series of Unfortunate Events although I should not rely on that comparison because this is actually sporadically very upsetting and violent! I'm writing in run-on sentences because I drank coffee. A book with a tone that's nearly impossible to pin down (sometimes it's very funny, sometimes it feels like a philosophy paper, sometimes there is vividly rendered sexual violence or torture in the middle of an otherwise silly chapter) but which I found really wonderful and interesting and more often than not very fun! Love u Angela.
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In terms of popularity I am astonished at how undervalued Angela Carter seems to be. Apart from the secret life of academia, where Carter is rightfully or wrongfully regularly exorcised by excited students, she remains a mystery to much of the literary world. There are a few reasons why I think this: Carter's intelligence: which shines so bright it makes ordinary prose seem possibly devolved in comparison. Everything about her prose is erudite, esoteric, erotically intellectualised, so much so it feels as if one is reading the most perfect brain, or the history of the entire world. [Indeed, Infernal Desire Machines touch upon on nearly all branches of philosophy from Confucianism, Oriental mythology, to Freudian philosophy.] Reading Carter is realising your own inadequacy; her command of the English language often forced me to reach over to the dictionary, and even familiar words Carter exploits linguistically - with education - to create shocking new formations. Her prose is masterfully stylistic but equally elegant and elongated, completely counterintuitive to the way reading happens now. Infernal Desire Machines may seem a confusing patch-work of stories but in its picaresque postmodern pastiche, Carter weaves an intricate, many-layered web of surrealism and magical realism like nobody else. Everything within the novel is created and comes under the power of the author; her level of fine control over the writing is a revelation as each chapter builds on the previous. The novel itself - being picaresque - seems aimless, absurd and grotesque but therein lies another component that is so distinctively Carter but can be off-putting: as beautiful as the writing is, there are some ugly truths revealed through the pages, and terrible things do happen, often, under the false impression of beauty. The book very openly deals in topics like rape, masochism, sadomasochism, taboo, torture to an extent which would be terrifyingly brave by any author, but in Carter's hands becomes both detached and philosophically theoretical. There is no authorial judgement: like the Cogito [another one of the book's main themes], there just is. This mixed Eden-like pasture of at once heavenly fruits and rotten grounds makes for a roller-coaster reading, where pleasure and pain become vague, and the entire reading process turns into a convergence of highs and lows, not unlike taking a drug. But unlike other novels written under the influence of drugs, Infernal Desire Machines defies the contemporary idea that writing can either be fun or smart. Carter does both with aplomb, integrating her interest in feminism, nature, identity and desire [which crops again and again in her works] with a fantasy ride that could rival any page-turner nowadays: religious philosophy lies hand in hand with centaurs; circuses become utopian constructs of the grotesque; peep-show proprietors become professors of physics; River People become the colonial metaphor of the wild. There are so many things in Infernal Desire Machines, that it is very easy to get lost in, but that is not to say one should not do so because there is no overall right way. The novel expects compliance, it expects for the reader to be taken along for the ride, mind and eyes open, willing to accept the novel's strangeness and reality utterly. In essence, the novel demands and deserves to be read.
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In The Elegant Universe Brian Greene suggests string theory could harmonize quantum mechanics with Einstein's special relativity. This theory posits that besides the three spatial and one temporal dimensions of our accustomed existence, an additional seven infinitesimal dimensions are compressed throughout the universe.
Thus, immense possibilities we can scarcely even conceptualize lie within each location and moment. Furthermore, some scientists also speculate that miniscule time dimensions may be folded into the spatial fabric, potentially directing time's flow not only backward but also toward unimaginable velocities, orientations, shapes.
The Elegant Universe came to mind while I was tripping through IDM. At first appearance this is a surreal picaresque novel which takes the form of an autobiography. It focuses on a character named Desiderio and depicts both his sexual obsession with the shape-shifting Albertina and his adventures in a world where time and space have become mutable.
Desiderio is instructed to assassinate the diabolical Dr. Hoffman, who has launched a “Reality War.” Doc intends to transform the world into a totalitarian system of actualized desire. To fulfill his mission Hoffman has collapsed the space/time continuum, erasing the border between the imaginary and the real which leaves his subjects in a state of chaos.
For me, Angela Carter has performed the same operation in IDM by injecting the most subversive elements of science, philosophy and theory into an apparent heroic quest. Just as Desiderio journeys through a lawless world that ceaselessly morphs into strange new creations, so does the intrepid reader. Carter's eerily brilliant prose could be Dr. Hoffman's formula for transforming latent images into the visible; Carter/Hoffman in her/his laboratory.
I could go on ad nauseum about this book but I'll end by saying that this unrepentant science-theory nerd found IDM an amazing read. -
The tension between reason and passion in this book makes me feel like I'm being pelted by champagne snowballs while sitting in a hot tub of Mexican cocoa. Carter is a wicked, wanton wordsmith; a cerebral chanteuse of the silent opera that is a novel.
It is bitterly difficult to find a decent copy of this book (in the US, at least). The fuzzy, fading print of the edition pictured may thwart all but the most devoted readers. But if you're of the party that considers the brain the most potent love organ, if constant mutations of setting and style intrigue you, if vivid, obscenely fetishistic vocabulary whets your whistle, do what you can to net this glittering beauty.
