Carmen Bujdei

 

 

Heterotopian Thresholds in Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

 

 

In his preface to The Order of Things, Michel Foucault uses an illustriously fabri­ca­­ted taxonomy (a bizarre ‘Chinese ency­clo­paedia’) to develop the notion of hetero­topology – originally defined as a surveying of heterotopian counter-sites, which simultaneously serves to contest actual, real space, and to engender new spatial/ social/ identity figurations.[1] Focusing on Angela Carter’s parodic politics of gender repre­sentation in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman,[2] this essay will chart the fluctuating boundaries of her dystopian narrative, and examine several heterotopian thresholds on which identity is provisionally articulated and redefined.

One of the central issues around which utopian studies seem to have revolved of late is the direct correlation between ‘utopian thinking’ and ‘totalitarian prac­tice’: given the ultimate incongruence of human ideals, utopianism is seen to be generically prone to raising the spectre of totalitarianism. This contention is strongly informed by the work of pluralist, liberal and postmodern critics of utopian thought, such as Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault or Leszek Kolakowski, whose core argument hinges at the monolithic, univocal or hegemonic ‘grand narrative’ of utopia. With its static outline, its inflexible blueprint of the ‘ideal society, and its engendering of totalitarian states, utopia visibly congeals into dystopian nightmare. The indictment is clearly targeted at the artificial articulation of extremely codified structures of govern­ment on prescriptive visions of perfection, whereby a definitive, unsurpassable, ‘better’ future society might be forged at the ex­pense of spontaneous interactions amongst social institutions and individuals.[3] By contrast, dystopia represents a mode of utopian thinking which upholds plurality, heterogeneity, processual becoming; it emphasises movement and processes over destinations, and opens up ‘visions of alternatives, rather than closing down on a vision of “a” better society.’[4] Discarding the fixity and stasis of monolithic value systems erected by utopia, Carter’s feminist dystopia embarks on a representational transgression which produces a subversive critique of substantialist notions of patriarchal subject(ific)ation.

In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), the siege under which an unnamed city, vaguely located in the South American continent, has fallen threatens to escalate into world-engulfing warfare. The dystopian contours of a Reality War waged between two totalitarian figures, the Minister of Determination and the diabolical Dr Hoffman, are those of a city falling prey to a host of mirages, ghosts and phantasms and becoming, in effect, a Zone. In Brian McHale’s terminology, this is a typically heteroclite or heterotopian site, which simultaneously decon­structs and reconstructs space through the juxtaposition, interpolation, superimposition, or misattri­bu­tion of ‘radi­cally discon­tinuous and inconsistent /…/ worlds of incompatible structure.’[5] This preoccupation with the radical indeter­minacy, the plurality or the instability of (im)possible selves and worlds evinces the ‘ontological dominant’[6] of Angela Carter’s postmodernist fiction. In particular, the novel under consideration here begins by contrasting two political, cultural or identity paradigms which are vying for supremacy over the city, only to gradually undermine their consistency and, through an explo­ration of multiple, heterotopian counter-sites, repudiate them as grand (utopian) narratives.

The city, itself a heterogenous aggregate of Amerindian and European colonisation history, increasingly falls prey to such hyperreal phenomena as: rivers running backwards; pigeons shouting quotations from Hegel, then forgetting the art of flying and dropping down dead onto the pavement; horses from paintings breaking through the frames of canvases and galloping in the streets; or city-dwellers being revisited by the palpable, substantial spectres of their dead relatives. This invasion of oneiric phantasms and fertile metamorphoses is the result of Dr Hoffman’s experiments in liberating imagination and desire from the constraints of reason and order, the very ideals upheld by his opponent, the Minister of Determination, who institutes an Or­wellian Determination Police to ‘quaran­tine the unreality’ (p. 11). This conflict, which may be variously understood as an antagonism between reason and imagination, the reality principle and the pleasure principle,[7] Dionysian ‘orgiastic panic’ (p. 16) and Apollonian serenity, is nevertheless conceived in sheer militaristic terms, revealing both of these polar opposites as the congealed, static projec­tions of their representatives.

Dr Hoffman, for instance, is ‘waging a massive campaign against human reason itself’ (p. 10), deploying a ‘ferocious artillery of unreason’ and being assisted by guerrilla forces: ‘his soldiers in disguise who, though absolutely unreal, nevertheless, were’ (p. 11). Far from being liberating, however, unleashed imagination creates deep-seated anxiety, profound melancholy, a sense of entrapment in a ‘downward-drooping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape’ (p. 19). Similarly, the Minister of Determination, with his ‘admiration for stasis’, intends to ‘freeze the entire freak show the city had become back into attitudes of perfect propriety’ (p. 11). He therefore aims to contain the contagious powers of Dr Hoffman’s effect by building a wall of barbed wire around the city and resorting to ‘primitive and increasingly brutal methods’ (p. 21) in suppressing civilian unrest and revolt with tear gas and machine gun fire.

What is staged as a ‘battle between an encyclopaedist and a poet’ (p. 22) is a conflict between two facets of totali­ta­rianism: one is rather occlusive and des­potic, while the other only apparently libe­rates desire, re-territorialising it in an endless consumerist cycle[8]. The Minister of Determination is thus a rational empiricist who wishes to tabulate everything so that the strict correspondence between names and references is restored, but manages to be ‘only a witch-doctor in the present state of things’ (p. 22). His reality-testing laboratory is an incineration room, which instead of salvaging the real, manages only to exterminate the living. Likewise, Dr Hoffman is a Faustian, ‘crazed genius’ (p. 27), who nevertheless resorts to scientific means of extracting eroto-energy by means of gigantic generators. His ‘revolutionary’ freeing of desire is done literally by incarcerating the bodies of lovers in glass cages, reminiscent of the panopticist distribution of space, wherein individuals are under constant surveillance and manipulation.[9]

Dr Hoffman‘s ‘phantasmagoric redefi­nition’ of the city unfolds through a disso­lution and reaggregation of space and time coordinates. Space loses its rational, architectonic order and registers ceaseless dilation, contraction, realignment and redis­tribution, to the extent that several fragmentary, non-contiguous worlds are made to coexist in an impossible space: ‘sometimes the proportions of buildings and townscapes swelled to enormous, ominous sizes or repeated themselves over and over again in a fretting infinity’ (p. 18). Similarly, time is subjected to Daliesque fluidisation and de(con)struction: ‘Past occupied the city for whole days together, sometimes, so that the streets of a hundred years before were superimposed on nowadays streets’ (p. 20). Despite Dr Hoffman’s utopian project of liberating desire, he flaunts the grand notion of history as a progressive advancement towards some teleological goal, since he flattens out temporality and collapses the vertical distribution of time layers into ‘tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of actualised desire’ (p. 10). The Doctor’s ‘historio­graphic’ venture aims at imploding chrono­lo­gical sequentiality into a synthetical, plural ‘Nebulous Time,’ which will make possible a playful discursive reinscription of time past: Trotsky, for instance, could be pictured as having composed the Eroica Symphony, Van Gogh could have written Wuthering Heights, while Milton might blindly have executed frescos in the Sistine Chapel. As the Doctor’s former professor explains, Nebulous Time could be envi­saged as ‘a period of absolute mutability when only reflected rays and broken trajectories of an entirely hypothetical source of light fitfully reveal a continually shifting surface, like the surface of water, yet a water which is only reflective skin and has neither depth nor volume’ (p. 98).

Desiderio, the protagonist and narrator of this story, embarks concurrently on an erotic and a thanatic quest (a search for Albertina, the daughter of the malevolent Doctor, and an attempt to assassinate the latter); what Desiderio consequently expe­riences is a dissolution of identity, even­tually straddling the very boundaries that are meant to separate the two worlds, that of reason and that of unreason. His name signifies ‘desire’, yet he is initially enlisted in the Minister of Determination’s ranks as an Inspector of Veracity; furthermore, he insistently claims at the beginning of his narrative that he is rather ‘immune to the Hoffman effect’ (p. 12). While, initially, survival in this dystopian regime means not surrendering to the flux of mirages around him, Desiderio will eventually arrive at an understanding that identity is a topos under constant construction and re-signification on the very borderlines or thresholds that connect, rather than separate, self from other.

Thus, his immersion into a succession of heterochronic and heterotopic ‘subuni­verses’ will catalyse his awareness that unreason, imagination, corporeality are as constitutive of identity as the mind, the spirit or any other traditionally privileged categories of Enlightenment rationality. Carter parodically recycles here the pica­resque narrative pattern, positing Desiderio as a picaro whose primary accomplishment is not necessarily that of having progressed from social anonymity to social recognition – although posterity is bound to grant him a heroic stature, given his slaying of the ‘diabolical’ Dr Hoffman. Indeed, Desiderio succeeds in denaturalising conventional assumptions of reason and desire as polar opposites and, in effect, problematises and dismantles a host of cultural representations of, particularly gendered, iden­tity. Thus, Desiderio explores several socio-cultural systems in which female corporeality is consistently the negative term against which axiomatic, normative identity is defined.

A representative of official power at the outset of his journey, Desiderio soon becomes an outcaste taking refuge amongst the River People and is forced to give credence to their intricate webs of ritual, whereby cannibalism, the ritual of ingesting the flesh of another, is literally taken to mean also the incorporation of the other’s ‘magic virtue’ (p. 90). What Desiderio uncovers is a sense of otherness being essential to explorations of self-identity; he therefore resorts to the donning of masks, literal and symbolical, the major point being that masquerading (self-effacement, self-erasure, multiplication of selves) is not only a game of surfaces or appearances, but also a processual enactment of identity as primarily performative. It is not the case that by peeling off various masks or husks there would be a core identity, a depth to be reached; on the contrary, what is challenged here is the very idea of fixed, non-transformable content, and here is where Carter’s critique of the notion of an autonomous, self-contained, identity, which has dominated Western conceptions of the liberal, humanist subject, is most effective.

The volley of successive impersonations continues with Desiderio posing as the peep-show proprietor’s nephew and as the very curator of Dr Hoffman’s ‘museum’ – a sack full of models, slides and pictures serving as templates from which real physical objects and real events may be engendered. In this disguise, Desiderio becomes immersed into a realm of abjected liminality – a freak show in which normality itself is marginalized and rendered questio­nable, since Japanese dwarfs, dancing Albinos, the Alligator Man, Madame la Barbe, Mamie Buckskin, the phallic female ‘cl[i]ng defensively together to protect and perpetuate [their] difference’ (p. 97). The freaks’ inherent monstrosity indicates, through its blurring of any clear delineations between humanity and its others, through the chaotic mixing of categories that their hybrid, liminal morphology displays, the fragility of any axiomatic categories tradi­tionally employed to define the standard, ‘normal’ being and the fact that normality itself is a construct, a fiction. This sudden reversal of perspectivism – which continues to occur throughout Desiderio’s encounter with the Erotic Traveller, his captivity in the African realm of Amazons, or his Gulli­veresque experience in the land of the Centaurs – flips over into the ‘ontological parallax’ that McHale considers to govern postmodernist fiction: the fluctuating onto­logical planes shattering the consistency or homogeneity of identity.[10]

Perhaps the most horrendous example of the dangers inherent in perpetuating canon­ical representations of identity is that of the House of Anonymity: in masked, priapic outfits, Desiderio and the Sadeian Count find in this (neo)Gothic edifice, a dozen girls in cages, reduced to ‘the undifferen­tiated essence of the idea of the female. This ideational femaleness took amazingly different shapes though its nature was not that of Woman; when I examined them more closely, I saw that none of them were any longer, or might never have been, woman. All, without exception, passed beyond or did not enter the realm of simple humanity. They were sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute’ (p. 131).

This biological reductionism is remi­niscent of the peep show and its strategic redefinition of the ‘seven wonders of the world’: the set of samples introducing Desiderio to the dismembered limbs and female anatomical sections of segmented, mutilated women in lascivious poses. Here Carter’s ‘complicitous critique’ of the reification of female corporeality under the speculary regime accomplishes what Linda Hutcheon has called ‘a paradoxical instal­ling and subverting of conventions’[11]: the equation of woman with the object of the male gaze is simultaneously used and abused, laying bare the strategies and mechanisms at work in the politics of gender representation.

In contrast with such objectification of womanhood, Albertina, indecisively out­lined as the object or the product of Desiderio’s desires, undergoes perpetual permutations of identity, her somatic and ideational fluctuations attesting to a refusal of any categori(c)al entrapments: the ‘series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire’ (p. 12) evinces Albertina as a liminal being, collapsing all sorts of boundaries (animal-human, male-female, etc.) in her fluid manifestations as a black swan, as the androgynous ambassador of Dr Hoffman, as a gipsy girl, as the siren-like madam of the brothel or as the masculinised Generalissimo who introduces Desiderio to the Gothic-villain-turned-Freud­ian-psychoanalyst’s abode.

In the heterotopian mirror[12] from Dr Hoffman’s castle, Desiderio realises that his successive transformations have shattered the boundaries between self and other into an anamorphic being: ‘I looked at myself in the oval, maho­gany mirror. I had been transformed again. Time and travel had changed me almost beyond recognition. Now I was en­tirely Albertina in the male aspect’ (p. 197).

Transgressions of gender dictates are, as Judith Butler has demonstrated, disruptive of cultural prescriptions, since they parody into excess the artifice of predetermined categories of masculinity and femininity. Butler suggests one possible way out of the maze of binarisms that the ascription of fixed gender in the heterosexual matrix presupposes: the notion of ‘drag’, insistent on transgression, confusion, ambiguity, permeation and redefinition of bodily contours, can ‘engender,’ via the subversion of dichotomic constraints, an identity that refuses congealment, a ‘gendered corporea­lisation of time’[13].

Gender identity, Carter also maintains, not only in this particular novel, but throughout her work (The Passion of New Eve, or Nights at the Circus) should be seen as mobile, fluctuating, malleable, the body itself undergoing constant inscription and reinscription. This radical rejection of biological essentialism[14] relies on a Foucauldian understanding of the body itself as performative rather than substantive. The Infernal Desire Machines… celebrates inter­connectedness of self and other; hence, the recurrent reference to identity as dissemination, pluralisation of being. From the juxtaposition and transposition of limbs through which the Moroccan acrobats of desire juggle with corporeality and construct a ‘diagrammatic multi-man’ (p. 113), to the mirroring effect of eyes reflecting the gaze of another in a ‘model of eternal regression’ (p. 43), the trope of bodily ambiguation circulates freely in the cultural imaginary of Carter’s heterotopian world.

Having annihilated Dr Hoffman and his infernal machines, having restored reason as the governing utopia of the Post-Enlighten­ment Age, Desiderio is left stran­ded, condemned to unending disillu­sion, and destined to perpetually desire desire itself. However, the provisional constitution and dissolution of boundaries (corporeal, territo­rial, social, sexual), which have governed Desiderio’s encounters with otherness, evince a programmatic refusal to acknow­ledge a single, uni­vocal utopian solution to the various forms of socius under which (embodied) identity is appropriated.

 

 

Notes