Burning Your Boats

A quick note on the many reasons to love Angela Carter: excess, glamor, wit, bawdiness, nerve and imagination. I’ve been reading a lot of short stories of late and the pace of  (so!) many of them can get deadly familiar. It’s like counting to a metronome. Countdown to deadpan. I start to wonder what the homogenizing force could be and whether it is inescapable, whether any freakish voice might make it out the gates intact. And who came to the rescue last week? Angela Carter with her profane and wickedly fun collection of short stories, Burning Your Boats.

The collection contains early work, stories from a 1974 collection called Fireworks, some from 1979’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, the 1980’s Black Venus and the 1990s American Ghosts and Old World of Wonders. Several (most?) of the stories are variations of fairy tales; sometimes two or three variations of a single tale published side-by-side. Variations of Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Cinderella, for example, are astounding in showing how dimensional a single fable can really be. Carter writes from the various perspectives of characters, she imagines entirely new scenes, sometimes entirely different ending without losing the essential core of the story. In one variation of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, the heroine wins over the wolf by seducing him. The story ends with the nubile girl in the arms of her animal lover. In a take on Cinderella, Carter’s Cinderella (never named so expressly) is finally vindicated by resurrecting the dead spirit of her mother (her fairy godmother), who transforms her own coffin into a stagecoach to carry the girl away. The source of her dead mother’s magic? Their bond, trust.

The stories are unflinchingly emotional and unflinchingly sexual. Much has been written, it seems, about the use of gender in Carter’s stories to re-imagine and reanimate these familiar storylines. It seems a little genius to me that Carter could discover so much life in a genre that seems so wooden, so locked in time. There, in the museum of folktale and fable, Carter finds life more vivid than that drawn by contemporary realism – or so it seems to me, today. Why fable? In the Cinderella variation described above, ‘Ashputtle  Or The Mother’s Ghost,’ Carter breaks out of narration to mull over why she chooses not to focus on the stepdaughters in the story. “But it would transform the story into something else…I would have to equip them with three dimensions, with tastes and memories, and I would have to think of things for them to eat and wear and say. It would transform ‘Ashputtle’ from the bare necessity of fairy tale … to the emotional and technical complexity of bourgeois realism. They would have to learn to think. Everything would change.” She concludes, “I will stick with what I know.”

Carter’s writing is thick with invented language, nonsense words and the grotesque. As I was reading I was thinking of that the writing reminded the delightful grossness of Jan Svankmayer’s puppetry. I turned the page and there! A story based on Svankmayer’s Alice, a re-imagination of Alice in Wonderland. It gave me a thrill, sharing a wavelength, across decades, lifetimes, with a female writer who has so sadly, already, passed away.

There are a few stories that are not based on the traditional fairytale and seem almost autobiographical: one from the author’s days living in Japan about a woman breaking up with her lover and another about a woman's relationship with a co-tenant, an elderly woman. Those are particularly gorgeous and told with the same vigor, the same enthusiasm for language, as the fables.

I usually make note of passages I like as I read with a mind to save them for later, easy access and to record here. In truth, I ripped through this book so quickly that I didn’t mark a single page. It’s a book that I was certain I would end up purchasing so that I could have it at the ready, to take up, a few pages at a time, whenever my courage flags. So this, from The Bloody Chamber (a take on Bluebeard), for no reason other than it is one of countless excerpts that made me gasp with its originality and its romance:

“I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! and it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence but because of its very gravity.”