Heroes and Villains
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Heroes and Villains
Angela Carter was born in Eastbourne in 1940 and later evacuated to live with her grandmother in Yorkshire. She studied English at Bristol University and published the first of her nine novels,
Shadow Dance
, in 1966. After escaping an early marriage, she used the proceeds of a Somerset Maugham Award to enable her to live in Japan for two years, a transforming experience. Her final novel,
Wise Children
, was published in 1991, a year before her death from lung cancer at the age of fifty-one. In an obituary from the
Observer
, Margaret Atwood wrote that ‘She was the opposite of parochial … She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the universe.’
Perhaps best known for her last two novels,
Nights at the Circus
and
Wise Children
, Carter was much admired for her work’s exuberant mix of fantasy, philosophy, science fiction and satire.
Heroes and Villains
, published in 1969, is her fourth novel.
Both
The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
and
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
are also published in Penguin Modern Classics
Robert Coover is the author of some twenty books of fiction and plays, his most recent being
Noir
and
A Child Again
. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including the William Faulkner Award, the Rea Lifetime Achievement Award for the Short Story, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London and elsewhere. At Brown University, he teaches ‘Cave Writing’ (a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality), and other experimental electronic writing and mixed media workshops, and directs the International Writers Project, a freedom-to-write programme.
ANGELA CARTER
Introduction by
ROBERT COOVER
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1969
First published in the United States of America by Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1969
Published in Penguin Books 1981
Published in Penguin Classics 2011
Copyright © Angela Carter, 1969
Introduction copyright © Robert Coover, 2011
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and introducer has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978–0–141–96837–7
Introduction
Like so many fairytale heroes before her, this tale’s protagonist must leave home and set forth upon a perilous journey of self-discovery. After the axe murder of her beloved Professorial father, Marianne chops off her golden plaits, burns her father’s books, drowns his clock in the swamp, flees her protective white tower and, in the company of her brother’s killer, ventures into the dark and mysterious forest beyond the fringes of her known world. ‘She loved nobody in this place but beyond it lay the end of all known things and certain desolation.’ A fearsome prospect, but she is not afraid. If her savage companion claps his hand over her mouth, she bites it. ‘Her ruling passion was always anger rather than fear.’ This is a girl who is bored with the impotent intellectual life of the Professors, hates their community festivals and rituals, including marriage, and disdains their self-referential language – a ‘severe’ child who won’t play the games of others, upending the little boy who, in his somewhat nasty innocence, only wants to play the hero, leaving him yowling in the dust. The boy calls her a Barbarian and a villain, and she becomes one.
In similar fashion, the author, Angela Carter, is here, in her breakthrough fourth novel published at the end of the turbulent 1960s, launching forth upon her own voyage of discovery, leaving behind the homey formulae of conventional British fiction and plunging into the dark entanglement, out at the edge, of ‘cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious’. After being labelled by reviewers a ‘Gothic’ writer for books she thought of as mostly mainstream naturalism, she decided, as she wrote in 1975, that she would ‘indeed write a Gothic novel, a truly Gothic novel full of dread and glamour and passion. About this time, I
began to read the surrealists and felt an increasing sense of justification, and what I wrote was a kind of pastiche Gothic novel called
Heroes and Villains
(after a current Beach Boys number), in which I used the framework to examine some intellectual problems about politics which were beginning to exercise me. Using an absolutely non-naturalistic formula gave me a wonderful sense of freedom.’
Like Marianne locked up in her safe but stifling steel-and-concrete tower, Carter felt penned in by the prevailing literary ideology – ‘So many celebrations of the status quo,’ as she called the novels of her time, mere ‘etiquette manuals’ – opting instead for de Sade’s definition of art as ‘the perpetual immoral subversion of the established order’. Writing, she believed, retained ‘a singular moral function – that of provoking unease’. Opposing naturalism as a ‘deeply politically repressive’ propagator of dead forms and deceptive half-truths, she chose the Gothic mode, ‘with its holocausts, its stereotyped characterization, its ghosts, its concentration on inner life, its rhetorical and conventionalized prose style’ (all qualities present here in
Heroes and Villains
), because ‘it can scarcely pretend to be an imitation of nature; so it cannot disseminate false knowledge of the world.’
In
Heroes and Villains
, the world has been devastated by a nuclear holocaust and human society has regressed to something resembling medieval Britain. Its isolated fortified villages, with their hereditary castes of Professors, Soldiers and Workers, are surrounded by dense overgrown forests inhabited by wild animals, who escaped from the pre-war zoos, and illiterate gypsy-like ‘Barbarians’, who live by pillage and scavenging, with subhuman mutants – ‘Out People’ – skulking zombie-like at the edges of the contaminated ruined cities. To save her Barbarian husband’s life, Marianne has to kill one of these creatures, but feels ‘neither shame nor horror, only a release from boredom and, with it, a certain sense of well-being’. Marianne is a strong-willed and independent young woman, unfazed by rape or savagery, fearing only the loss of her own autonomy, a prototype of other plucky Carter heroines to follow. Even as a child, when told that the Barbarians were cannibals who ‘wrap little girls in clay … bake them in the fire and gobble them up with salt’, Marianne knows herself to be too tough to be eaten.
This clan’s spiritual leader is a mad ex-Professor and magician named Donally, a giant with a forked parti-coloured beard, flamboyant costumes, teeth filed to points and an appetite for cruelty, aphorisms, myth-making and bizarre pagan rituals. Literacy empowers him among the illiterate, though he meets his match in the Professor’s steely daughter. He seeks to turn Marianne into ‘Our lady of the wilderness … The virgin of the swamp’, ‘Our little holy image’ – ‘You provide these unfortunate people with a focus for the fear and resentment they feel against their arbitrary destiny,’ he tells her – but she hates ‘holy images’ and will have none of it. Holy images are to be unmade, not made. As her author said, ‘I see my business, the nature of my work, as taking apart mythologies, in order to find out what basic, human stuff they are made of in the first place.’ Carter rejected myths as ‘consolatory nonsense’, yet the magic of art fascinated her, and Donally is somewhat, in his crazed performances, its present caretaker. He emerges from Carter’s long engagement with the medieval Merlin figure, the subject of her graduate studies; he has already turned up in
The Magic Toyshop
, in the form of the evil puppeteer Uncle Phillip, and will reach full apotheosis two years after
Heroes and Villains
as the great illusionist, Doctor Hoffman, in Carter’s masterpiece,
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
.
Though Carter is yet a year or two away from the mature style that will inform her greatest work, much of what will characterize it can be found here: its fierce passion, its earthiness, its intelligence, its exuberant inventiveness, its bold rhetorical and imagistic excess. ‘A linguistic dandy,’ as the
Independent
called her, ‘a mistress of the baroque’. Like her literary hero, Ronald Firbank, whom she declared to be ‘the greatest English writer this century’, she wanted a language that insisted upon itself as subject, ‘a fiction that takes full cognizance of its status as non-being – that is, a fiction that remains aware that it is of its own nature, which is a different nature than human, tactile immediacy. I really do believe that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is, not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself.’
Robert Coover 2011
There are times when reality becomes too complex for
Oral Communication. But Legend gives it a form by
which it pervades the whole world.
Jean-Luc Godard,
Alphaville
See how he nak’d and fierce doth stand,
Cuffing the Thunder with one hand;
While with the other he does lock,
And grapple, with the stubborn Rock;
From which he with each Wave rebounds,
Torn into Flames, and ragg’d with Wounds.
And all he saes, a Lover drest
In his own Blood does relish best.
Andrew Marvell, ‘The Unfortunate Lover’
The Gothic mode is essentially a form of parody, a way
of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit
of grotesqueness.
Leslie Fiedler,
Love and Death in the American Novel
Où fuir, dans un pays inconnu, désert, ou habité par des bêtes féroces,
et par des sauvages aussi barbares qu’elles?
Abbé Prévost,
Manon Lescaut
Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her. He was a Professor of History; he owned a clock which he wound every morning and kept in the family dining-room upon a sideboard full of heirlooms of stainless steel such as dishes and cutlery. Marianne thought of the clock as her father’s pet, something like her own pet rabbit, but the rabbit soon died and was handed over to the Professor of Biology to be eviscerated while the clock continued to tick inscrutably on. She therefore concluded the clock must be immortal but this did not impress her. Marianne sat at table, eating; she watched dispassionately as the hands of the clock went round but she never felt that time was passing for time was frozen around her in this secluded place where a pastoral quiet possessed everything and the busy clock carved the hours into sculptures of ice.