Angela Carter's Pyrotechnics

A Union of Contraries

Charlotte Crofts, Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Charlotte Crofts, Marie Mulvey-Roberts

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350182745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Representing a shift in Carter studies for the 21st century, this book critically explores her legacy and showcases the current state of Angela Carter scholarship. It gives new insights into Carter's pyrotechnic creativity and pays tribute to her incendiary imagination in a reappraisal of Angela Carter's work, her influences and influence. Drawing attention to the highly constructed artifice of Angela Carter's work, it brings to the fore her lesser-known collection of short stories, Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces to reposition her as more than just the author of The Bloody Chamber. On the way, it also explores the impact of her experiences living in Japan, in the light of Edmund Gordon's 2016 biography and Natsumi Ikoma's translation of Sozo Araki's Japanese memoirs of Carter.

Part One

Signs and objects

1

Carter and Japanese signs: Bunraku, Mishima, irezumi and Sozo Araki

Natsumi Ikoma

Until the publication of Carter’s official biography in 2016, how Angela Carter spent her years in Japan had been ‘mysterious’ to the public (Gamble 2006: 106), though it is shared knowledge that her literary style significantly changed post-Japan. Edmund Gordon’s book sheds light on some part of it and reveals to the world the existence of her ex-boyfriend, Sozo Araki, with whom she cohabited, and how she had a devastating and intense relationship with him. I have the good fortune of knowing Sozo, and after interviewing him, I persuaded him to write a memoir of Angela Carter, which was translated and published in 2017.¹ Informed by Sozo, as well as by Carter’s own writing, this chapter examines how Carter analysed Japanese signs – culture, social incidents and people – that made a huge impact on the pyrotechnics in Carter’s later works.

Going against the easy temptation for a European to distance themselves from Japanese elements by treating them as an ‘Other’ and transferring anything alien onto the ‘orientals’, either positively or negatively, Carter chose instead to immerse herself in Japanese culture and to analyse it intimately. By doing so, and by being absorbed in Japan so as to call it ‘home’ (Carter [1974] 1988: 70), she managed to acquire a unique vantage point from which she examined things in Japan, such as irezumi, bunraku puppet theatre, kabuki, films, literature, Yukio Mishima and her ex-boyfriend Sozo, among others.

This unique vantage point originates in the fact she was deeply in love with Sozo. Her fascination with him was, in the beginning, largely aesthetic. When she met Sozo at a cafe in Shinjuku, in downtown Tokyo, she found him ‘incredibly beautiful’ (Gordon 2016: 140). Sozo himself remembers having been complimented on his beauty by Carter; she praised his smooth skin, slender physique and supple muscles (Araki 2017: 105). He was, to her, initially a work of art, whose beauty she appreciated. Like a beautiful object, he was easy to approach and make contact with. She found Japanese men in general very beautiful. In the interview with Ronald Bell, when asked what has given her the most pleasure while living in Japan, she replied, ‘Japanese men… They’re very beautiful!’ (Bell 1973: 26).

As her love for Sozo grew more intense, however, going past the beautiful look became an issue for her. She may have wanted to read him like a book, if she could. But he was a complicated book, hard to decipher, and she could not read Japanese. Their relationship was not all bliss, as Sozo was an unreliable partner, and their relationship was turbulent. She had to rely on Sozo’s translations, and it was not an ideal situation for her, receiving only what had been filtered through him. They argued often, though they had passionate as well as peaceful moments, too. Trying to understand him and Japan, Carter observed, dissected and analysed everything around her.

Asked what had been the least pleasant aspect of her stay, Carter gave the same response as before: ‘Japanese men!’ (Bell 1973: 27). The interview took place after Sozo had left her, and she talked about Sozo in the past tense:

I lived with a Japanese national for a year. It is a great adventure to love a Japanese; much more so, maybe, than any of the other cross-cultural, cross-racial explorations, because of the peculiar severity of the Japanese idea of themselves. And one never knows where it will end because one becomes very much aware of one’s own culture as one – well, at any rate, I – learned more and more about the sheer horror of being Japanese, of being a Japanese man, of the Procrustean bed of the traditional mores.

(Bell 1973: 27)

By ‘the Procrustean bed’, Carter seems to suggest how Japanese society demands its citizens to fit in: to a certain concept, a style, a form. This insightful verdict on Japanese men may have been what she arrived at after she broke up with Sozo. But one of her earliest descriptions of Sozo in her journal around the time of their initial meeting compares him to a samurai (ADD Ms. 88899/1/93). This is quite discerning and prophetic, when read in conjunction with her published analysis of samurai in ‘A Souvenir of Japan’:

To look at a samurai, you would not know him for a murderer, or a geisha for a whore. The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as moving as they are absurd.

([1974] 1988: 10)

In this entry, with the remarkable acuteness of a true artist, Carter noted that the extravagance of the Japanese performance of gender, which is epitomized in the stylized beauty of samurai and geisha, makes them ‘objects hardly pertains to the human’. These constructions are dazzling, but underneath their layers of kimono is humanity obliterated and made irrelevant. From very early on in her stay in Japan, Carter somehow managed to grasp this principle in Japanese culture: the detachment of the surface from what is underneath. The frequently used Japanese expressions, ‘tatemae’ and ‘honne’, or ‘what you express to others’ and ‘what you truly feel’, might show the extent of how commonplace this principle is. What matters and is valued is the surface in the tradition of Japanese culture. From the very first time she met Sozo, Carter sensed something repressed and repressive underneath his friendly and beautiful smile, and this gap between the smooth and beautiful mask and repressed humanity is what could have fascinated Angela Carter.

Bunraku puppet theatre and its performance of femininity

Carter could not read the Japanese language, though she tried to learn it from Sozo briefly. But perhaps because she was illiterate in Japanese, Carter had a peculiar ability to grasp the ‘signs’, including human performance, as pure visual ‘signifiers’ independent of their ‘signified’ meanings, as ‘not speaking Japanese, and so having to interpret the culture entirely through its visual aspect, was an invaluable “apprenticeship in the language of signs”’ (Gordon 2016: 157). Her use of the word ‘signs’ here is most certainly a nod to Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs published in 1970, overlapping Carter’s stay in Japan.² This book exhibits a sensibility extraordinarily similar to the one expressed in Carter’s writing. With regard to bunraku traditional puppet theatre, Barthes writes, ‘In the West, the puppet (Punch, for instance) is supposed to offer the actor the mirror of his contrary… Bunraku, however, does not sign the actor, it gets rid of him for us’ ([1970] 1983: 58). As explained by Barthes, a puppet in bunraku is controlled by three male masters: the leading master manipulates the head and the right hand, another the left hand, and the third one the legs. Only the headmaster shows his face, while the other two conceal their faces behind black covers. Puppets are voiced by a male chanter, even when the character is female. Importantly, the corporeality of these masters and chanters, even in the case of the headmaster who is not clad in inconspicuous black costume but in formal kimono for men, is erased in the stylized performance. The bodies of the puppet masters in bunraku theatre, as Barthes analyses, are reduced to mere functionality. Their masculine bodies and voices do not need to be hidden, because the theatrical codes bury them in the background as the fabled performance of ‘ultimate femininity’ comes to the fore.

Ultimate femininity, performed by a doll that is controlled and voiced by men, may attest to what is appreciated in the Japanese theatrical tradition: a constructed femininity, not a real woman. Indeed, not a single woman is allowed to take part in the traditional bunraku puppet theatre. Another theatre tradition in Japan, kabuki, is also an all-male endeavour in which no woman is allowed to perform, and kabuki actors playing female roles are praised for their performance of ‘femininity’ that is said to exceed that by real women.³ Barthes analyses these kabuki male actors thus:

The Oriental transvestite does not copy Woman but signifies her: not bogged down in the model, but detached from its signified; Femininity is presented to read, not to see: translation, not transgression; the sign shifts from the great female role to the fifty-year-old paterfamilias: he is the same man, but where does the metaphor begin?

([1970] 1983: 53)

Barthes seems to suggest here that the respect a male puppet master receives from society somehow paves the way for the detachment of the concept of femininity from women and supports the patriarchal structure of puppet theatre.

Barthes then continues to write how this tradition represses feminine reality and prioritizes the signifier:

the refinement of the code, its precision, indifferent to any extended copy of an organic type (to provoke the real, physical body of a young woman), have as their effect – or justification – to absorb and eliminate all feminine reality in the subtle diffraction of the signifier: signified but not represented, Woman is an idea, not a nature.

([1970] 1983: 91)

His analysis of ‘femininity’ in the Japanese theatre tradition, of its being an idea, a concept quite detached from the feminine reality of a live woman, is shared by Carter, although Carter, as a feminist writer, seems to find the repression of female reality in Japanese theatre, as well as the everyday performance of gender in Japan, misogynistic and abhorrent. What differentiates Carter from Barthes is the fact that this repression of female reality mattered to Carter significantly more, because it was her body and her reality that were being repressed. She was not, therefore, taken in by the Orientalist exoticism when she observed the puppet theatre in Japan, raving about the sheer beauty of these dolls. Instead, she found in bunraku problems for women in Japanese society.

‘The Loves of Lady Purple’, a short story inspired by bunraku, can be read as Carter’s remonstrance towards this Japanese tradition. In this story, the female puppet, Lady Purple, is manipulated by a male master, until one day she comes to life, breaks free from her bondage, devours him and leaves for town to become a whore. The story has triggered discussions among Carter scholars whether this ending is not entirely a success, because Lady Purple’s total liberation is not achieved. To this discussion Rebecca Munford offers an insightful analysis, that ‘Lady Purple materialises here as a creation of the male imagination’, ‘she is cast in a Sadeian mould’ and ‘is the machine itself’ (2013: 121). As Munford rightly suggests, this story is not a story of liberation where a puppet breaking free from the control of a patriarchal puppet master, turns into a human being. Instead, the puppet turns into a killing machine, an automated whore, to reveal the nature of the ‘femininity’ which Japanese theatre tradition constructs. What Lady Purple represents is ‘an idea’ of femininity, fabricated solely from male fantasy, reflecting their desire and fear. Lady Purple cannot become a real woman precisely because she has no relation to her. After liberation, she can only become an automaton, a devouring monster born out of a misogynist fear for women.

‘Femininity’ in everyday life in Japan

Apart from in Japan’s theatre tradition, Carter found a similar imposition of the constructed notion of ‘femininity’ upon real women in the form of the Japanese societal notion of ‘the foreign woman’. In ‘A Souvenir of Japan’, the protagonist is keenly aware of the expected role she is supposed to play, that of the role of a ‘foreign woman’:

I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator.

(Carter [1974] 1988: 7)

What is described here is a doubly alienating experience of a non-Japanese woman in Japan: she needs to perform the concept of ‘femininity’ as well as that of ‘a foreigner’ – both epitomize a ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ in Japanese society. Carter seems to connect both as a fundamentally ‘female’ experience here, when the narrator feels compelled to impersonate a ‘foreign’ ‘woman’, even when she already is one in either category. By performatively establishing her double otherness, she exerts the power of attracting the gaze, which paradoxically alienates her by turning her into a sign of otherness. The trouble is that the narrator, despite feeling self-conscious and awkward, seems to enjoy being an object of male gaze at the same time.

‘Flesh and the Mirror’ is another short story in which Carter uses the motif of performativity. The protagonist ends up performing a romantic female character, who is so unlike her self-definition, unwittingly conforming to, and supporting, this romanticized notion of ‘femininity’ ([1974] 1988: 61–70). Similarly, ‘Poor Butterfly’ describes Carter’s experience as a part-time bar-hostess in the Ginza district, where the hostesses played mothers ‘to feed their large infants food’ (Carter [1982] 1993: 48), the ‘large infants’ being adult male customers. The women in these stories are expected to perform certain roles set out for them by Japanese society. These roles are for the convenience of men; they buy these women’s services along with their compliance. The hostesses are there to please men, to attend to their needs, a ‘masturbatory device’ for men (Carter [1982] 1993: 50), with no need for reciprocity.

As these examples show, Carter found the principle of the Japanese theatre tradition to be permeating everyday life in Japanese society. A type, a style, an idea to perform is imposed on women and men both, and women especially suffer from it, because they are more objectified. Even though this ‘femininity’ is quite an alien notion – a male construct, after all – women are supposed to perform it ‘naturally’. They inevitably fail, destined to fall short of expectation. The only other options available to women are to be categorized as wives and mothers. Carter said in an interview:

In general, Japanese men seem to find women who cannot be easily categorized as either wives or mothers a great threat… Japanese men often treat women who can’t be classified as mother or surrogate mother as ambulant sexual orifices and regard any manifestation of intellectual activity or even proper female pride in a woman with open amazement and ferocious derision, as if such a thing were a threat to the very fabric of the world.

(Bell 1973: 28–9)

In such a society, it may be no wonder why a constructed notion of ‘femininity’ is more highly valued than a real woman, as the former never deviates from that idealized form to pose any threat. A kabuki actor’s performance of femininity is therefore more artistic and ‘feminine’, and paradoxically more ‘authentic’, than that of a woman, precisely because it is not rooted in the body and sensibility of an actual woman.

Carter on Mishima

Yukio Mishima, a renowned novelist in the early half of the twentieth century, is perhaps one of the clearest examples to demonstrate the misogynistic creation of ‘femininity’ in Japanese culture and is the subject of one of Carter’s essays (Carter [1997] 1998: 238–44). He directly dealt with the concept of ‘femininity’ in kabuki theatre in his story, ‘Onnagata’. In this story, Masuyama, the male prota...