• 1 Carter may also have been influenced by British Surrealist artists such as Eileen Agar and Ethell C (...)

3Carter clearly acknowledged the influence that Surrealism exerted on her fiction, deeply suffused as it is with surrealistic images and echoes. In ‘Notes from the Front Line’ Carter considers her ‘various intellectual adventures in anarcho-surrealism’ as a fundamental part of her ‘personal process of maturing into feminism’ (Carter 1997, 37).1 Freud’s work also had a fundamental impact on Carter’s œuvre, while Surrealism similarly claims Freud as one of its sources of influence. Indeed, considering Carter’s interest in Freud, it is no surprise that the heavy Surrealist investment in Freudian perspectives should have interested her for, as Carter has noted, the Surrealists are themselves Freudian.

• 2 For an account of the Breton-Freud relastionship see Anna Balakian’s André Breton: Magus of Surreal (...)

4Breton, the ‘father’ of Surrealism, understood with great clarity the affinities between his vision and practice of art and the work that Freud was developing in Vienna, namely ‘free association’ and the interpretation of dreams as techniques used to explore the unconscious. Breton, who had been a medical student before the First World War, visited Freud in Vienna in 1924, a meeting which is detailed in the first chapter of his autobiography, Les Pas Perdus.2

• 3 Angela Carter referred to ‘the glorious transgressive impulse the surrealists valued most of all ab (...)

5The world portrayed by the Surrealists who, as Carter notes, ‘concerned themselves with a direct relation to the unconscious’ (Carter 1993, 72) is a ‘world transformed by imagination and desire’3 (Carter 1993, 70), characterised by ‘perpetual outrage and scandal, the destruction of the churches, of the prisons, of the armies, of the brothels’ (Carter 1993, 69). Surrealism can be said to have staged a rebellion against the exclusive reign of Reason and advocated a privileging of interior, ‘unconscious’ modes of expression dominated by the rule of fantasy and oneiric states. Breton clearly acknowledges his debt to the Freudian proposition of the domination of the unconscious realms of the human psyche by the related impulses of sexuality and death, Eros and Thanatos, so aptly expressed in fictional form in Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman. For Carter, in analogous vein, surrealism equated a ‘permanent revelation’ and a ‘permanent revolution’, demanding the ‘liberation of the human spirit’ (Carter 1993, 69). In The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman Carter creates a vivid representation of just such a world, which in that sense can be understood to contain a pointed critique of a surrealist philosophy made to serve as the guiding doctrine and political agenda of a dictator, Dr Hoffman, the representative of the unrestrained pleasure principle, who, having started the ‘Reality War’ (Carter 1982a, 27), wants to take over the whole world, ‘waging a massive campaign against human reason itself’ (11). The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman can be described as a dystopian novel, a cautionary tale about the nefarious consequences of an arbitrary and unregulated use of the surrealist premise of the dominance of the unconscious and the unleashing of the libido in society at large.

• 4 Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity, no page number.

6Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass, which Octavio Paz calls ‘the last genuinely meaningful work of the West’,4 is a work profoundly implicated with the eminently Surrealist themes of the releasing of eroto-energy and the liberation of repressed, unconscious drives. I wish to argue that the last chapter of Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, ‘The Castle’, can be read as a textual illustration of and meditation on Duchamp’s The Large Glass.

• 5 In her insightful book Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in The Large Glass and Related Wo (...)

7The last chapter of Carter’s novel offers a vivid textual representation of the structure of the Freudian psyche. Indeed, the whole novel can be described as a parodic illustration of the Freudian theories which detail the super-ego, ego and id configuration of the psyche, as well as the internecine battle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In Dr Hoffman’s castle, the cellar, in ‘the bowels of the earth’ (219) is the site of an orgy of ‘repressed’ sexual drives, which takes the shape of numerous copulating couples who, with the help of hormones fed intravenously, are kept in a permanent state of physical excitement. The equivalent of the Freudian unconscious, this repository of eroto-energy is responsible for the lighting of the castle and also for the Doctor’s attack on the city and on the reality principle embodied by the Minister of Determination and his army, the super-ego. Significantly, like Duchamp himself who had a declared interest in creating a ‘Playful Physics’, and whose work shows a pronounced attraction to such scientific areas as chemistry, classical mechanics and thermodynamics,5 Dr Hoffman had also ‘graduated in physics with honours from the national university’ (26) and had gone on to become an ‘enormously distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of P.’ (27). In addition, thus suggesting the extent of the influence on both Duchamp and Carter of Alfred Jarry, a precursor of the Surrealists (whose work, like Duchamp and Carter’s, contains other mechanical brides), Dr Hoffman can aptly be described as a latterday Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician, borrowing the name of Jarry’s character in his epononymous novel Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (1911). Jarry’s influence on Duchamp has been amply documented, while one of the epigraphs to The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman comes, meaningfully, from Jarry’s picaresque novel, which provides another model, besides Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, to Desiderio’s journey and quest. The shadow of Jarry’s influence thus clearly hovers over Carter’s own picaresque novel, while Carter in turn updates this network of influences by including Duchamp.

• 6 Behind these libidinal machines, moreover, stand the Sadeian ones, who constituted such an importan (...)

8Angela Carter’s Desire Machines take their place beside Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s renowned ones in their Anti-Œdipus.6 Interestingly, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s L’Anti-Œdipe was published the same year as Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, 1972, both books conducting a political analysis of desire and its mechanisms as well as of the Œdipus myth. Indeed, both books can justifiably be seen as manifestations of a reevaluation of society’s mores in the early 70s, under the influence of the rebellious decade of the 60s.

• 7 Jarry’s The Supermale (1902) also provides another central source for Carter’s The Infernal Desire (...)
• 8 The term ‘celibate machine’ was used by Michel Carrouges who, in his Les Machines célibataires (197 (...)
• 9 In ‘The Fate of the Surrealist Imagination in the Society of the Spectacle’ Susan Rubin Suleiman co (...)

9Deleuze and Guattari’s provocative insights into the nature of desire and of desire-machines provide an invaluable framework with which to analyse Duchamp’s painting as well as Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman.7 Following from their provocative statement that ‘everything is a machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1990, 2), Deleuze and Guattari specifically refer to Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even as a ‘celibate machine’8 (Deleuze and Guattari 1990, 18), describing it in apt machinic terms: ‘A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1990, 18). The question they go on to ask also directly applies to Duchamp’s erotic machinic assemblage, as well as to Carter’s ‘love slaves’ in Dr Hoffman’s laboratory: ‘what does the celibate machine produce? what is produced by means of it? The answer would seem to be: intensive quantities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1990, 18). For Deleuze and Guattari ‘everything is production’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1990, 4), desire is production, or desiring-production. Indeed, Dr Hoffman’s ‘desire machines’ serve a specific logic of production, generating the energy to light the castle and the whole city. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the body is composed of various desiring-machines, while the unconscious is an industrial factory, a machine for production (Deleuze and Guattari 1990, 113), an insight once again vividly dramatized in Dr Hoffman’s underground laboratory. Guattari in particular speaks of ‘a whole theoretical and practical conception of the unconscious-machine of the . . . unconscious’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 47). Carter’s novel thus offers a narrative dramatization of the working of a series of machinic assemblages9 which couple people and mechanisms in a succession of carnivalesque, voyeuristic scenes.

• 10 This sexual machine was partly inspired by Raymond Roussel’s machinery, in particular the latter’s (...)
• 11 Duchamp’s The Large Glass might also be understood as an early critique of consumer culture through (...)
• 12 Already in 1912 Duchamp started experimenting with drawings depicting the mechanics of sex, such as (...)
• 13 Roland Barthes, in his study of the Marquis de Sade, provides a description of the Sadean libidinal (...)

10Duchamp’s The Large Glass can be described as a complex machinic aggregate, a ‘libidinal assemblage’10 with ‘all the machineries it brings into play’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1992, 37), to borrow Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology.11 Over nine feet tall, the declared subject of Duchamp’s The Large Glass12 is the relation between the sexes. The ‘Bride’ in the upper panel floats over a ‘Bachelor Apparatus’ below, exciting the ‘Bachelors’ with ‘love gasoline’. Similarly, in Dr Hoffman’s castle, built of ‘stone and stained glass’ (217, emphasis mine), in the underground laboratory with ‘mirrored’ (214) floors where the couples are engaged in endless intercourse,13 the set up is strikingly reminiscent of The Large Glass, down to the lover’s ‘secretions’ (214) which correspond to Duchamp’s ‘love gasoline’. In Dr Hoffman’s ‘powerhouse of the marvellous, where all its clanking, dull, stage machinery was kept’ (201), a structure which was ‘roofed and walled with seamless looking-glass’ (213), the ‘desire generators’ (213), the ‘love slaves’ (219) produced ‘the electricity of desire [which] lit everything with chill, bewitching fire’ (213). In this vivid recreation of The Large Glass, the lovers’

• 14 It would be interesting, but beyond the scope of this essay, to compare the colonizing impulse of t (...)

12While engaging in a critical dialogue with Duchamp’s iconic work, Carter nonetheless revivifies it, supplying the metaphorical impulse that sets it in motion. Indeed, in Carter’s novel, it is ‘the visible propagation of eroto-energy’ (214) that provides the electricity to run the castle and which will eventually supply the impetus for the invasion of the city by Dr Hoffman’s troops. However, the ‘unleashed unconscious’ (211), as Desiderio finds out, is not only a disillusionment but also monstrous. It is against the implementation of the Doctor’s rule that Desiderio acts. Described as a ‘terrorist in the cause of reason’ (197), Desiderio became a hero in his city, after having killed Dr Hoffman, whose aim was to establish a ‘dictatorship of desire’ (212), and destroyed his plans of a take-over of the imagination, of the ‘repressed’ contents of the unconscious, the id. ‘Reason’ prevailed, and Desiderio ‘became one of the founders of the new constitution’ (220).14 Carter’s novel can be seen, then, as a critical answer to Surrealism’s dominant motif of the unbridled rule of desire and its consequences. There is, however, a characteristic Carterian twist in this plot: in a typical quest narrative, the hero slays the dragon/monster (Dr Hoffman) and marries the girl. In this case, however, the hero kills the girl as well, as the visible projection of his longing and a harbinger of death.

• 15 Like Shiva and Shakti in Indian mythology.
• 16 Another meaningful detail which further confirms our analysis of the echoes between Duchamp’s The L (...)

13In the end, both Duchamp’s The Large Glass and the copulating lovers in Dr Hoffman’s laboratory share in the mechanical frustration that rules their acts. The lovers are described as ‘caught perpetually in the trap of one another’s arms . . . petrified pilgrims, locked parallels, icons of perpetual motion, they knew nothing but the progress of their static journey towards willed, mutual annihilation’15 (215, emphasis mine), words which prompt reference to the contents of Exhibit Seven of the peep-show, ‘Perpetual Motion’, where the figures of a man and a woman are engaged in endless intercourse, propelled by a clockwork mechanism.16

• 17 ‘The Savage Sideshow: A Profile of Angela Carter’, 56.

16Carter, whose familiarity with Freud’s writings is extensive (she claimed to love Freud ‘as though he were an uncle’),17 is here adding her own visual interpretation of Courbet’s Origine du Monde (1866), as of Duchamp’s version of Courbet’s painting, while offering further perspectives to reflect on the always complex gendered politics of looking.

• 18 The resonances between Man Ray’s photograph Rrose Sélavy (alias Marcel Duchamp), 1921, and Tristess (...)

23The coincidence of the metaphors used by Carter with those deployed in the glass surface of Duchamp’s work suggests the degree of the influence the French artist’s iconic The Large Glass exerted on the British writer. Tristessa, the transvestite cinema goddess,18 was revealed, in her nakedness, to be a man. Thus, as in Duchamp’s The Large Glass, the sexes of the bride are also mixing in Carter’s novel, as they were in Albertina, whose Proustian associations remind us that Albertina’s character was based on Proust’s lover Alfred Agostinelli. Indeed, there are two brides in this scene, for New Eve, now a woman, thus a bride underneath her clothes, was forced to dress like a bridegroom. Again we are confronted with a highly ambiguous mixing of sexes and gender roles in the characters of New Eve and Tristessa, who incidentally started their fictional life as two men, as Carter clarifies: ‘a man who has been changed into a woman, Eve, and a man who has elected to become a woman in appearance, Tristessa’ (Carter 1997b, 592).

• 19 Furthermore, in preparation for her marriage, she/he is made to put on a ‘tulle veil’ (Carter 1982a (...)
• 20 See also Octavio Paz’s Aparencia Desnuda: La obra de Marcel Duchamp (1998).
• 21 A version of Duchamp’s notes first appeared in a box, in 1934. It was later published as a book, in (...)
• 22 In addition, the shots that have penetrated into the zone of the bride in Duchamp’s The Large Glass(...)

24The halo in The Large Glass mentioned by Janis Mink finds an intriguing correspondence in Tristessa’s ‘enormous web of pale hair hung on the air behind’ (123)19 which, when she moved, created a sort of halo around her head.20 This halo can also be seen as having religious connotations. Indeed, while Duchamp’s Bride remains a virgin, becoming in Duchamp’s words ‘the apotheosis of virginity’,21 Tristessa is turned into a mock bride, indeed a parodic version of a virgin bride. In ‘Surrealism, Male-Female’, Dawn Ades observes how in ‘The Large Glass the bride is skied above her bachelors, harking back to a sacred iconography of visions of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, depicted in a heavenward ascent above clouds and male worshippers’ (Ades 174). In addition, from Duchamp’s notes about The Large Glass, we learn that the Bachelors are not going to make it into the zone of the Bride, for they are too enmeshed in their own mechanisms. In The Passion of New Eve, meaningfully, New Eve feels ‘a great peace and a sense of reconciliation’ (Carter 1992b, 75) after her metamorphosis. In order to comfort him/her, Mother suckles him/her with her double tier of nipples: ‘It seemed the breasts I suckled could never be exhausted but would always flow with milk to nourish me and my relation to the zone of mother had not changed and could never change for Little Œdipus had lived in a land of milk and kindness before his father taught him how to stab with his phallus and baby’s relation to the breasts bears no relation to his or hers’ (Carter 1992b, 75). Carter’s use of the same idiom, the relation to the zone of the Bride, this echo that resonates from Duchamp to Carter, constitutes another significant instance of the reverberations in theme and iconography between Duchamp and Carter.22 Again the parallels in Carter’s novel are striking: New Eve is significantly told by Sophia, before her transformation into a woman, that she should be glad for she is going to be the ‘Virgin Mary’ (Carter 1992b, 70). Indeed, both Duchamp’s The Large Glass and The Passion of New Eve carry out a pronounced critique of some Catholic dogmas. Dawn Ades suggests that the blossoming of Duchamp’s Bride is, among other things, the

• 24 As a counterpart to this fantasy, compare Picabia’s Girl Born Without a Mother (1915).

25Carter’s New Eve, who was fated to become another avatar of the Virgin Mary, through her ‘virgin birth’, thus provides another version and possible solution to this conundrum, in dialogue with Duchamp.24

• 25 See in this respect M. E. Warlick’s Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth, 2001.
• 26 The Passion of New Eve is also a novel suffused with manifestations of Carter’s interest in alchemy (...)
• 27 This theme is also pursued in Carter’s short story ‘The Merchant of Shadows’ (American Ghosts and O (...)

27Nadia Choucha reads Ernst’s painting as dealing with alchemy (Ernst, like most Surrealist artists, was very interested in alchemy, as was Carter). According to Choucha, the title, The Robing of the Bride,25 ‘reinforces the alchemical theme’ and is ‘a reversal of one stage in the alchemical process called ‘Unrobing of the Bride’26 (which Duchamp used as The Bride Stripped Bare . . .)’ (Choucha 118). The androgyne, one of the central alchemical symbols, suggesting the perfection of a unified being, male and female, in which all opposites are finally harmonized, a recurrent symbol in Surrealism, is also a conspicuous figure in Carter’s fiction. Choucha suggests that the male and female elements in Duchamp’s The Large Glass ‘attempt to achieve union and thus a sense of wholeness’ (Choucha 43). Although they never accomplish that union in Duchamp’s work, Carter carries to its logical extension the sexual longing of the Bride and the Bachelors. While both brides, in Duchamp’s The Large Glass and The Passion of New Eve, keep the bachelors waiting, in The Passion of New Eve, New Eve and Tristessa, the Bride and the Bachelor, are eventually led to consummate their desire in what can be considered as the apotheosis of that already glorified alchemical union of opposites, for both New Eve and Tristessa, the transsexual and the transvestite, enclose and carry in themselves the other sex. Ernst’s Bride, in turn, ambiguously gendered, possibly a Hermaphrodite hiding her male sex organ with her hands, finds an almost perfect correspondence in Tristessa, the screen femme fatale found out to be a man.27

• 28 Susan Rubin Suleiman states that ‘the antipatriarchal and antitraditional impetus of Dada/Surrealis (...)

31The recovery and convergence of Surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis in Angela Carter’s fiction can be seen as symptomatic of a cluster of anxieties that have come to the fore again in the last decades of the millenium and continue to be pivotal to current debates about identity, the body, sexual politics and transgressive sexuality, as well as social and family structures. This convergence signals the return of repressed apprehensions about societal configurations and dynamics, while simultaneously hinting at alternative organizational patterns that will give rise to new psychological configurations, which will gradually occur as a result of new models of negotiating desire and its vicissitudes. Surrealist politics and poetics, then, stress the breaking down and blurring of all sorts of boundaries, physical and psychic, as well as the transgressing of borders and frontiers between the so-called real and imagination, the realm of dreams where uncensored fantasy rules. Surrealist politics, thus, which Angela Carter to a great extent engages with, playing as they do with conventions and displacing taboos, such as the unbridled rule of desire, gender roles, androgyny, virgin Brides and immaculate conceptions, as well as male procreation, touch a very topical and relevant chord in our contemporary world.28

• 29 For a detailed study of Duchamp and Ernst’s iconic works see David Hopkins’s Marcel Duchamp and Max (...)
• 30 In Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, & Lawrence Margot Norris rema (...)

33What do Duchamp and Ernst’s Brides thus have in common? They both vividly express transgressive sexuality and desire, which they share with the Brides in Carter’s works we are analysing here: Albertina as the emanation of Desiderio’s profoundest wishes, Tristessa and New Eve. In addition, they both participate in a complex symbolic cluster which includes alchemical echoes as well as a deconstruction of Christian iconography, similarly carried out by Carter.29 Duchamp’s Bride as Ernst’s,30 then, may be said to offer crucial intertexts to Carter’s brides in The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve.