Flesh and the Mirror

21/07/2023

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     Reading Angela Carter’s ‘Flesh and the Mirror’ it isn’t easy to know how seriously to take the story. Phrases like “the room was a box of oiled paper full of echoes of the rain” and “the morning before the night before, the morning before this oppressive morning, I woke up in the cabin of a boat”, might make us wonder. Is this pastiche? The inclination towards such a reading is there if we think of Carter’s most famous work: The Bloody Chamber, a collection of self-conscious, or more precisely feminist-conscious re-workings of well-known fairy tales like ‘Puss ’n’ Boots’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’. The self-consciousness is evident here when the narrator says “I no longer understood the logic of my own performance. My script had been scrambled behind my back. The cameraman was drunk.” The story isn’t only calling attention to itself as a work of literary fiction, it invokes cinema too.  

    But how do we differentiate bad writing from the self-reflexive; are we to assume that purple prose is part of the story’s intentionality or that the poetic images ought to be taken straight? Some of these images are vividly realised, indicating there need be no irony involved in their comprehension. “I was searching among a multitude of unknown faces for the face of the one I loved while the warm, thick, heavy rain of summer greased the dark surfaces of the street…” for example, or even “the crowds lapped round me like waves full of eyes until I felt that I was walking through an ocean….” But the former sentence continues: “… until after a while, they began to gleam like sleek fur of seals just risen from the bottom of the sea.” The latter: “…whose speechless and gesticulating inhabitants, like those with whom medieval philosophers peopled the country of the deep, were methodical inversions or mirror images of the dwellers of dry land.” Is Carter pushing prose into the skilfully baroque or mocking the simile? The latter sentence piles one on top of another. Later in the story, we have ungainly personification: “Therefore I evaded the mirror. I scrambled out of its arms and sat on the edge of the bed.” We also have a few oxymorons: “insubstantial substance” “enigmatic transparency”, “indecipherable clarity”. But we have too a first-person narrator who says that she was “walking through the city in the third person singular”, and a page later switches from the first person into the third: “On the night I came back to it, however hard I looked for the one I loved, she could not find him anywhere and the city delivered her into the hands of a perfect stranger who fell into step beside her…”

   If the piece is far from naively written that doesn’t mean we can understand easily its purpose let alone its story. It seems a woman has a Japanese lover whom she returns to after some time back in England but the lover isn’t there when she arrives in Yokohama and so she gets a train into nearby Tokyo. She has a night with someone else and sees the boyfriend the next day, and they argue and fall out. This appears to be the content of the story but it is narrated by a woman who seems split, a figure drawn to the melodrama she can extract from her life, the mirror that creates a schism in her being, and a country she stays in partly because it can exacerbate the enigma she wishes to see herself presenting. “There I was, walking up and down, eating meals, having conservations, in love, indifferent, and so on. But all the time I was pulling the strings of my own puppet; it was this puppet who was moving about on the other side of the glass.” 

    This is a lot to be getting on with, especially if along with these elements Carter has written a story that wants to be read as a commentary on its own creation, and with the reader musing over how seriously we ought to take the prose. Interviewer Susan Bernofsky says, “about five years ago you said you'd once believed that all writing, all fiction, was somehow about other fiction, other stories—then you said you'd changed your mind about this.” Carter replies: “I don't think I said that absolutely positively, I think I may have said I was beginning to wonder how, if culture was as sel- referential as that, anything new ever got into it. I'm very much concerned with what the culture-worker produces when he or she works at producing culture.” (‘We’re Not Dealing with Naturalism Here’) 

    Clearly, Carter would insist that words aren’t transparent things but how opaque does a writer wish to make them, and must they arrive at opacity to eschew the predictable? Though ‘Flesh and the Mirror ‘was part of a story collection published in Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, which has been viewed as the most autobiographical of her works, written after leaving her husband at the end of the sixties and living in Japan for a couple of years, the story seems as much a product of semiotic preoccupation, of language as a system of signs rather than a reality words merely illustrate. This need mean no more than that the writer wishes to avoid dead metaphors and exhausted phrasing, the sort of prose Orwell so insisted upon in his critique of political language. “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (‘Politics and the English Language’) Orwell insists words have meanings and their purpose is to make reality more vivid. But Carter belongs to another generation, and another perspective. If Orwell could be so dismissive of painter Salvador Dali, it wasn’t only for the odious morality he perceived but also a sensibility he wouldn’t have comprehended. Anna Watz noted that Carter watched Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930) very early on in the 1960s and she says about the latter that it shaped her.” (AngelaCarterOnline) 

   But more generally what her work appears influenced by is a shift away from language as trustworthy. If Orwell found language solid while many of its users suspect, Carter would say that words are troublesome for at least two reasons. Not only would she be inclined to agree with Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that language is arbitrary, that there is no direct link between a word used and its relationship with the thing it expresses, but that even if we make that leap and accept the arbitrariness can still produce the meaningful, then as a female writer she might still have problems with its lazy phallocentric focus. Catherine Clement and Helene Cixous trace the genesis of this “'newly born woman’ through a provocative and witty deconstruction of phallocentric (Freudian, Levi-Straussian, and Lacanian) assumptions about gender”, says Roberta Rubenstein. “For Clement, the ancestry of the new woman can be understood through prototypes from myth and history, the sorceress and the hysteric, both of which were socially anomalous female roles that threatened male visions of social order.” (Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature) It is not surprising Rubenstein pays attention to Angela Carter’s work, seeing how in Carter’s The Passion of The New Eve we see “the unreliability of appearances, the mirroring, doubling, splitting, and dissolution of images of the gendered subject or object. In Carter's narrative, mirrors are everywhere and they are frequently cracked, representing the distortions of image analogous to the mind's inevitable distortions of what is seen as well as what is imagined.”  

    The imagery Rubenstein describes is clearly evident as well in Flesh and the Mirror, as though Carter wishes to explore what happens when assumptions about language and secure claims about identity no longer hold. If much thought in the post-war years mused over the arbitrariness of the signifier, as thinkers like Lacan, Jakobson, Barthes and Eco, developed in different ways semiotic questions, wondering how language is far from natural, by the seventies, Cixous, Kristeva, Irigary and others were concerned with language as not only arbitrary but also oppressively so; hence phallocentrism. Yet Carter wouldn’t have seen herself as anti-Freudian: “I’m a Freudian, in that sense, and some others, too. But 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.” (Bomb) 

    Carter coincides with what was called Ecriture feminine, or women's writing, but she wouldn’t have wished to be defined by it. “I don’t want to be sectarian but, you know, I wouldn’t want to be compared with other women, not because I don’t want to be compared with other women…but, you know, I don’t want to be compared with other women…I don’t think there’s anything special about women’s writing.” (AngelaCarterOnline) Could Carter have been so concerned with feminine writing and say of the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges: “the grand old man to whom I owe so much”? (AngelaCarterOnline) 

   Yet in various ways, her work coincided with the preoccupations of her time, and we could do worse than see Carter as a post-modernist fascinated by language’s arbitrary nature, a feminist determined to undermine male prejudice, and a Freudian interested in how the unconscious is a world of its own. That may be a lot to unpack in the briefest of time but let us try while returning to Flesh and the Mirror. If postmodern fiction often drew attention to the text in its storytelling and its use of language, Carter’s tale uses the mirror to indicate a reflective surface that might also include the words she uses; that the prose is purple all the better to make us see its inherent absurdity. When the narrator says “our pelts were stippled with the fretted shadows of the lace curtains as if our skins were a mysterious uniform provided by the management in order to render all those who made love in that hotel anonymous”, it may have sounded less absurd if it were instead: “our pelts were stippled with the fretted shadows of the lace curtains, as if our skins were a mysterious uniform rendering us anonymous.” The image would have held but the prose would have become less exaggerated. Is the writing bad, if it is bad at all, or self-consciously bad? When the narrator insists “the air was thicker than tea that’s been on the hob all day and cockroaches were running over the ceiling”, it is surely a pastiche of bad writing. It is one thing to find a simile for the thickness of the air, and stewed tea might not be the worst (though it hardly thickens like honey). But to add on the hob all day is surely a gag on bad writing. 

    Carter may understandably be resistant to being seen as a feminist writer but is ‘Flesh and the Mirror’ as feminine a tale as Carter’s contemporary Martin Amis’s ‘Let Me Count the Times’ is a work of trapped masculinity? If Amis’s story objectifies women, Carter’s character's subjectivity makes reality malleable. The character’s feelings generate states that leave the reader unsure what counts as fantastic or fallible, fictional or factual, real or oneiric. Amis’s story is always well aware of which one is which and while it would be nonsense to claim men are objective and women subjective, an aspect of feminine writing was concerned with this question. Luce Irigary reckoned that “women's sexual pleasure (jouissance) cannot be expressed by the dominant, ordered, "logical," masculine language” as she [Irigary] “explored”, according to Ross C. Merfin, “the connection between women's sexuality and women's language through the following analogy: as women's jouissance is more multiple than men's unitary, phallic pleasure…so "feminine" language is more diffusive than its "masculine" counterpart. (‘Feminist Criticism and Jane Eyre’). 

   Carter may not have quite concurred, but she would have been interested in writing that could escape realism and attend to the unconscious. Those twin fathers, Freud and Borges, allowed her to address the unconscious with the aid of the self-conscious, making fictional works that would be both excavating the intricacies of the mind while attending to the fictional as an experiment with the make-believe. As Borges said, “of course all stories are bogus, because even if I write a story about my next-door neighbour, it is a bogus story because, after all, I’m not my next-door neighbour.” (‘A Master in Montreal’) But can we know ourselves well enough to know always for sure what is fact and what is fiction, with Freud noting that “the unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious. Everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage.” (Interpretation of Dreams) Carter’s work, and for our purposes ‘Flesh and the Mirror’, attends to the fluidity of these spheres as it blends aspects that leave the story teasingly hard to discern.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Flesh and the Mirror

     Reading Angela Carter’s ‘Flesh and the Mirror’ it isn’t easy to know how seriously to take the story. Phrases like “the room was a box of oiled paper full of echoes of the rain” and “the morning before the night before, the morning before this oppressive morning, I woke up in the cabin of a boat”, might make us wonder. Is this pastiche? The inclination towards such a reading is there if we think of Carter’s most famous work: The Bloody Chamber, a collection of self-conscious, or more precisely feminist-conscious re-workings of well-known fairy tales like ‘Puss ’n’ Boots’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’. The self-consciousness is evident here when the narrator says “I no longer understood the logic of my own performance. My script had been scrambled behind my back. The cameraman was drunk.” The story isn’t only calling attention to itself as a work of literary fiction, it invokes cinema too.  

    But how do we differentiate bad writing from the self-reflexive; are we to assume that purple prose is part of the story’s intentionality or that the poetic images ought to be taken straight? Some of these images are vividly realised, indicating there need be no irony involved in their comprehension. “I was searching among a multitude of unknown faces for the face of the one I loved while the warm, thick, heavy rain of summer greased the dark surfaces of the street…” for example, or even “the crowds lapped round me like waves full of eyes until I felt that I was walking through an ocean….” But the former sentence continues: “… until after a while, they began to gleam like sleek fur of seals just risen from the bottom of the sea.” The latter: “…whose speechless and gesticulating inhabitants, like those with whom medieval philosophers peopled the country of the deep, were methodical inversions or mirror images of the dwellers of dry land.” Is Carter pushing prose into the skilfully baroque or mocking the simile? The latter sentence piles one on top of another. Later in the story, we have ungainly personification: “Therefore I evaded the mirror. I scrambled out of its arms and sat on the edge of the bed.” We also have a few oxymorons: “insubstantial substance” “enigmatic transparency”, “indecipherable clarity”. But we have too a first-person narrator who says that she was “walking through the city in the third person singular”, and a page later switches from the first person into the third: “On the night I came back to it, however hard I looked for the one I loved, she could not find him anywhere and the city delivered her into the hands of a perfect stranger who fell into step beside her…”

   If the piece is far from naively written that doesn’t mean we can understand easily its purpose let alone its story. It seems a woman has a Japanese lover whom she returns to after some time back in England but the lover isn’t there when she arrives in Yokohama and so she gets a train into nearby Tokyo. She has a night with someone else and sees the boyfriend the next day, and they argue and fall out. This appears to be the content of the story but it is narrated by a woman who seems split, a figure drawn to the melodrama she can extract from her life, the mirror that creates a schism in her being, and a country she stays in partly because it can exacerbate the enigma she wishes to see herself presenting. “There I was, walking up and down, eating meals, having conservations, in love, indifferent, and so on. But all the time I was pulling the strings of my own puppet; it was this puppet who was moving about on the other side of the glass.” 

    This is a lot to be getting on with, especially if along with these elements Carter has written a story that wants to be read as a commentary on its own creation, and with the reader musing over how seriously we ought to take the prose. Interviewer Susan Bernofsky says, “about five years ago you said you'd once believed that all writing, all fiction, was somehow about other fiction, other stories—then you said you'd changed your mind about this.” Carter replies: “I don't think I said that absolutely positively, I think I may have said I was beginning to wonder how, if culture was as sel- referential as that, anything new ever got into it. I'm very much concerned with what the culture-worker produces when he or she works at producing culture.” (‘We’re Not Dealing with Naturalism Here’) 

    Clearly, Carter would insist that words aren’t transparent things but how opaque does a writer wish to make them, and must they arrive at opacity to eschew the predictable? Though ‘Flesh and the Mirror ‘was part of a story collection published in Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, which has been viewed as the most autobiographical of her works, written after leaving her husband at the end of the sixties and living in Japan for a couple of years, the story seems as much a product of semiotic preoccupation, of language as a system of signs rather than a reality words merely illustrate. This need mean no more than that the writer wishes to avoid dead metaphors and exhausted phrasing, the sort of prose Orwell so insisted upon in his critique of political language. “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” (‘Politics and the English Language’) Orwell insists words have meanings and their purpose is to make reality more vivid. But Carter belongs to another generation, and another perspective. If Orwell could be so dismissive of painter Salvador Dali, it wasn’t only for the odious morality he perceived but also a sensibility he wouldn’t have comprehended. Anna Watz noted that Carter watched Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930) very early on in the 1960s and she says about the latter that it shaped her.” (AngelaCarterOnline) 

   But more generally what her work appears influenced by is a shift away from language as trustworthy. If Orwell found language solid while many of its users suspect, Carter would say that words are troublesome for at least two reasons. Not only would she be inclined to agree with Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that language is arbitrary, that there is no direct link between a word used and its relationship with the thing it expresses, but that even if we make that leap and accept the arbitrariness can still produce the meaningful, then as a female writer she might still have problems with its lazy phallocentric focus. Catherine Clement and Helene Cixous trace the genesis of this “'newly born woman’ through a provocative and witty deconstruction of phallocentric (Freudian, Levi-Straussian, and Lacanian) assumptions about gender”, says Roberta Rubenstein. “For Clement, the ancestry of the new woman can be understood through prototypes from myth and history, the sorceress and the hysteric, both of which were socially anomalous female roles that threatened male visions of social order.” (Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature) It is not surprising Rubenstein pays attention to Angela Carter’s work, seeing how in Carter’s The Passion of The New Eve we see “the unreliability of appearances, the mirroring, doubling, splitting, and dissolution of images of the gendered subject or object. In Carter's narrative, mirrors are everywhere and they are frequently cracked, representing the distortions of image analogous to the mind's inevitable distortions of what is seen as well as what is imagined.”  

    The imagery Rubenstein describes is clearly evident as well in Flesh and the Mirror, as though Carter wishes to explore what happens when assumptions about language and secure claims about identity no longer hold. If much thought in the post-war years mused over the arbitrariness of the signifier, as thinkers like Lacan, Jakobson, Barthes and Eco, developed in different ways semiotic questions, wondering how language is far from natural, by the seventies, Cixous, Kristeva, Irigary and others were concerned with language as not only arbitrary but also oppressively so; hence phallocentrism. Yet Carter wouldn’t have seen herself as anti-Freudian: “I’m a Freudian, in that sense, and some others, too. But 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.” (Bomb) 

    Carter coincides with what was called Ecriture feminine, or women's writing, but she wouldn’t have wished to be defined by it. “I don’t want to be sectarian but, you know, I wouldn’t want to be compared with other women, not because I don’t want to be compared with other women…but, you know, I don’t want to be compared with other women…I don’t think there’s anything special about women’s writing.” (AngelaCarterOnline) Could Carter have been so concerned with feminine writing and say of the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges: “the grand old man to whom I owe so much”? (AngelaCarterOnline) 

   Yet in various ways, her work coincided with the preoccupations of her time, and we could do worse than see Carter as a post-modernist fascinated by language’s arbitrary nature, a feminist determined to undermine male prejudice, and a Freudian interested in how the unconscious is a world of its own. That may be a lot to unpack in the briefest of time but let us try while returning to Flesh and the Mirror. If postmodern fiction often drew attention to the text in its storytelling and its use of language, Carter’s tale uses the mirror to indicate a reflective surface that might also include the words she uses; that the prose is purple all the better to make us see its inherent absurdity. When the narrator says “our pelts were stippled with the fretted shadows of the lace curtains as if our skins were a mysterious uniform provided by the management in order to render all those who made love in that hotel anonymous”, it may have sounded less absurd if it were instead: “our pelts were stippled with the fretted shadows of the lace curtains, as if our skins were a mysterious uniform rendering us anonymous.” The image would have held but the prose would have become less exaggerated. Is the writing bad, if it is bad at all, or self-consciously bad? When the narrator insists “the air was thicker than tea that’s been on the hob all day and cockroaches were running over the ceiling”, it is surely a pastiche of bad writing. It is one thing to find a simile for the thickness of the air, and stewed tea might not be the worst (though it hardly thickens like honey). But to add on the hob all day is surely a gag on bad writing. 

    Carter may understandably be resistant to being seen as a feminist writer but is ‘Flesh and the Mirror’ as feminine a tale as Carter’s contemporary Martin Amis’s ‘Let Me Count the Times’ is a work of trapped masculinity? If Amis’s story objectifies women, Carter’s character's subjectivity makes reality malleable. The character’s feelings generate states that leave the reader unsure what counts as fantastic or fallible, fictional or factual, real or oneiric. Amis’s story is always well aware of which one is which and while it would be nonsense to claim men are objective and women subjective, an aspect of feminine writing was concerned with this question. Luce Irigary reckoned that “women's sexual pleasure (jouissance) cannot be expressed by the dominant, ordered, "logical," masculine language” as she [Irigary] “explored”, according to Ross C. Merfin, “the connection between women's sexuality and women's language through the following analogy: as women's jouissance is more multiple than men's unitary, phallic pleasure…so "feminine" language is more diffusive than its "masculine" counterpart. (‘Feminist Criticism and Jane Eyre’). 

   Carter may not have quite concurred, but she would have been interested in writing that could escape realism and attend to the unconscious. Those twin fathers, Freud and Borges, allowed her to address the unconscious with the aid of the self-conscious, making fictional works that would be both excavating the intricacies of the mind while attending to the fictional as an experiment with the make-believe. As Borges said, “of course all stories are bogus, because even if I write a story about my next-door neighbour, it is a bogus story because, after all, I’m not my next-door neighbour.” (‘A Master in Montreal’) But can we know ourselves well enough to know always for sure what is fact and what is fiction, with Freud noting that “the unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious. Everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage.” (Interpretation of Dreams) Carter’s work, and for our purposes ‘Flesh and the Mirror’, attends to the fluidity of these spheres as it blends aspects that leave the story teasingly hard to discern.


© Tony McKibbin