Liz Milner wrote this review for Green Man Review.
Angela Carter is to writing what Jackson Pollock is to painting; she flings words on the page in wild, almost obscene abundance. Alliteration, assonance — all the tricks in a writer’s gig bag are scattered hither and yon. She writes like a fireworks display where all the fireworks go off all at once in the loudest brightest grand finale that ever was. It shouldn’t work, and yet it does.
Her subject matter is wide-ranging and covers just about every hip and trendy topic of the mid-twentieth century. She created her own style of magical realism, which brought the fantastic worlds of writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa from the steamy tropical jungles of Latin America to the frigid forests of Northern Europe.
Carter’s goal was “to say things for which no language previously existed.” She was heavily influenced by oral tradition, folklore, popular culture, music halls, circuses and Hollywood, but her relationship to tradition was problematic. She wrote “I am all for putting new wine into old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.” She reinterpreted Grimm’s fairytales in a post-Freudian, feminist light. Her fascination with sexual politics and eroticism and her spirited defense of the Marquis de Sade earned her the title, “high priestess of post-graduate porn.”
Capturing such wild abundance in an academic treatise seems an impossible task. In Anagrams of Desire, Charlotte Crofts strives heroically to meet this challenge, but ultimately fails. Crofts is hobbled from the start by her use of academic language and by the focus she has chosen for her book. Angela Carter was a gorgeous, pyrotechnical stylist. Using lit-crit jargon to analyze her work is like airbrushing the aurora borealis out of a photograph to obtain a clearer picture of the night sky.
While most academic studies focus on Carter as a novelist and journalist, Anagrams of Desire is the first that explores Carter’s work as a scriptwriter. Most of the radio and television programs that Crofts bases her analysis on are not available to the general public. Some may no longer exist. This is a major weakness of the study, since in many cases one cannot compare Crofts’ claims with the actual works.
Carter wrote many screenplays, but only two were produced, The Company of Wolves and The Magic Toyshop. The Company of Wolves (1984), is a blood-soaked retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” that was directed by Neil Jordan of The Crying Game fame. In this version of “Little Red Riding Hood, ” the heroine learns to love her inner wolf. In The Magic Toyshop, a funny uncle forces his niece to perform in his increasingly kinky puppet theater productions. The uncle is finally destroyed by his own puppets. Among Carter’s unpublished screenplays was The Christchurch Murders, a treatment of the story that inspired Peter Jackson’s film, Heavenly Creatures.
Carter also wrote scripts for radio dramas that were broadcast on British Radio 3 and 4 during the 1970s and ’80s. Four of the tapes were rebroadcast after her death in 1992. The tapes are lost, but the scripts are available. Carter loved radio for its “aural hallucinations, its ability to cut from objective to subjective reality, from the inner, personal voice to the conflicting voices of those bearing witness to the diverse manifestations of that inner voice.” In a radio drama, Carter felt she could recreate fairyland and she saw radio as taking over where traditional storytelling had left off.
Come Unto These Yellow Sands, dramatized the life of the Victorian fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd. Yellow Sands won the Sony Award for Best Drama Documentary in 1979. In A Self-Made Man, Carter celebrates Ronald Firbank’s self-creation as an act of resistance against the “dominant ideology” of masculinity. Some explanation of who Ronald Firbank was would have been handy. From the book, I get the impression he was a famous dandy, but it’s not clear if we are talking Beau Brummel or Quentin Crisp.
Carter also did TV documentaries. The most controversial was a documentary on the representation of Christ in Western Art, The Holy Family Album. By showing the contents of God’s family picture album, Carter depicts the Creator as a very unsavory character: stalking young virgins, committing adultery, torturing and murdering relatives. The Holy Family Album was more than a flip bit of blasphemy. It was examination of the religious imagery of Western Art. The script for this program has yet to be published.
Crofts assumes that the reader comes to the book with an in-depth knowledge of Carter’s life and career. It would have been helpful to have a brief biography or even just a chronology so that the reader could place Carter’s career in the context of her time. There are lots references to Carter’s career as a journalist. Since it is difficult obtain Carter’s journalistic writings in the U.S., it would be good to have some background. An explanation of British Media would also be helpful. I know BBC Radio 3 & 4 tend to be avant-garde, but what am I to make of the fact that Carter’s reviews were published in the Observer? Does this indicate that her audience was middle-of-the-road, widely radical or what?
Given its use of lit-crit jargon, its reliance on texts that now exist only in archives or not at all, its frequent citing of obscure academic controversies and its sketchy information on cultural context, Croft’s book is of limited appeal to a general reader and is best suited to academics interested in Media Studies and Feminism.
(Palgrave, 2003)
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