Heroes and Villains Read online

  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

  Heroes and Villains

  Introduction by ROBERT COOVER

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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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

  Contents

  Introduction by ROBERT COOVER

  Epigraph

  HEROES AND VILLAINS

  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 t
hat 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

  1

  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.

  Marianne lived in a white tower made of steel and concrete. She looked out of her window and, in autumn, she saw a blazing hill of corn and orchards where the trees creaked with crimson apples; in spring, the fields unfurled like various flags, first brown, then green. Beyond the farmland was nothing but marshes, an indifferent acreage of tumbled stone and some distant intimations of the surrounding forest which, in certain stormy lights of late August, seemed to encroach on and menace the community though, most of the time, the villagers conspired to ignore it.

  Marianne’s tower stood among some other steel and concrete blocks that, surviving the blast, now functioned as barracks, museum and school, a number of wide streets of rectangular wooden houses and some stables and market gardens. The community grew corn, flax, vegetables and fruit. It tended cattle for meat and milk besides sheep for wool and chickens for eggs. It was self-supporting at the simplest level and exported its agricultural surplus in return for drugs and other medical supplies, books, ammunition, spare parts for machinery, weapons and tools. The sounds of Marianne’s childhood were cries of animals and creaking of carts, crowing of cocks and the bugles of the Soldiers drilling in the barracks. In February and March, wailing gulls blew in from the sea across the freshly ploughed fields, but Marianne had never seen the sea.

  She was not allowed to go outside the outer wire fence away from the community. Sheep sometimes wandered away, leaping briary hillocks above abandoned habitations, and sometimes a shepherd followed them, though he would go reluctantly and heavily armed. The Soldiers kept to the roads when they drove away lorries full of produce but, even so, the Barbarians occasionally hijacked the convoys and killed all the Soldiers.

  ‘If you’re not a good little girl, the Barbarians will eat you,’ said Marianne’s nurse, a Worker woman with six fingers on each hand, which puzzled Marianne for she herself had only five.

  ‘Why?’ asked Marianne.

  ‘Because that is the nature of the Barbarians,’ said her nurse. ‘They wrap little girls in clay just like they do with hedgehogs, wrap them in clay, bake them in the fire and gobble them up with salt. They relish tender little girls.’

  ‘Then I’d be too tough for them,’ said Marianne truculently. But she saw the woman honestly believed what she said and wondered vaguely if it were true. She thought that at least a visit from the Barbarians would make some kind of change. The children played Soldiers and Barbarians; they made guns with their fingers and shot one another dead but the Soldiers always won. That was the rule of the game.

  ‘The Soldiers are heroes but the Barbarians are villains,’ said the son of the Professor of Mathematics aggressively. ‘I’m a hero. I’ll shoot you.’

  ‘Oh, no, you won’t,’ said Marianne and grimaced frightfully. ‘I’m not playing.’

  Her uncle was the Colonel. He had a harsh, loud voice and she disliked him. Her brother was a cadet. Her mother loved her brother best. Marianne tripped up the son of the Professor of Mathematics and left him sprawling and yowling in the dust, which was not in the rules. The other children soon left her out of their games but she did not care. She was a skinny and angular child. She marked all her possessions with her name, even her toothbrush, and never lost anything.

  Besides the wire netting around the boundaries of the cultivated land were the watch towers manned with machine guns stood on stilts at intervals; there was also a stout wall topped with barbed wire round the village itself. The only entry through this wall was a large wooden gate where the sentry post was. When the Barbarians attacked the community, it stood siege inside the village wall since, in order to enter the village, the Barbarians had to storm the gate. When Marianne was six years old, she saw the Barbarians for the first time.

&n
bsp; It was the time of the May Day Festival. On May Day there was a picnic, there was music and the Soldiers performed an impressive march past and drill. Marianne’s father, a gentle man constitutionally sunk in melancholy, stayed in his study with his books, such was his privilege, but her mother, the other Professor women in the tower and the Workers were very busy. They cooked succulent food and pressed best clothes. Marianne ran around bothering and pestering everybody, stealing scraps of uncooked dough and curiously indulging her spitefulness in several ways until at last her nurse said grimly: ‘I’ll deal with her.’

  She scooped Marianne under one arm and took her to a high room nobody used. A window opened on to a little balcony of white-painted iron. She had a key to this room and she locked the door on Marianne, snapping through the keyhole: ‘There you’ll stay until I fetch you.’ Miraculously translated from the business of the kitchens, Marianne was quite deflated. She sat on the bare boards in the middle of the floor and looked about her. A creeper wound in through the open window like a snake; there were all kinds of snakes in the forest, several of them venomous, which was not so before. Marianne was not frightened to be left alone but she was very angry. She went out on to the balcony, which squeaked beneath her feet. She peered through the iron bars at the village. It appeared diminutive, from this height, and very tidy and brightly-coloured, like a place where everyone was happy. The orchards shivered with bloom. The fields were soft green but the brambles were still pierced here and there by a few spires of steel which arched to the ground like decolourized rainbows, and leprous viaducts crested with purple loosestrife lurched towards the still uncovered core of calcined earth at the centre of the ruins. Around the edges of the horizon spread the unguessable forest.