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Article Excerpt
Each reading is a translation.
--Octavio Paz, "Translation: Literature and Letters"
As a staunch materialist, Angela Carter was acutely aware of the impact of larger historical forces on the act of creation. Thus, at the request of Michelene Wandor, she agreed to situate herself politically as a writer for a collection of essays, On Gender and Writing (1983). In her oft-quoted contribution to the volume, titled "Notes from the Front Line," Carter stresses the influence of the feminist movement on her life and work: "The women's movement has been of immense importance to me personally and I would regard myself as a feminist writer, because I'm a feminist in everything else and one can't compartmentalize these things in one's life" (Shaking a Leg 37). Far from reducing the meaning of a literary text to the personal convictions of its author, however, Carter puts the stress on the activity of reception, as she insists on the need "to leave the reader to construct her own fiction for herself from the elements of my fictions" (37). (1) The importance that Carter gives to the role of the reader shapes her understanding of how writing itself works. She famously adds: "Reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts. I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode" (37). We wish to argue that Carter's view of creation as stemming from the dynamic interplay of reading and writing was intimately connected to (and perhaps even originated in) her experience as a translator.
When Carter was commissioned to translate Charles Perrault's tales into English for Victor Gollancz in 1976, she found out that "Each century tends to create or re-create fairy tales after its own taste" (Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault 17), and this was to have a crucial influence on her literary practice, which derived a new energy from revisiting the cultural and literary past from the perspective of the present. Since every reader is a potential author who can tease out new meanings in old texts, the creative act becomes a bold gesture of appropriation and reinterpretation, and Carter notes that the ferment of the new wine will in some cases liberate energies that will shatter the container itself. Carter's experiments carried out in the laboratory of fiction testify to her playful, irreverent, and anarchic spirit. She clearly revels in the provocative image for its own sake, and yet, in characteristic fashion, the bottle metaphor is not gratuitous. It draws attention to the profoundly transformative impact of the rewriting process as it frees up anti-conventional readings of old texts that challenge expectations, certainties, and comfortable beliefs, and undermine all efforts to contain meaning. (2)
Taking this quote as a starting point, this essay examines some of the forms that the active reading advocated in "Notes from the Front Line" takes in Carter's work as a translator, an aspect of her writing career that has not attracted much critical attention. (3) The essay traces the emergence of Carter's view of the interrelationship between reading, translating, and fiction writing as continuous and even inseparable activities that were to shape her career as a writer. As she was working
on Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passe, Carter was made acutely aware of the creative and critical displacement of her French source in the process of adapting his tales for English readers steeped in a completely different historical, social, and cultural context, and animated by equally distinct expectations and requirements. Her decision to rewrite several of Perrault's tales in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) can therefore be seen as the logical development or counterpoint of her work as a translator. According to Jack Zipes, the two activities were carried out more or less simultaneously: "As she began her work on Perrault, she also started writing her own original stories that formed the basis of The Bloody Chamber" ("Remaking of Charles Perrault" ix). Although the critical consensus reads into Carter a feminist imperative to subvert Perrault's tales, we propose that translating and rewriting were rather a means to pursue and develop a complex and productive dialogue with Perrault by engaging with aspects of his texts that she couldn't integrate in her translation. The Bloody Chamber would notably allow her to explore the sophisticated strategies and semantic richness of Perrault's texts. As she was translating Perrault, Carter indeed realized how translation and rewriting enable the source text to live on beyond itself, and that "even as a translation harks (back or across) to an original or source text, the original also 'anticipates' its futural reinscription(s)" (Brodzki 67). In this sense, The Bloody Chamber is less a debunking of her predecessor than a genuine dialogue based on a deep understanding of the nature and significance of Perrault's work, which explains why Carter's interest in Perrault is not so surprising as it may seem.
We take her "Bluebeard" as an example of translation as a dialogical, creative, and transformative rereading that marked a turning point in Carter's literary career, as Jack Zipes observes in his introduction to his new Penguin edition (vii). Thus, her rewriting of the tale in the story she calls "The Bloody Chamber" represents in our view yet another way of responding to Perrault's "La Barbe bleue," and Carter's choice of the fairy tale as the basis for her literary creations in the eponymous collection of short stories and elsewhere reflects a recognition of the extraordinary potential of the genre to carry out poetic and artistic experiments, along with an awareness of its crucial social role in shaping a sense of self and understanding of the world from an early age. Carter was therefore not so much breaking away from Perrault as following his plea for a modern literature as she transposed Perrault's "project of worldly instruction" ("Better to Eat You With" 453) in the late twentieth century.
Carter's Textual Sources and Background Reading
When Angela Carter read Charles Perrault's tales in the original language to brush up her French in 1976, this truly defamiliarizing experience was an eye-opener that completely transformed her perception of "fairy tales." She rediscovered the genre she associated with childhood from a new, adult perspective, and this firsthand experience of Perrault's texts enabled her to radically revise her notions about "fairyland" as a sinister realm invested by "nutters, regressives and the unbalanced, as though a potential audience of children granted absolute licence" ("Better to Eat You With" 451). Carter recorded the experience in an enthusiastic article for New Society in which she praises Perrault's tales not only for their narrative effectiveness and stylistic economy, but also for their pedagogical force and worldly wisdom:
The notion of the fairy-tale as a vehicle for moral instruction is not a fashionable one. I sweated out the heatwave browsing through Perrault's Contes du temps passe on the pretext of improving my French. What an unexpected treat to find that in this great Ur-collection--whence sprang the Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Tom Thumb, all the heroes of pantomime--all these nursery tales are purposely dressed up as fables of the politics of experience. The seventeenth century regarded children, quite rightly, as apprentice adults. Charles Perrault, academician, folklorist, pedant, but clearly neither nutter nor regressive, takes a healthily abrasive attitude to his material. Cut the crap about richly nurturing the imagination. This world is all that is to the point. ("Better to Eat You With" 52-53)
Carter's rediscovery of Perrault's contes would lead to the publication of two volumes of translated tales besides Carter's own "book of stories...
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