The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

‘Yes; the Count was dangerous. I was keeping him under the closest surveillance. It was my most important mission of the whole war. I would have taken him to my father’s castle if I could, to enlist him in our campaign for he was a man of great power though he was sometimes a little ludicrous because the real world fell so far short of his desires. But he did what he could to bring it up to his own level, even if his will exceeded his self-knowledge. And so he invented those macabre clowns, the Pirates of Death. ‘What was chilling, even appalling, in the Count’s rapacity was its purely cerebral quality. He was the most metaphysical of libertines. If he had passions, they were as lucid and intellectual as those of a geometrician. He approached the flesh in the manner of one about to give the proof of a theorem and, however exiguous those passions seemed to him, they were never unpremeditated. He acted the tyrant to his passions. However convulsive the grand guignol in his bed, he had always planned it well beforehand and rehearsed it so often in his brain that his performance perfectly simulated an improvisation. His desire became authentic because it was so absolutely synthetic.