The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

by Angela Carter

‘Now the Professor and his sets of samples are gone, my father cannot structure anything until he makes new models. And desires must take whatever form they please, for the time being. Who knows what we shall find here? ‘If his experiment is a failure, we shall, of course, find nothing.’ ‘Why is that?’ ‘Because the undifferentiated mass desire was not strong enough to perpetuate its own forms.’

However, this rigorous puritanism did not prevent every male in the village from raping Albertina on the night we arrived and their organs were so prodigious, their virility so unmentionable, that she very nearly died. While, as for me, they forced on me the caresses of all their females for they had no notion of humanity in spite of their extraordinary nobility of spirit. Because they were far more magnificent than man, they did not know what a man was. They did not have a word for shame and nothing human was alien to them because they were alien to everything human.

But I did not know how to reply except with a few, wordless murmurs because I had not yet grasped the essentially nonverbal nature of the language and he soon abandoned all attempts to talk to me and bent over me afresh to count my toes and exclaim over my toenails, which clearly fascinated him.

But, since they had found us on the Holy Hill, they knew we were a sign from heaven though they had not yet decided just what it was we signified. While they racked their brains over the problem, they took certain hygienic precautions.

Albertina was as concerned as I with the texture of the life of our hosts but not from any simple, childish curiosity such as mine. She had become engrossed in the problem of the reality status of the centaurs and the more she talked of it, the more I admired her ruthless empiricism for she was convinced that even though every male in the village had obtained carnal knowledge of her, the beasts were still only emanations of her own desires, dredged up and objectively reified from the dark abysses of the unconscious. And she told me that, according to her father’s theory, all the subjects and objects we had encountered in the loose grammar of Nebulous Time were derived from a similar source – my desires; or hers; or the Count’s. At first, especially, the Count’s, for he had lived on closer terms with his own unconscious than we. But now our desires, perhaps, had achieved their day of independence. I remembered the words of another German savant and quoted to her: ‘ “In the unconscious, nothing can be treated or destroyed.”* Yet we saw the Count destroyed; and I myself destroyed the Cannibal Chief.’ ‘Destruction is only another aspect of being,’ she said categorically and with that I had to be content.

‘This is your Minister’s place,’ she said. ‘He has not got enough imagination to realize that the most monstrous aberrations are bound to flourish in soil once it has been disinfected of the imagination.’ And, though I loved her more than anything in the world, I remembered the music of Mozart and murmured to the Queen of the Night: ‘I do not think so.’

I don’t know. All I know is, I could not transcend myself sufficiently to inherit the universe. Although it was real, I knew the perfection round me was impossible; and perhaps I was right. But now I am too old to know or care. I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking. I thought at the time perhaps I was a terrorist in the cause of reason; though I probably tried to justify myself with such a notion later. Yet when I close my eyes I see her still, walking through the orchard towards her father’s house, in her soldier’s uniform, her heavy black plaits hanging down her back like a little girl’s.

They both laughed gently and I felt the hair rising on my scalp. In that room which hung in the castle like a bubble filled with quietude, faced with that strange family group, I felt the most appalling fear. Perhaps because I was in the presence of the disciplined power of the utterly irrational. He was so quiet, so grey, so calm and he had just said something entirely meaningless in a voice of perfect, restrained reason. All at once I realized how lonely we were here, far away in the mountains with only the wind for company, in the house of the man who made dreams come true.

He bemused me. He was stillness. He seemed to have refined himself almost to nothing. He was a grey ghost sitting in a striped coat at a very elegant table and yet he was also Prospero – though, ironically enough, one could not judge the Prospero effect in his own castle for he could not alter the constituents of the aromatic coffee we sipped by so much as an iota. Here, nothing could possibly be fantastic. That was the source of my bitter disappointment. I had wanted his house to be a palace dedicated only to wonder.

Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.

‘My father has discovered that the magnetic field formed by our reciprocal desire – yes, Desiderio, our desire – may be quite unique in its intensity. Such desire must be the strongest force in the world and, if it could be crystallized, would show itself as a deposit which is the definitive residuum of the most powerful inherited associations. And desire is also the source of the greatest source of radiant energy in the entire universe!’ Her intellectual grasp impressed me but I could have wished she was a little less earnest. She had inherited in full her father’s lack of humour. The peep-show proprietor had warned me of his lack of humour. Yet I found her most endearing when she was so serious. When I thought she was endearing, suddenly she looked exactly like the angel the nuns put on top of the convent Christmas tree. And yet she was very eloquent. Her eloquence moved me, as the music of Mozart and the wall-paintings of the Ancient Egyptians used to move me.

‘Once the samples are selected, interpreted, painted, cast and articulated, I can exhibit pain as positively as I can exhibit red. I show love in the same way that I show straight. I demonstrate fear just as precisely as I exemplify crooked. And ecstasy and tree and despair and stone, all exhibited in the same fashion. I can make you perceive ideas with your senses because I do not acknowledge any essential difference in the phenomenological bases of the two modes of thought. All things co-exist in pairs but mine is not an either/or world.

‘And he thinks I only operate in the gaps between things and definitions! What scant respect he shows for me!’

But what ofthe subject?

Well, you know the choice I made. Nothing in this city quarrels with its name. The clocks all run on time, every one. Time moves forward on the four wheels of the dimensions just as it always did before the Doctor’s time. When I finish this chapter, they will bring me a cup of hot milk and a plate of lightly buttered digestive biscuits; when I finish my life, they will bring me a winding sheet and take me to a vault in the Cathedral. They have reconstructed the Cathedral so well you would not believe it had ever been demolished. I will never see her again. The shadows fall immutably. In the square, the chestnut tree casts leaves of autumn on my statue’s shoulders. The golden bowl is not broken in this city. It is round as a cake and everyone may have a slice of it, according to his need. A need is nothing like a desire. Old Desiderio asks young Desiderio: ‘And when he offered you a night of perfect ecstasy in exchange for a lifetime’s contentment, how could you possibly choose the latter?’ And young Desiderio answers: ‘I am too young to know regret.’

Perhaps I acted only on impulse. Perhaps he did not offer me a high enough price; after all, he only offered me my heart’s desire. Besides, he was a hypocrite. He penned desire in a cage and said: ‘Look! I have liberated desire!’ He was a hypocrite. So I, a hypocrite on a less dramatic scale, I hypocritically killed him, did I? But there I go again – running ahead of myself! See, I have ruined all the suspense. I have quite spoiled my climax. But why do you deserve a climax, anyway? I am only trying to tell you exactly, as far as I can remember, what actually happened. And you know very well already that it was I who killed Dr Hoffman; you have read all about it in the history books and know the very date far better than I because I have forgotten it. But it must have been October because the air smelled of mushrooms. I would have hated him less if he had been less bored with his inventions.

He might have been inviting me on a guided tour round a chocolate factory. I wondered why his daughter loved him. The Count had suited my notion of Prometheus far better than the real Prometheus did; yet, now and then, the half-derisive contempt I felt for this prim thief of fire was touched with a horrid shudder when I remembered he was triple-refined Mind in person and Matter was an optical toy to him. But I could not understand why a man like him should want to liberate man so much. I could not see how he could have got that notion of liberation inside his skull. I was sure he only wanted power. Perhaps I killed him out of incomprehension.

So that was the Doctor’s version of the cogito! I DESIRE THEREFORE I EXIST. Yet he seemed to me a man without desires.

calculations went awry. Nebulous time arrived instantaneously rather than in the course of a programmed dissolution of time itself and I did not know if the manifestations could, as it were, stand on their own two feet. Or on whatever number of feet they decided to possess.

I knew only that he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason. And yet he moved with the feeble effort of a man near death.

They were all stark naked and very young. They came from every race in the world, brown, black, white and yellow, and were paired, as far as I could see, according to colour differences. They formed a pictorial lexicon of all the things a man and a woman might do together within the confines of a bed of wire six feet long by three feet wide. There was such a multitude of configurations of belly and buttock, thigh and breast, nipple and navel, all in continual motion, that I remembered the anatomy lessons of the acrobats of desire and how the Count had spoken, with uncharacteristic reverence, of the ‘death-defying double somersault of love’. I was awed and I was revolted.