Craft Essay #6 - Carter/Carey

Craft Essay #6:

Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter

meets

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

I.

Angela Carter’s story collection Saints and Strangers is about language—crazy, glorious, spinning, glittering language. She hangs her language like technicolor laundry across the sturdy clotheslines of such iconic tales as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the legend of Lizzie Borden, the sad life of Edgar Allan Poe, and Baudelaire’s infatuation with Jeanne Duval. Carter uses language and other techniques—summary, tone, point of view—to subvert these stories and twist them to fit her view of the world.
Behold the heightened language of “The Fall River Axe Murders”: “the dark, satanic mills” (p. 9), “a stangulatory neck tie” (p. 9), “this burning morning” (p. 9), “domestic apocalypse” (p. 11)—all in the red-hot first few pages! And the accumulation of adjectives: “sweet, sensual, horizontal thing” (p. 9), “the large, accusing, blue stare” (p. 17), “her soft, warm, enormous bum” (p. 22). And the alliteration: “In a blue serge suit one look at which would be enough to bring you out in a prickly heat, Andrew Borden will perambulate the perspiring town truffling for money like a pig” (p. 10); “For he held himself upright with such ponderous assertion it was a perpetual reminder to all who witnessed his progress” (p. 19). The repetition: “Hot, hot, hot” (p. 9), “Bustle! bustle! bustle!” (p. 9), and
Still, all still; in the house nothing moves except the droning fly and the stillness on the staircase crushes him, he falls still. Stillness pressing against the blinds, stillness, mortal stillness in the room below, where Master and Mistress share the matrimonial bed.
All this linguistic hysteria and yet, at the same time, Carter’s language grounds us by, in effect, rubbing our noses in the smell, taste, and feel of what it was like to be in the Borden household on that fateful August day. Then, perversely, after setting us up like a chicken with its neck stretched out on the block, she does not even document the murders! Her narrator—a modern observer jaded enough to acknowledge that the presence of a Borden family friend (one John Vinnicum Morse) is inconvenient to a story designed for “the maximum emblematic effect” (p. 11)—is more interested in the potential causes of Lizzie’s violent outburst: an unspecified form of mental illness (bipolar disorder?) synchronized with her menstrual cycle.
Carter repeats this cause-and-effect theme in “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe,” where her savvy third-person narrator demonstrates how Poe’s unfortunate childhood inspired his dark poetry and tales of death, not to mention his fatal alcoholism. Her weapon of choice in this endeavor is, of course, language. Here’s how she (for this narrator is a woman just as surely as Philip Roth’s is a man) describes the birth of Edgar’s little sister: “They heard the shrill cry of the new-born in the exhausted silence, like the sound of the blade of a skate on ice, and something bloody as a fresh-pulled tooth twitched between the midwife’s pincers” (p. 73). Again, there are those pile-ups of adjectives: “Veins as blue as those on Stilton cheese but muscular, palpitating, prominent, lithe, stood out on her forehead” (p. 74). When poor Edgar’s actress mother dies and the three Poe children are doled out to various foster homes, the narrator wonders when they will meet again: “the church bell tolled: never, never, never, never, never” (p. 75). How could Poe not have grown up to write “The Masque of the Red Death”?
“Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a tongue-in-cheek setup for Shakespeare’s comedy, narrated by the magical fairy adopted by Titania. As in the other stories in the collection, the language is a head-spinning combination of timeless poetry and contemporary lingo. “Child of the sun am I, and of the breezes, juicy as mangoes” (p. 91) rubs up against lines like “Puck is no more polymorphously perverse than all the rest of the sub-microscopic particles” (p. 90). The narrator is at once a sexually ambiguous sprite and a modern academic type who goes on at length about the difference between the English woods known to Shakespeare and the “necromantic forest” where the Bard’s comedy is set (p. 87). Paradoxically, as in the other tales, these linguistic and intellectual flights of fancy not only amuse and entertain but also somehow grab our lapels and yank us into her bizarre world.
“Peter and the Wolf” ignores the Prokofiev folk tale in favor of a dark, disturbing version held together by the author’s total command of language: “The howling of the wolves mutilated the approaching silence of the night” (p. 59). Here is a description of the wolf-girl’s genitalia as glimpsed by Peter: “a set of Chinese boxes of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon another into herself, drawing him into an inner, secret place in which destination perpetually receded before him” (p. 63).
Like the other stories, “Peter and the Wolf” relies heavily on summary, as several years are compressed into eight short pages:
A girl from the village on the lower slopes left her widowed mother to marry a man who lived up in the empty places. Soon she was pregnant. In October, there was a severe storm. The old woman knew her daughter was near her time and waited for a message but none arrived. After the storm passed, the old woman went up to see for herself, taking her grown son with her because she was afraid. (p. 59)
This technique is consistent with the old folk tales and legends the author is upending. But then she will pause and describe something in a prose so sharp it cuts:
If they had not been the first wolves he had ever seen, the boy would not have inspected them so closely, their plush, grey pelts, of which the hairs are tipped with white, giving them a ghostly look, as if they were on the point of dissolving at the edges; their sprightly, plumey tails; their acute, inquisitive masks. (p. 60)

This contrast is echoed by the narrator’s tone, which careens throughout the book from the wildly eccentric (“He saw the primitive, vast, magnificent, barren, unkind, simplicity of the mountain” [p. 67]) to the authoritatively concrete (from “Axe Murders”: “Bridget’s lopsided shoes stand together on a hand-braided rug of aged rags” [p. 12]) to the amusingly vague (that same authoritative narrator admits, when describing the Bordens’ Saturday meal, “I don’t know if they had greens or not” [p. 20]). This stark contrast—between summary and specificity, and between several tones—creates a weirdly pleasurable frisson.
The dichotomy is most boldly clear in the collection’s final piece, “Black Venus.” From pages 111 to 118, the third-person narrator tells the story of an exotic black dancer/prostitute and her poet lover. Few specifics are given—no names (just “she” and “Daddy,” as in “sugar daddy”), and even pinning down the time frame requires some math skills (thanks to a reference to Josephine Baker’s fame “a hundred years later” [p. 114]). But there are plenty of fireworks in the language: “She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off” (p. 111); “Night comes in on feet of fur” (p. 112); she had “the voice of a crow reared on honey” (p. 118). Then, on page 118, the narrative suddenly transforms from what feels like another legend into a factual account of the relationship between Charles Baudelaire (the poet) and his muse, Jeanne Duval (the dancer). Dates are provided, places named. Baudelaire’s notes are referred to (pp. 118-9). But even as the narrator grounds us in facts, she continues with the stunning poetic language. On page 121, she describes the Antarctic: “Down there, far down, where the buttocks of the world slim down again.” When Baudelaire was aroused, “his Lazarus arose and knocked unbidden on the coffin-lid of the poet’s trousers” (p. 122). And of course there are the adjective-mad descriptions: “She walked beside him like an ambulant fetish, savage, obscene, terrifying” (p. 122).
Like Peter staring at the wolf-girl’s “forbidden book,” we are at once repulsed by and attracted to these stories with their raw, glistening words; their unflinching descriptions of bodily functions and their high-falutin’ poetry; their intellectual analysis and their slangy informalities. There is a staggering intelligence behind it all, someone with a clever intellectual agenda, but what pushes these stories under our skin is the language.

II.

Like Saints and Strangers, Peter Carey’s picaresque novel True History of the Kelly Gang derives much of its power from language. But unlike Carter’s erudite narrators, Carey’s first-person narrator, infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, is a semi-literate character whose limitations are his strength.
For example, because of Ned’s near-total lack of formal education (though he has read R.D. Blackmore’s classic adventure, Lorna Doone), he does not bother with such formalities as commas or quotation marks. More than illustrating the narrator’s grammatical ignorance, this lends the storytelling a headlong, propulsive quality appropriate to Ned’s adventures. It also forces the reader to concentrate, so as to make sense of such sentences as
She prayed Almighty and merciful God who has commissioned Thy angels to guide and protect us command them to be our companions from our setting out until our return to clothe us with their invisible protection to keep us from all danger of collision of fire of explosion of fall and bruises. (p. 242)

Another grammatical issue is Ned’s tendency to misconjugate the verb “to be”: “It were during Sgt O’Neill’s hateful reign…” (p. 13); “We wasn’t finished tending to the pigs” (p. 13). This beguiling quirk lends Ned’s writing the quality of everyday speech, and somehow makes him all the more likable.
Another of Ned’s more charming limitations is self-imposed. Because the novel is primarily composed of episodes he has written down for his young daughter to read, the polite bank robber and horse thief avoids offensive curse words. Sometimes he does this with the use of dashes (e.g., “bastard” becomes “b-----d” [p. 115]). At other times, he resorts to the well-known substitutions of “eff” and “ess, ” as in “It was eff this and ess that” (p. 9) or “What’s he effing want?” (p. 111). Most resourcefully, Ned often replaces “fucking” with “adjectival,” as in “Get out of my adjectival chair” (p. 34). This last technique creates an odd effect for the reader, who must take the extra nanosecond to re-place the original word. It both pulls us out of the story—in a way that reminds us that this was written by a “real-life” person—and pulls us in by forcing us to write the story with him.
Despite Ned’s limitations—or perhaps because of them—he is capable of dazzling and colorful wordplay, particularly when employing similes: “Peering sideways at her like a chook about to peck a cabbage stalk” (p. 108); his parents were “ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history” (p. 92); “as peaceful as a broody hen” (p. 57). These and the liberal use of quaint phrases (e.g., when the family cows were unable to produce, it was because “the milk had gone up into the cow’s horns” [p. 99]), and unique Australian terms (“bowyangs” [p. 94]; “mia mia” [p. 73]) give the tale a palpable sense of authenticity, and root us in the time and place.
Throughout the novel Ned also makes use of abbreviations such as “v.” for “very” and “cd.” for “could.” Toward the end of his story, as seemingly all of Australia’s police force is closing in on him, Ned employs these abbreviations even more, since he doesn’t have the luxury of writing out full words (“Time is of the essence daughter” he writes on p. 353). This technique, like the lack of punctuation, helps propel the story forward, and it also bolsters the charming conceit that these chapters are actual transcripts quickly scrawled by Ned Kelly himself. This marks another major difference between True History of the Kelly Gang and Saints and Strangers: whereas Carter’s narrators seem to be speaking from a place outside the story (even the first-person ones, such as the fairy narrator of “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” who uses the language of a modern intellectual), Carey places Ned firmly in his time and place. He even goes so far as to precede each of the thirteen “parcels” of manuscript pages with a brief description of the type of paper used by “their author” (e.g., National Bank letterhead, for Parcel One) and their condition (e.g., “dust soiling along [the] edges” of the pages of Parcel Two), much as a museum or a bookseller might describe an actual historical document.
Occasionally, Ned will resort to alternative techniques in order to round out the sweeping story. He includes newspaper accounts of the Kelly Gang’s exploits (complete with snarky annotations made by his girlfriend, Mary Hearn [p. 303]), or scenes reported (in first-person) to him by friends or family, such as Joe Byrne’s vivid retelling of Ned’s boxing match with Wild Wright (p. 106). There are also a few mysterious scenes of Ned’s mother, Ellen, written from Ned’s point of view even though he is miles away and not a direct witness. While it’s possible that Ellen later recounted these episodes to Ned, who then included them in his narrative, the impression is that there is some sort of telepathic element at work (the two of them are especially close, so much so that one of Ellen’s beaus calls Ellen Ned’s “girlfriend”). This impression is reinforced by the spooky nature of these scenes, which include the appearance of the dreaded Banshee (p. 91) and the curse of Kevin the Rat Charmer (p. 173). Thus, even as he switches point of view, Carey is technically agile enough to convince us that this is a first-person narrative told by a simple man in 19th century Australia.
Carey bumps up against the built-in confines of the first-person narrative only when it comes to the wounding and capture of Kelly by police, since Ned is unable to write down the details of the event himself. The siege at Glenrowan comprises the only third-person sections wholly independent of Ned’s account (I don’t include the newspaper clippings because Ned has made it clear that he has pasted them into his notes). The novel includes two separate descriptions of the siege. The first is an “unsigned, undated, handwritten account” placed at the very beginning of the novel (p. 3). The second is placed at the end (p. 357) and includes a scene with Thomas Curnow, the schoolteacher responsible for Kelly’s capture. This second version of events is credited to an “S.C.” (Curnow’s wife? She would be the only one privy to the scene with her husband, though how she would know what went on elsewhere during the siege is unclear). Carey’s thorough devotion to maintaining “authenticity” in these sections—by, for example, providing convincing notes (complete with references to the library where the accounts can be found)—lends even more believability to Ned’s first-person narrative.
In both Saints and Strangers and True History of the Kelly Gang we are in the hands of great storytellers. While their techniques may be wildly different on the surface—Carter’s heightened, heavily saturated legends vs. Carey’s more grounded “true history”—their stunning narrative techniques are both held together by authenticity of detail and, most of all, language.