![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Angela Carter spent a few years in Japan, from 1969 to 1972, and though the experience apparently impacted on her creative imagination so much as to transform her writing style drastically thereafter, the details of her life in Japan have not previously been revealed. With original information drawn from interviews with Carter’s former Japanese boyfriend, combined with the examination of her unpublished journal entries, this paper attempts to bring to light the scale of the impact that Japanese society, culture, literature (especially of Tanizaki and Nosaka whose works Carter favoured), and her romantic and devastating encounter had on her literary career. Short stories compiled in Fireworks as well as the novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman seem to be inspired by her own emotionally draining relationship with this Japanese boyfriend, whom she calls “my friend S” in her essays. Her journal entries further suggest that Carter experienced her relationship with him as what she names “a philosophic assassination,” a loss of subjectivity in the mirror of the other, although she also confesses that she loves him “desperately.” The paper tries to suggest how Carter may have become better equipped as a postmodern feminist writer in her literary project of subverting masculine discourses, empowered by these personal ordeals she had in Japan.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
This paper was supported by KAKENHI 24520307 (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(C)) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
1 After this paper was submitted, the official biography written by Edmund Gordon was published and it shed some light on Carter's life in Japan (see Gordon).
2 Dimovitz observes that “[i]t was in Japan that she experienced what she saw as a truly structured, patriarchal system, predicated on a massive cultural repression, which she then re-read back into English and American culture” (“Cartesian Nuts” 15). He also analyses the influence of Japanese comic books and Sade, both of which Carter picked up in Japan for the first time, and whose association, he argues, “seems to have helped to develop Carter's 1970s technique of making literal the unconscious and unspoken assumptions and symbolic forms that define a culture” (16).
3 See Tonkin; Ikoma.
4 In her journal, Carter records: “Dr Hoffman; Dec 24, 1970–May 20, 1971. (Actual writing finished, March 1971)” (Journal 93 n. pag.).
5 In her journal, Carter contemplates calling a story on Sozo “The Assassin Sings” (Journal 93 n. pag.).
6 Sozo told me how Carter talked with his father, and one of Carter's journal entries records her conversation with Sozo's sister-in-law in detail, showing that they frequently communicated with one another (Journal 93 n. pag.).
7 See “Mishima's Toy Sword” in Carter's Shaking a Leg 241.
8 I also persuaded Sozo Araki to write a memoir about Carter. It was completed, translated into English by me, and – I am hoping – will be published in the near future.
9 Carter's concept of gender performativity and Butler's are not exactly the same, as Joanne Trevenna points out. Trevenna links Carter's gender formation more closely to the theories of Simone de Beauvoir, as Carter seems to presuppose the pre-gendered subject, than to Butler's. However, she also appreciates the contemporary resonance of Carter's theory, for it
moves beyond the feminism of de Beauvoir and invites a more contemporary critical debate through its presentation of the pre-gendered subject as unstable and fragmented. Undermining the unity and integrity of the “one” presented by de Beauvoir, this more postmodernist/poststructuralist treatment of identity, in turn, reopens a partial link to the work of Judith Butler. (275)
10 Nosaka's name is misspelled as Nozaka in this translation.