Heterotopia in Angela Carter’s Fiction: Worlds in Collision

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. CONVERGING ECHOES
1.1. INTRODUCING ANGELA CARTER
1.2. DEFINING HETEROTOPIA

2. HETEROTOPIAN ZONES- INNER DEPTHS OF OUTER SPACES
2. 1. DISMANTLING CATACOMBS
2.1.1. THE CASTLE
2. 1.2. THE PRISON
2. 1.3. THE CAVE/THE WOMB
2. 2. MAZES OF THE OUTSIDE
2. 2.1 THE FOREST
2. 2.2. THE DESERT
2. 2.3. THE CITY

3. HETEROTOPIA – REACHING FOR THE OTHER
3.1. DUPLICITOUS DOLLS
3.2. INNOCENT PREDATORS
3.3. CANNIBALS
3.4. DESIRED OTHERS

4. HETEROTOPIA – DYNAMICS OF PERFORMANCE
4.1. SCENES OF DISSEMBLANCE
4.2. TWISTS OF PASSION
4.3. SONGS AND DANCES

5. HETEROTOPIA – THE WARP AND WEFT OF STORYTELLING
5.1. THE ‘CONFIDENCE TRICK’
5.2. EMBROIDERING GENEALOGIES
5.3. CINEMATIC SPINNERS

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbreviations

illustration not visible in this excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Angela Carter’s work is a bewildering welter of discourses that work towards changing our perception regarding such issues as identity construction, marginality, myth as foundation of ideology, fluidity of boundaries. Her playful intertextual allusions to literature, psychology, politics and popular culture are infused with irony and wit, while components of discordant genres glitter in the ensuing narrative layers. Her fiction and non-fiction, as well as her experiments in screen and radio adaptation have been universally acclaimed, but the challenge of finding a critical framework complex and accurate enough by which to study her work has remained, since no classification seems to do her justice.

My solution is to move away from the urge to approach her works according to literary frames, to a discussion informed by a different metaphor, denoting enigmatic spaces, conterdiscourses, borders of otherness – heterotopia. The various interpretations given to the term, that I have relied on, are rooted in its designation of otherness in terms of spatial position, provided by Foucault (1966). Displacement gives voice to Angela Carter’s characters, and the spaces they inhabit display melting borders. Heterotopia are shaped by the antagonistic relations operating within these ambiguous spaces, by strategies of resistance, such as performance and telling stories. Space is a language that can be employed to articulate social relationships, with realms of multiple discourses and fluctuating centres mirroring the stages of identity formation (Lefebvre, 1991:132): “Every language is located in a space. Every discourse says something about a space; and every discourse is emitted from a space”.

Previous studies of Carter’s work have made little use of theories of space in relation to her major themes, so my decision to resort to a spatial metaphor has been reinforced by the prospect of a relevant and, most of all, fresh perspective. My growing interest in Angela Carter’s fiction has also been spurred by my nine-year professional involvement in film studies, and the opportunity to approach the two movie adaptations of her writings from an academic perspective. After having read her entire work, I have selected the novels and short stories that best serve my purpose of proving that the complexity of Angela Carter’s narrative and cinematic investigation can be subsumed under an equally fluid concept, appropriated from cultural geography, heterotopia . The works under scrutiny are: The Magic Toyshop (1967), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984), Wise Children (1991), ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’ (Fireworks, 1974), and ‘The Erl-King’, ‘Lady of the House of Love’, ‘The Company of Wolves’ (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, 1979).

The two movie adaptations I have also selected for my critical endeavour, one of her novel The Magic Toyshop and one inspired by her short stories ‘The Company of Wolves’ and ‘Wolf-Alice’, will, first of all, help students in media studies better understand the process of page to screen adaptation, and will, secondly, offer avid readers the complete picture of Carter’s cross-cultural approach. Apart from the above mentioned novels and short stories, which form the kernel the following pages, there are references to her early novels and other short stories, as they complement the development of my argument. I have also included quotations from her philosophical and journalistic texts, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982), Expletives Deleted (1992), Shaking A Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings (1997), since they share the same thematic concerns, and provide clues to the interpretation of her seemingly conflicting fictional statements.

The first chapter is divided into two sections, the first providing an overview of Carter’s themes in the context of various stages of her critical international reception, while the second clarifies the concept of heterotopia, from its etymology to its scientific and metaphorical usage, and outlines the theoretical I applied. The purpose of the former section is two-fold, as it introduces readers to Angela Carter’s concerns and their literary expression, on the one hand, and justifies the novelty of my argument, that spatiality is a chief dimension of her work, on the other hand. The latter section further underscores the inseparability of spatiality and the major dynamic sites I have subsequently termed heterotopia.

In the second chapter I have turned to public and domestic zones of confinement and to the crevices between them, explored by characters in their struggle to negotiate their subjectivity, via movement or the lack of it. The division I have operated separates areas of the outside from interior topographies and illustrates the formation of heterotopia in The Passion of New Eve, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Nights at the Circus , ‘The Erl-King’, using Brian McHale’s means of spatial construction, as well as strategies of resistance to confinement inspired by Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Mihail Bakhtin.

Multiple masculinities and femininities are unravelled in the third chapter which deals with the negotiation of boundaries and the meaning of heterotopia as conflicting relationships rooted in sites of patriarchal ideology in The Passion of New Eve, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Wise Children, ‘The Erl-King’, ‘Lady of the House of Love’, ‘The Loves of Lady Purple’. I have employed Rosemary Jackson and Catherine Belsey’s ideas about desire, Foucault’s opinions on violence and Laura Mulvey’s theories on the gaze, to support Hetherington’s definition of heterotopia. The articulation of the subject’s desire requires transgression of myths and symbols, while the experience ranges from arousing to grotesque.

The satirical and sometimes irreverent approach of patriarchy under the guise of performance is the focus of the fourth chapter, in which heterotopia denote sites of performative and theatrical transgressions, following Foucault’s definition. Dona Haraway’s view on the female body, Bakhtin’s theories on the grotesque laughter, Kristeva’s thetic and abject zones are the main components of the theoretical grid of the chapter, while the corpus of analysis is represented by The Passion of New Eve and Wise Children. Gender and sexuality become fluid, as impersonation and monstrosity develop into strategies that may ensure secure zones for the formation of the subject.

The acts and artifice of storytelling form the core of the fifth chapter, in which I follow Carter’s experiments with cinema in textual and visual forms, and her tricks of linguistic and cinematic focalizations in The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve, Nights at the Circus, Wise Children, ‘The Company of Wolves’. Heterotopia arise as an effect of ambiguity generated by discourse, in accordance with Edward Soja’s opinion, while Bakhtin’s theories on narrative discourse are linked to Grant’s strategy of manipulating time schemes and Mulvey, Judith Mayne and Mary Ann Doane’s debates on power in film studies. I argue that Carter’s politics of appropriation and transformation allows her to confront tradition, leading to heteroglossia and dialogism as means of breaking the narrative frames and paving the reader’s way to other spaces.

With my selection of Angela Carter’s selection of works, filtered through heterotopia as physical, metaphorical or literary spaces, you are invited to follow the lines of one reader's path through a fascinating body of fiction combining fantasy, parody, magical realism, and the angle which shaped them.

1. CONVERGING ECHOES

1.1. INTRODUCING ANGELA CARTER

Angela Carter’s work is a collage of almost any conceivable genre: nine novels, essays, reviews, lectures, fairy-tales, short stories, poetry, screenplays, radio plays, and a libretto. No wonder that the legacy of a writer who “realised that there were no limitations to what one could do in fiction” (1997:35) defies attempts to an orderly classification, so that hesitancy about using labels in conjunction with her work must be contextualized. Carter's work addresses as early as the seventies and the beginning of the eighties the specific themes that, in the late eighties and nineties, have become central to mainstream postfeminism. She worked with postmodern conventions before they were widely accepted, at a time when Anglo-American feminism privileged realism. It was not until the mid-to-late eighties that feminist theorists began to consider what had once been an oxymoron, that feminism and postmodernism could be regarded as allies rather than enemies. She is most frequently mentioned in connection to feminism and postmodernism, as long as the border between them is viewed as fluid because she uses both postmodernist techniques and feminist politics in such a way that it is not possible to reduce her to either. Before appropriating the term heterotopia as the overarching label of Carter’s work, I consider it important to point out some defining features her writings share with both literary developments.

Postmodernism can be defined easily in relation to the ideologies of the Enlightenment and Modernity. Postmodern thinkers reject the idea of the unity of reason, which leads to hostility towards such concepts as the autonomy of the individual or the use of Reason in pursuit of happiness. Metanarratives are held in contempt and the monolithic discourses of Western civilizations are superseded by multiple local narratives. These seem to represent a point of intersection between postmodernism and feminism, with the latter’s emphasis on women’s voices. The similarity is superficial, however, if we consider that feminism does not reject the values and goals modernity has inherited from the Enlightenment, such as truth, justice or equality. As a result, feminism remains a revisionist movement within modernity, attempting to accomplish its goals here and now, while competing with the postmodern vision of the death of universal values. Feminists have constantly searched for female stereotypes in fiction, and the critical categories used to shape them. Carter shares the feminist view that the whole patriarchal culture on all its levels, from mythology to narrative fiction, is overloaded with false images of women. She lets the stereotypes explode, and reassembles them into seductive, comic or grotesque forms. She also aims at turning the existing social order upside down, attracted perhaps by the Enlightenment promise that arbitrary authority would cease to exist.

Postmodern literature advocates the impossibility of grasping and re-forming ‘objective reality’. It is built on the conviction that literature and criticism are dead, and exposes its own weakness and artificiality at every step, by recycling motifs and techniques. Thus, a postmodern text exists in relation to other texts imitated or parodied, as a vanity fair where uninitiated readers are lost. Carter also uses symbols of Western culture, combines them at will, in order to expose their petrified meanings and lack of depth. Her feminist aims to alter our way of thinking about gender roles are reached through postmodern strategies of writing, playing with myth, deconstructing fairy-tales. She remains in intimate relationship with the discourses she attempts to overthrow, both by assuming the form of accepted literary genres and by apparently revitalizing archetypes, symbols or topoi.

According to Margaret Atwood (1992:61), Carter was “born subversive”, while the title of Carter's own collection of essays, Nothing Sacred (1982), describes her attitude towards everything—literature, culture, society, sexuality, religion, philosophy, and feminism—nothing is exempt, including those things she loves. This ironical mode is described by Carter herself as “to think on my feet” (SL 24). She likes to “present a number of propositions in a variety of different ways,” thereby leaving the reader “to construct her own fiction for herself from the elements of my fictions” (SL 24). As a result, it is often difficult to determine where, ultimately, Carter stands, and this is what can be so troubling for many readers, especially for feminists who want to read her work as prescriptive or consider the protagonists in her stories as role models. This has led to different and sometimes contradictory interpretations of her work, especially in terms of its potential subversiveness and also in terms of her positioning within both postmodernism and feminism.

Her narrative works as a site of mediation, a mode of inquiry, a place to negotiate a number of poststructuralist theories and to combine them imaginatively in a fictional narrative, giving them a new life of their own.

A brief survey of the critical work on Carter reveals a continual attempt to address the subversiveness of her forms, her intentions and their ultimate execution. The congregation of themes that have occupied critics include her place within both postmodernism and feminism, her use of various genres, and her representations of women, concentrating on female agency, sexuality, femininity and most problematic of all, pornography.

It is possible to consider four different periods of criticism with regard to her work: the first two, which exhibit some overlap, existed during her lifetime, in an engagement and response to the work as it was published, with a tremendous increase following the publishing of Nights at the Circus (1984), marking the line between the first two periods; the third took shape in 1992 immediately after her death, when it became possible to assess her work as a whole; and then a fourth period has emerged in the late nineties, allowing for a little more historical and critical distance.

Early criticism was concerned with the limitations and patriarchal nature of the genres Carter employed—especially the fairy tale—and her work's pornographic elements, throwing her subversive style and feminism into question. For example, Robert Clark (1987) disparages ‘The Company of Wolves’, a rewriting of the Little Red Riding Hood story, as “old chauvinism in new clothing” while Andrea Dworkin (1981) criticizes Carter for not adequately revising the form of fairy-tales. Patricia Duncker (1984) goes even further in her assessment of the genre itself as hopelessly patriarchal, and reinforcing the pornographic situation of woman as a willing victim. A clear line is drawn between her early and late fiction, where the early novels are considered to contain the seeds for what is developed later into more fully formed incarnations, usually with the assumption that the earlier work is inferior.

One critical practice that emerged in the second period, after the publication of Nights at the Circus, was the tendency to employ a hermeneutic of progression with regard to her fiction. Critics dissatisfied with the representation of women in Carter’s earlier works were happier with the later ones; they considered those women strong personalities rather than victims, they appreciated Carter’s treatment of heterosexual taboos, and the general opinion was that Carter’s cynical pessimism is eased by laughter and the comedic (Palmer ^[1987], Jordan ^[1990], Duncker ^[1984]). In the third and fourth periods, there has been an increasing tendency to use the non-fictional work The Sadeian Woman as a focal point to explain not only aspects in The Bloody Chamber but also problematic representations in the later works, especially in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Nights at the Circus.

Between 1997 and 1998, three full-length studies of Carter’s work were published, Aidan Day’s (1998), Sarah Gamble’s (1997), Linden Peach’s (1998), and a collection of essays edited by Lindsay Tucker (1998), displaying a lack of consensus about where to place Carter. Day reads Carter as a rationalist; Gamble as a feminist interested in dramatizing the liminal, Peach as an English writer strongly influenced by American culture, while Tucker's volume comprises a series of challenging and sometimes conflicting interpretations, with an inconclusive overview. The approaches are either chronological or thematic, providing a general basis for further study. Elaine Jordan (1992), an important critic in Carter studies, has argued that the fairy-tales, along with the rest of Carter's work, represent an exploration of the complex nature of what it is to be a heterosexual woman in a patriarchal society. Meanwhile, Merja Makinen (1992) joins with Jordan and counters Duncker, pointing out that when writers employ ironic strategies of rewriting, as Carter and postcolonial writers do, genres are able to carry new sets of assumptions. Other critics at that time have taken their cue from this more positive reading of her work and have begun to assess her employment of a number of genres. The volume Flesh and the Mirror, edited by Carter's friend Lorna Sage (1994), an important critic as regards the biographical aspects of her work, is an excellent example of this trend, as it explores the influence of media, surrealism and science fiction on Carter's writing.

The most recent criticism situates her use of genres within various theories of intertextuality. However, the best analyses demonstrate an awareness of the reading process itself. For example, Lucie Armitt (1997) effectively foregrounds the pleasure involved in the interpretative act itself in her observation that The Bloody Chamber holds a great fascination for critics. Further, Armitt indicates that although she agrees with Jordan and Makinen, they do not analyze how Carter rewrites the tale, and she herself begins such work by a brief consideration of the tales in terms of interlocking frames.

It is therefore evident that criticism has evolved as a result of dialogue, but it is also a reflection of changing interests in the general critical climate. For instance, in the early nineties, John Bayley (1992) accused Carter of “political correctness”, but it is important to note large critical consideration of Carter's use of postmodernism as subversive. Sally Robinson (1991:78) has also explored how Carter's texts “strategically engage with the theoretical concerns of postmodernism” and she focuses on the preoccupation with the “place of 'woman' in the deconstruction of culture's master narratives”.

Criticism continues to focus on what might be labelled postmodern aspects, issues of gender and other related themes of interest to contemporary feminist analyses, such as the body, spectacle, and violence. As Bristow and Broughton (1997:14) note, the most insistent feature in Carter studies is that of “theatricality, spectacle and play-acting”, associated with the notion of theory and politics of gender as performance. Despite the fact that Carter did not read Bakhtin's theories until after she had written Nights at the Circus, criticism constantly points to these carnival elements to explain her subversion.

Carter is often mentioned in the context of the symbiosis of feminist themes and postmodernist techniques in the essays included in Sage’s Flesh and the Mirror (1994), or the collection of feminist essays edited by Alison Easton (2000) and Sarah Gamble (2001). Nights at the Circus is used as magnifying lens for Carter’s array of themes and discourses in Helen Stoddart’s book (2007), fairy-tales come under scrutiny in the collection edited by Cristina Bacchilega and Danielle M. Roemer (2001), while countless essays on her work complete anthologies on contemporary British writers (Nicola Pitchford ^[2002], Sarah Sceats ^[2005], Julia Simon ^[2005]).

A less explored aspect of her writing, irony, is vital to understanding her possible subversion and her position regarding both postmodernism and feminism. Linda Hutcheon (1989:l60) is well-known for making the link between irony and the feminist postmodern. In The Politics of Postmodernism, she argues that parody especially but also the extremely close trope of irony are common postmodern tools that are attractive for many feminists: “I also think postmodernist parody would be among the 'practical strategies' that have become 'strategic practices' in feminist artists' attempt to present new kinds of female pleasure, new articulations of female desire, by offering tactics for deconstruction”. However, as Hutcheon herself notes in Irony's Edge (1994), there are numerous ways of understanding this trope. Carter's work is extremely allegorical. These allegorical elements, as well as postmodern techniques help to create the multi-layered meanings, the open-endedness and the ground to the irony in her work. I believe that this description is an apt way to describe the particular combination of both the cynical and utopic tendencies in Carter's work, the extreme critique to which she subjects everything, combined with the desire for change. It is the kind of irony Carter herself describes when she talks about presenting “a number of propositions in a variety of different ways” (SL 24).

Carter's reference to the role of the reader in relation to her open-ended fictions emphasizes her desire to present positive, creative positions rather than negative, destructive ones. In an attempt to explain her contrasting attitude to some postmodernist issues, she describes her work As belonging to the nineteenth-century because it invites the reader “to take one further step into the fictionality of the narrative, instead of coming out of it and looking at it as though it were an artefact” (Haffenden, 1985:91).

Some have found her work troubling, especially because she has been known to attack particular forms of feminism; for example, either by portraying one character as a mouthpiece for a certain kind of feminism in a gentle caricaturization (Ma Nelson, or Lizzie in Nights at the Circus) or in a scathing manner (Mother in The Passion of New Eve), a style which is taken by many as a biting critique of the radical feminism of the 1970s. Today, however, she is recognized for anticipating central debates in feminism in the late 1980s and 1990s, for instance, viewing pornography as potentially liberatory and gender as performative.

It is her unique sense of both postmodernism and feminism—and their combination—which largely makes Carter into a kind of chimera. For just as Carter is evasive regarding feminism, so too she expresses resistance to the term postmodernism. In an interview with Haffenden, she equates postmodernism with Borges' metafictional idea of “books about books” (1985:70). In this exchange, she admits to having been interested in this idea in the past, but by the time of the interview, she has reconsidered that this kind of practice is best described as “fun but frivolous” (Haffenden, 1985:79).

There are evidently many reasons why we should hesitate in calling Carter a postmodernist. Yet it is also difficult not to use such a term because it does refer to a certain tradition that engages with concerns and techniques also evident in the work of Carter for which there is no other appropriate label. For instance, many critics cite the overlap between her work and postmodern concerns in terms of her critique of Western patriarchy and representation, the production of "truth" through myth, her use of intertextuality, hybridization and parody, her experimentation with narrative structures, including open-endedness, or her employment of fiction as literary criticism.

One label that Carter has more readily accepted, although with some qualifications, has been ‘magic realist’. As Helen Carr (1989:7) has noted, Carter's novels became more acceptable after the discovery of South American magic realism because she could be assigned to an actual genre. This use of the term to describe her continual blurring of the line between realism and fantasy certainly seems appropriate, yet once again, it is the case that she used the genre's techniques before it became popular. Further, although Salman Rushdie is credited with the distinction of being the pioneer of this tradition in the English novel, his friend Carter predated him. Yet, as Peach cautions, the term is more appropriate to Carter's later works than to her earlier ones. As Carter herself points out, the context in which she was involved, “more intellectual than folk”, was very different from that of Marquez (Haffenden, 1985: 81).

Other tags she has been given include ‘speculative’ and ‘fantasist’, with many critics dividing her work into an early-sixties fusion of realist Gothic and fantasy, and a later post-sixties magic realist, speculative and philosophical phase. One intriguing label that has been used for Carter is that of ‘science fiction’ writer. In ‘New New World Dreams’ (1994) Roz Kaveney sheds some light on this designation in her observation that Angela Carter freely made use of tropes derived from this genre.

Like the mainstream postfeminists of the nineties, Carter's work is interested in the themes and limits of female desire and sexuality, in sado-masochism and pornography and their relationship to violence; she is countering the very powerful stereotype of ‘woman as victim’ by considering masculinity as much as femininity, delighting in popular culture, especially in film, and making humour integral to feminism. Grounded in the carnivalesque and the body, Carter's is the humour of Shakespeare's tragic fools described by Kate Webb (1994:5) as “seriously funny” and by Salman Rushdie (1992) as having a “deadly cheeriness”.

Just as postfeminism makes the subject of men and masculinity an important focus, so too, we find these themes in Carter's work. At a time when feminist fiction was interested in promoting strong female characters and the expression of both the female voice and women's experience, much of Carter's work, particularly her early novels, features male protagonists and investigates issues of masculinity. In fact, Sally Robinson's experience of reading The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is that there is “no place for a woman reader in this text” (1991:105). But Carter's interest is in investigating the structure of desire itself, along with its implications, both for men and for women. She is one of the first to challenge and to explore what has come to be known as the stereotype of ‘the woman as victim’, yet her investigation of this theme is more complex. While it remains a focus throughout her novels and short stories, her most sustained analysis appears in the non-fictional The Sadeian Woman (1979). This controversial work is known for its challenge to the widespread complicity of women who identify with images of themselves as victims of patriarchal oppression. The book examines the myths surrounding three identities women have in our culture—the virgin, the whore and the mother—and demonstrates the dangers of each, while indicating their similar singular basis; namely, that these identities “have been defined exclusively by men” (SW 77). Contrary to the interpretation of a number of critics, Carter does not simply debase the role of the victim and elevate that of the whore; instead, she sees them as two sides of the same coin: “they mutually reflect and compliment one another, like a pair of mirrors” (SW 78).

In most of her earlier work, her investigation of desire causes her to create protagonists who are largely female masochists or male sadists. This has been an issue for feminists. Some have addressed this problem by dividing her work into early and late years: Paulina Palmer (1987) considers the later more liberatory than the earlier; Christina Britzolakis defines the early heroines as “puppets of male-controlled scripts” (1995:51) and the later ones as using “theatricality and masquerade to invent and advance themselves” (1995:51); Elaine Jordan considers that “she started out writing as a kind of male impersonator” but later started “writing radically as a woman” (1990:31). There is no question that she does portray strong women, especially in her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. She confesses that she spent ten years writing Nights at the Circus because she had to be “big enough, strong enough, to write about a winged woman”(qtd. in Gamble, 1997:157).

Her love of popular culture and film is demonstrated in the intertextual references throughout her work and her journalism. She was particularly interested in the bad girls of cinema. Unlike postfeminists who seem to privilege this medium above all others, Carter's work is also replete with references from a range of sources—opera, Renaissance drama, philosophy, literature, myth and fairy tales as well as film and television. Thus, rather than understanding the blurring of boundaries between high and low culture in terms of the inclusion of the latter into the former, she turns this postmodern tendency inside out and reads Shakespeare as popular culture, turning high culture into popular culture. For instance, she claims: “I tend to use other people's books, European literature, as though it were that kind of folklore. Our literary heritage as a kind of folklore” (Haffenden, 1985:82). For Carter, then, popular culture is not confined to an understanding of texts that are produced by the mass media, but includes our entire cultural heritage. Performance, looking, and artifice are central to her work, and her work is replete with spaces of theatricality. Her use of carnival allows for transgression and intersects with an underlying examination of gender.

Romanian university curricula have, sadly, shrunk under both national and European constraints, so the study of postmodern literature wavers between a chronological, exhaustive presentation of writers and a thematic, selective approach, dictated by the availability of resources. Two of Angela Carter’s novels were translated into Romanian, The Magic Toyshop in 2007 (Magazinul Magic de Jucǎrii, trans. Adina and Gabriel Raţiu), and Nights at the Circus in 2008 (Nopţi la Circ, trans. Gabriela Grigore), introducing Romanian readers to her intriguing fictional universe. Ileana Botescu Sireteanu’s 2007 study, devoted to the fiction of Carter and Winterson represents a necessary addition to the gallery of conference papers written by Romanian academics enchanted by Carter’s works (Hanţiu [1999, 2006], Bǎlǎnescu ^[2004], Adăscăliţei ^[1998], Chiper ^[2002]). My analysis will hopefully provide an accessible entry to Carter’s works and contribute to her inclusion into the local university syllabus.

Fairy-tales, Gothic fiction, a baroque sensibility, feminism, science fiction, magical realism: from this mélange emerges Angela Carter's fiction. A phantasmagorical work framed by the horrific, the erotic, and the humorous, Carter’s writing displays her fascination with borders, liminality, and ways of crossing and transgressing limits. I will address these aspects of her work in the following chapters, as forms of heterotopia, a term I have considered appropriate due to its elastic definitions which I review in the ensuing section.

1.2. DEFINING HETEROTOPIA

The term heterotopia originally comes from the study of anatomy, where it refers to “parts of the body that are either out of place, missing, extra, or, like tumours, alien” (Hetherington, 1998:72).

Heterotopia as a spatial metaphor derives from the ancient Greek pronoun heteros ‘other’ and the noun topos ‘place’. Coined by analogy to utopia and dystopia, heterotopia means, quite literally, ‘a place of different order’ and refers to an actual place conceived as being otherwise and existing outside normative social and political space. The three main places in his work where Foucault refers most explicitly to heterotopia are, firstly, the introduction to The Order of Things/ Les mots et les choses, published in 1966, where he discusses Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia (1970/1991:xvff), secondly, in the same year, a radio broadcast as part of a series on the theme of utopia and literature, and thirdly, in a lecture given to a group of architects in 1967, ‘Des autres espaces’ , only released and published unedited shortly before his death, in 1984, and translated into English as Of Other Spaces (1986). In all three cases the key issue raised is that of ordering.

“Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they make it impossible to name this and that” (Foucault, 1970:xviii)

He gives an inventory of ‘other spaces’, using a puzzling spectrum of examples, identifying six ‘principles’ of heterotopology:

Firstly, heterotopia are found in all cultures and epochs. Heterotopia circumscribe rites of passage, “crisis heterotopias”, (e.g. schools) and “of deviance” (e.g. prisons). Like elsewhere in the lecture, it isn’t clear whether Foucault is talking about kinds of heterotopia or about heterotopia in general.

Secondly, heterotopia have a certain function in relation to ‘all’ other sites in a ‘culture’. They are “absolutely different”, and their difference is an effect of the “synchrony of the culture in which [the heterotopia] occur” (1967:241). Thus, their function can change historically.

Thirdly, heterotopia can juxtapose within them heterogeneous elements which are ‘in themselves’ incompatible. Heterotopia are ambiguous, non-totalisable, contradictory spaces. This third characteristic of heterotopia is the most popular one amongst writers using the word. Edward Soja (1995), in his heterotopologies, concentrates on the holding together of differences within postmodern spaces of Los Angeles. Edward Relph (1991) considers ‘postmodernity’ to be the generalisation of heterotopia, of the pluralistic coexistence of elements which one would ‘normally’ think or find apart. Miriam Kahn (1995) writes about the “heterotopic dissonance” resulting from the “displacement” of artefacts and myths in anthropological museums. I will return to the issue of elements being called ‘in themselves’ incompatible, ‘displaced’ and ‘normally’ separate in the second and the fourth chapters.

The forth principle is that heterotopia arise especially through ‘heterochrony’ or discontinuity in time. They can accumulate the past, as in museums, or stretch out the now, as in carnival and roller-coaster rides. Foucault (1967:242) says tourist destinations combine both, and my focus on performance in chapter four will investigate this principle.

The fifth is that heterotopia operate by demarcation, by territoralization, by a “system of opening and closing” (1967:243). They may be publicly accessible though they curiously do not let the visitor in entirely. “[W]e think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded” (ibid.). The most adequate metaphor to understand a comparable heterotopic place may be the one of the sailing ship, according to Foucault (1984:184-185):

“the ship is a piece of floating space, a placeless place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over to the boundless expanse of the ocean, and that goes from port to port, from watch to watch, from brothel to brothel, all the way to the colonies in search of the most precious treasures that lie waiting in their gardens, you see why for our civilization, from the sixteenth century up to our time, the ship has been at the same time not only the greatest instrument of economic development, of course, but the greatest reservoir of imagination. The sailing vessel is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without ships the dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police that of the corsairs”.

The last principle refers to the function heterotopia have “in relation to all the space that remains” (1967:243). Foucault is frustratingly vague at the end of his lecture, stating that heterotopia can have two seemingly ‘polar’ functions to ‘the rest’ of space. Either they provide ‘illusion’, making other places in society seem ‘still more illusionary’ (like brothels do) or they provide ‘perfection’ (as colonies do). In chapter five I will link this principle to the voices controlling the narrative and manipulating the reader

For Foucault, there are two principal modes of ordering: through resemblance and through similitude. It is the latter that we should associate with heterotopia. The ordering represented by resemblance is a familiar one, social expectations developed over time assume that certain things go together in a certain order. These representations act as signs where what is being signified refers to a known referent. Similitude, however, is all about an ordering that takes place through a juxtaposition of signs that culturally are seen as not going together, either because their relationship is new or because it is unexpected. What is being signified cannot be easily attached to a referent. Foucault (1983) takes the surrealist paintings of Magritte as an illustration of the ordering process of similitude. Similitude is constituted by an unexpected bricolage effect and can be used to challenge the conventions of representation. It is the juxtaposition of things not usually found together and the confusion that such representations create, that mark out heterotopia and give them their significance. This switch from ways of representing through resemblance to similitude is essential to fully grasp the significance of heterotopia for Foucault. As Harkness suggests, in his introduction to the English translation of Foucault’s long essay on Magritte ‘This is Not a Pipe’:

“Resemblance, says Foucault, ‘presumes a primary reference that prescribes and classes’ copies on the basis of the rigor of the mimetic relation to itself. Resemblance serves and is dominated by representation. With similitude, on the other hand, the reference ‘anchor’ is gone. Things are cast adrift, more or less like one another without any of them being able to claim the privileged status or ‘model’ for the rest. Hierarchy gives way to a series of exclusively lateral relations.” (1983:9-10)

For Foucault places of Otherness are spaces, whose existence sets up “unsettling juxtapositions of incommensurate ‘objects’ which challenge the way we think, especially the way our thinking is ordered” (Hetherington, 1998:42). The surprise effect heterotopia generate results from their different mode of ordering. What defines heterotopia as places of another order is not physical location. The relation of the topos of the ‘other’ to the topos of the ‘same’ is determined less by physical position than by the confluence of discourses, institutions, and procedures deployed in a place.

Since Foucault himself was hardly exact and exhaustive on what he meant by heterotopia, his readers have interpreted his lecture in quite different ways. David Harvey (1996:230) says Foucault is talking about “space[s] of liberty outside of social control”, whereas Foucault says prisons are heterotopia too (Foucault 1967:240).

Kevin Hetherington’s book The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (1998) is more assertive and argues convincingly that heterotopia are the “sites of alternate ordering” in modernity. He qualifies heterotopia as places of “Otherness, whose Otherness is established through a relationship of difference with other sites, such that their presence either provides an unsettling of spatial and social relations or an alternative representation of spatial and social relations” (1998:8). As to the question of what Otherness mans, he describes it as “something without”, different to the norm either within a culture or what (Said, 1991) would term between cultures, ‘something excessive’ or ‘something incongruous’ , a hybrid combination of the incongruous. Angela Carter’s female characters in chapter three will serve as arguments of breaking the binary of power, while male ones must find the Other outside the mirror before reaching a deeper understanding of the self. As well as discussing what Foucault had to say about heterotopia, Hetherington looks at the better known term ‘utopia’, drawing on the work of Louis Marin (1984), and calls attention to Marin’s interest not in utopia as imaginary perfect societies, but in the spatial play that is involved in imagining and trying to create these perfect worlds in the spaces that make up the modern world. The term he coins to refer to this spatial play is ‘utopics’. For Marin, irreconcilable ambiguity is a necessary requirement for a full understanding of utopia. When Thomas More first coined the term ‘Utopia’ in his literary satire (1516) of sixteenth-century society, he collapsed two Greek words together: eu-topia meaning ‘good place’ and ou-topia meaning ‘no-place’ or ‘nowhere’. His Utopia was a good place that existed nowhere, except in the imagination. Ever since, people have been trying to create utopia, by turning the nowhere into the good place. Marin’s aim is, however, to separate the nowhere from the good place, to return utopia to eu-topia and ou-topia and to investigate the zone that opens up between them. That chasm, which Marin calls ‘the neutral’, is where Hetherington (1998:7) locates Foucault’s heterotopia.

“within this in-between space that I call heterotopia. To do that it is in my interest, made possible by Marin, to keep this space-between not quite nowhere, but not as a good space either. Heterotopia do exist, but they only exist in this space-between, in this relationship between spaces, in particular between eu-topia and ou-topia. Heterotopia are not quite spaces of transition—the chasm they represent can never be closed up—but they are spaces of deferral, spaces where ideas and practices that represent the good life can come into being, from nowhere, even if they never actually achieve what they set out to achieve—social order, or control and freedom”.

Hetherington’s approach, however, is limited, as he relates it to ‘utopics’ and to ‘modernity’ alone. Soja (1989), on the other hand, focuses not so much on the difference between heterotopia and the rest of society (heterotopia as counter-sites), but seems to favour the differences (of temporalities, of cultures, of ethnicities, of knowledge) within selected postmodern urban spaces. Soja’s Thirdspace (1996) centres around what Henri Lefebvre called ‘spaces of representation’ and Foucault’s heterotopias. He argues that, geographically speaking, there have been two conceptualisations of space: what he calls ‘Firstspace’ is the space of concrete materiality, while ‘Secondspace’ designates ideas about space. The former is real, the latter imaginary, whereas ‘Thirdspace’ is real-and-imaginary. It is the result of a fusion between material and mental spaces, but also more than this. Soja suggests that these three spaces can be found in the opening chapter of Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991:33).

Under the influence of both Nietzsche and surrealism, Henri Lefebvre viewed everyday life as a field of political struggle, where the seed of change could grow due to heterogeneous forms and spaces opposing capitalism. He also employs the word heterotopia several times, for he classifies places as ‘isotopias’ or analogous/ homogenous places, ‘utopias’ or non-places filled with power and possibility, and ‘heterotopias’ or contrasting, mutually opposing places (1974/1991:163-164 and 366). Heterotopia, then, always come as a pair. The way I understand it, the heterotopic is not so much a characteristic of one place, as a particular relation between places. Lefebvre advances the idea of a triadic process, which consists of the relationship between ‘Spatial Practice’, ‘Representations of Space’, and ‘Representational Spaces’ (1991:33). Space is viewed as perceived, conceived and lived. The first of these takes space as physical form, space that is generated and used. The second is the space of knowledge and logic, of maps and mathematics. The third space is produced and modified over time, the lived, social space, invested with symbolism and meaning. For Lefebvre, spatial practice is associated with the production of a distinct space by social relations associated with capitalist production and reproduction. Representations of space are linked to the production and conceptualization, the physical form of space. It is Lefebvre’s belief that within the capitalist social formation, “its spatial practice is rendered invisible as abstract space by the dominant representations of space, obscuring the social relations of power by which that space is produced” (1998:22). Resistance to the dominant social relations must make this space visible. This resistance takes place through what Lefebvre calls representational spaces. Such spaces are described as “embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to art” (1991:33). He goes on to suggest that representational spaces are

“[S]pace as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.” (1991:39)

Representational spaces involve making use of sites that have been left behind or left out as fragments produced by the tensions within the contradictory space of capitalism that lies hidden by its representations of space. The use of sites whose attributed meaning leaves them somewhat ambivalent and uncertain allows for these spaces, according to Lefebvre, to offer a vantage point from which the production of space can be made visible and be critically viewed, exposing thus the social power relations at work. The activities related to the production of representational spaces, are dis-placed, so that marginal groups, and marginal ways of thinking help produce the meaning of the sites. In the 1970s when Lefebvre was writing The Production of Space he had in mind the sorts of acts of resistance by students and workers that he had seen in the representational spaces of the campuses and streets of Paris in 1968. Representational spaces are, thus, spaces of freedom.

In her article ‘Of other spaces’ (2000), Maria Tamboukou presents a Foucauldian genealogy of the disciplinary practices, and the heterotopic relations involved in the emergence of women’s colleges in nineteenth century England. ‘Heterotopic relations’ here refers to the relations shaping women’s social life, confined by patriarchy ideologically, and within the college walls, physically. Tamboukou calls these colleges heterotopias, characterized by discontinuous space and time, because they facilitated the blurring of the gendered division between public and private spheres, despite patriarchal surveillance. They are fleeting, plural, wayward, potentially disruptive spaces.

What I have found helpful about Tamboukou’s article, is her interest in the voices of those within heterotopia: the women. They managed to transform this lived space from an ‘other’ space, into an ‘own’ space, ‘isotopic’ to a certain degree with other feminine spaces. The women used women’s colleges to develop their feminine identities, and struggled to keep patriarchal discipline and pedagogy out.

This struggle over space raises the question of what otherness means. Every space is ‘other’ for someone – Doreen Massey asks of Foucault, “Surely all spaces/places are heterotopias?” (1998: 224). So either we call all spaces/places heterotopias or we call some relations between places ‘heterotopic’. All places, then, are heterotopic to certain other places. Woman's body becomes a personal spatial site that she must explore in order to alter her relationship to the surrounding male-dominated cultural and social space, as I illustrate in the second and third chapters of my discussion.

Arun Saldanha, in his article ‘Structuralism and the Heterotopic’ (2000) refines Foucault’s heterotopology, by identifying aspects of the heterotopic that I will relate to Angela Carter’s heterotopia: reciprocality, politics of boundaries, situatedness, multivocality. Othering is always reciprocal and involves the agency of both ‘sides’ (Saldanha, 2000). Calling the heterotopic relational also means calling it reciprocal. We could say that just as there is no such thing as power, only power relations, so there is no such thing as heterotopia, only heterotopic relations. While spatial othering is a double-sided process, it is possible to say that the means to other, to marginalise, to segregate, are not evenly distributed. One ‘side’, the ‘subordinate’ side, is more problematic than the other, ‘dominant’ side because the latter has more means to confine and define what goes on within the subordinate side. That is to say, a heterotopic relation is also an antagonistic relation (Saldanha, 2000).

Foucault started his discussion of heterotopia and utopia with imagining social relations with a familiar philosophical metaphor: the mirror. Though the metaphor is ego-centric, I take it to be a handy spatialising metaphor for the heterotopic boundary between self and Other, reflexivity, and the workings of the ‘virtual’ in the ‘real’ (Foucault 1967: 239-240):

“The mirror is a utopia after all, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror I see myself where I am not, in an unreal space that opens up virtually behind the surface; I am over there where I am not, a kind of shadow that gives me my own visibility, that enables me to look at myself there where I am absent ≠ a mirror utopia. But it is also a heterotopia in that the mirror really exists, in that it has a sort of return effect on the place that I occupy. Due to the mirror, I discover myself absent at the place where I am, since I see myself over there. From that gaze which settles on me, as it were, I come back to myself and I begin once more to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in the sense that it makes this place which I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass both utterly real, connected with the entire space surrounding it, and utterly unreal since, to be perceived, it is obliged to go by way of that virtual point which is over there” (Foucault, 1986:179).

In order to realise one’s own space and identity, Tamboukou’s women students, for instance, had to oppose themselves to the conservative men outside, the virtually present other, the “other side of the glass” (Foucault 1967: 240). Of course, in contrast to Foucault’s metaphor, the other behind the glass in Tamboukou’s study is not only ‘virtual’, but men of flesh and blood ‘looking back’ at women’s colleges. When Foucault asserts that the heterotopic “exerts a sort of counteraction to the position I occupy” (1967: 240), his spatial play of presence/absence evokes reciprocality (Saldanha, 2000). The reciprocality of the heterotopic boundary goes beyond segregating self and other, and reflects the antagonism that constitutes and is constituted by that segregation: antagonism between women and men, prisoners and guards, gays and straights.

The second aspect of the heterotopic Saldanha identifies is the politics of boundaries and it follows directly from this antagonism. Terms like ‘segregation’ and ‘exclusion’ connote processes of spatial othering centred on sharp demarcations between self and other. The heterotopic boundaries between inside and outside are not rigid but fluid, not fixed once and for all, but constantly fought over and negotiated. When speaking about the simultaneous penetratibility and “curious exclusions” of heterotopia, Foucault (1967:243) might have envisaged heterotopic boundaries in the same way:

“Here the heterotopia takes on the qualities of human territoriality, with its surveillance of presence and absence, its demarcation behaviors, its protective definition of the inside and the out. Implicit in this regulation of opening and closing are the workings of power, of disciplinary technologies” (Soja, 1995: 16).

If heterotopias are open-but-closed, accessible but ‘sacred’ in some way or another, a struggle will emerge between those who want it closed and others who want it open.

The third aspect of the heterotopic, situatedness, pertains to the way Foucault consistently describes heterotopias as being totally different from all other sites in a society. Foucault’s structuralist tendency is to treat every relation as a relation expressing a whole, rather than conforming to a specific time and space. This mistake is evident in Foucault’s crucial remark (1967:239) that in heterotopias “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”. A major deficiency in Foucault’s argument becomes clear: he does not situate the heterotopic relationship (Saldanha, 2000). He seems to believe every element simultaneously relates to all the other elements in perfect “synchrony”. In one of the few pieces of writing which is critical of Foucault’s ‘Of other spaces’, Benjamin Genocchio (1995:39) questions Foucault’s heterotopology. Genocchio argues that Foucault logically neutralises heterotopia’s otherness, for “how is it that heterotopias are “outside” of or are fundamentally different to all other spaces, but also relate to and exist “within” the general social space/order that distinguish their meaning as difference? In short, how can we “tell” these Other spaces/stories?” (Genocchio 1995: 38).

Calling otherness a discursive effect means there must be something to oppose otherness in the first place, so spatial otherness is itself situated, itself relational, itself heterotopic, one might say, to other ways of speaking about space.

Genocchio wishes to redefine ‘the heterotopia’ not as a discernible actual place, but as a conceptualization of space, thinking space as “polysemous and contestory, made from a woven thread of some still enchanted fabric which must always be questioned, fought over, altered and most of all, unravelled” (1995:43).

The heterotopic must not be defined as ‘absolute’, as Foucault does, but as relative, relative to the way we speak about it. Difference is voiced differently. Hence, the multivocality of the heterotopic also implies that every attempt to define it is in some way or the other effective in reality, and therefore political, as I argue in chapter five. This is what Saldanha calls the ‘multivocality’ (2000) of the heterotopic. It’s the fourth principle of heterotopology he brings forth and the fourth critique of Foucault’s. Not only do heterotopic relations have different meanings for those involved in them, but also for those analysing them. Other to whom? Counter to what? In geography, it has not gone unnoticed that Foucault writes: “The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time, and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space” (1967: 239). In his work in general, he has had a lot to say about marginalization, entrapment, othering, disjunction, subordination, that is the interaction between space, heterogeneity and relations of power, issues I tackle in chapter three.

Wearing’s (1998) heterotopia translates as a place which minority groups find that is liberating: heterotopia designates “space that allows and confines activity” (Wearing, 1998:146). Heterotopic space encourages opportunities for those who have immigrated and resettled “to establish themselves in their new community, restore mind and body, develop friendships and new skills” (Hall and Huyskens, 2002:1). Hall and Huyskens adopt Wearing’s definition of heterotopia, based on the latter’s study of Foucault (1986), and view the term as a reference to “a liberating leisure site or space” with the potential to provide a place for renewal and enhancement of self-esteem. Hall and Huyskens (2002:2) have identified leisure sites as a key factor in the acculturation of refugee women offering them a site of escape from the difficulties that the new life presents, a space for recovery of pleasure, a zone to assert or reconfigure identity , and an empowering force. The role of heterotopia is deemed to be an essential key in evaluation and understanding because it is a potentially cathartic space in which “rewriting the script of identity” (Wearing, 1998:146) may occur.

Two castles project their shadows over Foucault’s (1990) vision of modernity. The first is de Sade’s (1785) castle, a space in which the complete freedom of unrestrained, sadistic, male desire is acted out on the bodies of women and children with impunity. The second is Kafka’s (1922), although it could also be the labyrinthine space of the law courts in The Trial (1925) . In either case, it is a space of the absolute irreproachable power of bureaucracy and the law. Both are obligatory points of passage in which freedom and control extend beyond their own limits and mingle with one another. Both spaces are examples of heterotopia. The first is configured as a space of unlimited individual freedom, a freedom that allows unrestrained sexual conduct. If, in this Sadeian vision, freedom is allowed total control, in the second, the Kafkaesque vision, it is social control that is allowed total freedom. Here there are no limits to which surveillance and discipline are exercised:

“The ideal point of penalty today would be an infinite discipline: an interrogation without end.” (Foucault, 1977:227)

Perspective cannot be disregarded in either case. For the victims of such spaces, their meanings would be different, because each space is the mirror image of the other. In both, the individual, perpetrator and victim, is defined as a subject. But the point is not just one of perspective: for Foucault at least, the issue is mainly one of the constitution of subjectivity within the uncertain nexus of freedom and control defined by such spaces (1986).

Heterotopia are spaces in which an alternative social ordering is performed, “one that stands in contrast to the taken-for-granted mundane idea of social order that exists within society” (Hetherington, 1988:39). Both of these spaces have an unsettling effect, in their power play on our fears, and leave us in awe. They are spaces of the sublime. Both host a compulsion to order, and that ordering derives from a utopian view of modernity as an exercise in both freedom and control in all its ambivalence. The spaces that de Sade and Kafka conceived are distinctly modern spaces concerned with the issue of social order. They define for us the extremes of modern ways of thinking, from sexual libertinage and the celebration of a libertarian individualism on the one hand, to the absolute liberty given to the bureaucratic apparatus on the other. In both, that modernity is an expression of agency, a coming-into-being of actors through their capacity to make use of their freedom to control others. They come into being as desiring machines (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984) and as judges with absolute authority to define their actions and the actions of others within their own citadels or castles. In so doing they also define themselves and become the subjects of their own control, as I point out in chapter two.

In looking at Foucault’s ideas about such spaces it is clear is that there is a strong surrealist theme running though his analysis, notably in his emphasis on similitude and the powers of random juxtaposition in creating alternative perspectives. This is not something just found in the paintings of Magritte, although they are a fine example, but in some of the key surrealist texts and in some of the writings of those who followed the surrealists (notably Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille). For the surrealists, the surreal product of the imagination had an autonomous existence. Perceived in the manner of the freedom of the imagination, set free through the automatic production of images in meaningless poetry, automatic writing and the painterly representation of the unconscious mind, the world of the surrealist is a world of similitude rather than resemblance in which the wonder of the unconscious is revealed through metonymical juxtaposition of the otherwise incommensurate. Surreality is the affirmation of a world of chance, affect and involuntary memory.

Bataille (1985,1991), for example, favoured the connection of libidinous transgressive ‘religious’ practices and desires to ‘limit-experiences’ such as sexuality, madness and death. These heterogeneous experiences, erotic and violent could be enacted as acts of human sacrifice, within a space reminding of de Sade’s castle (Bataille, 1989).

Antonin Artaud is another surrealist writer whose concept of space recalls the notion of heterotopia, with his two manifestos on the theatre of cruelty in The Theatre and Its Double (1930). To him, theatre had lost contact with life because rationality had drawn it away from emotion, the unconscious and the body, or in a word, with desire. He wanted theatre and life to become one, the emotions of daily life to be reintroduced into theatre, moulding it into a total experience and a shock on the senses of the ‘audience’. As a means of rendering desire, Artaud (1977) wished that theatre should become a direct and unmediated situation that employed feeling rather than intellectual analysis, a heterotopic experience, as can be seen from his enthusiasm for Balinese theatre. In his first manifesto, Artaud set out his ideas on what such a theatre might be like. It was to be based on action rather than text and therefore required particular spatial expressions (1977:68). For Artaud, theatre was to be the language of space that “liberates a new lyricism of gestures which because it is distilled and spatially amplified, ends by surpassing the lyricism of words” (1977:70). Such a theatre was to do away with the idea of a text, of a producer and of an audience in the conventional sense:

“Every show will contain physical, objective elements perceptible to all. Shouts, groans, apparitions, surprise, dramatic moments of all kinds, the magic beauty of all costumes modelled on certain ritualistic patterns, brilliant lighting, vocal incantational beauty, attractive harmonies, rare musical notes, object colours, the physical rhythm of the moves whose build and fall will be wedded to the beat of moves familiar to all, the tangible appearance of new, surprising objects, masks, puppets many feet high, abrupt lighting changes, the physical action of lighting stimulating heat and cold, and so on.” (1977:72)

A theatre such as this could lead to the formation of new symbolism through the erasure of grids dividing the stage from auditorium, and a spontaneous approach of the peculiarities of the spatial setting. In practice, such a theatre is a theatre of the body: this is an idea Artaud expresses through his concept of cruelty. With this, Artaud conveys a craving for life in its most passionate and immediate form, as a blind, unmediated form of desire.

Foucault’s (1986,1991) analysis of heterotopia parallels Bataille’s thoughts on heterogeneity, found most explicitly in the practice of sacrifice, and Artaud’s on the transformational possibilities for the body in his theatre of cruelty. Consequently, heterotopia are the sites of limit experiences, connected to the madness, sexual desire and death, in which humans test the limits of their existence and are confronted by its sublime terror.

Heterotopic places are sites which rupture the order of things through their different mode of ordering to that which surrounds them. Such sites of limit experience promote acts of resistance and transgression. However, there is another important but related role that heterotopia serve. They were also to act, for Foucault (1986:27) as spaces for the means of alternative ordering through their difference and Otherness. That ordering can be the sadistic ordering of total freedom but it can also be the Kafkaesque ordering of total control:

“Either their [heterotopia’s] role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory.…Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.”

Rob Shields in his Places on the Margin (1991) has also focused on the relationship between freedom and order in representational spaces. Shields’ work draws heavily on that of Lefebvre (1991) and also Victor Turner’s (1969) analysis of liminal space. He concentrates on margins in relation to the social construction and production of space, described conceptually as social spatialization, and on the significance of places on the margins within the social production of space. Shields (1991:29-65) develops a social constructionist theory of space, with particular emphasis on the significance of marginal, or liminal places. He is concerned first with the imaginary geography of place and the creation of socially constructed accounts of place or “place myths”. His second concern is with places whose meaning are marginal and in transition. He sees the significance of such places as an opening for affective groups, or neo-tribes, engaged particularly in ludic and transgressive practices associated with the creation of new lifestyles. Shields shows how certain places take on a mythological meaning of marginality, which develops an independence from their social construction to become a place myth. The nation is an example of a place myth, but they can be seen to exist at both lower and higher levels of resolution. The body, a room, a house, street, town, city or continent, even the universe, can all be seen as having their own place myths. These are all imagined cultural formations that fit into a symbolic system of placing. Place myths are defined, therefore, not only by their own contested symbolic criteria, but also in relation to other places. Place myths also, according to Shields, form a system of differences. For Shields, margins are always linked in a binary way with centres. Rob Shields notes that places on the margins have “a history of transformations between being markings, near-sacred liminal zones of Otherness, and carnivalesque leisure spaces of ritual inversion of the dominant, authorized culture” (1991:5).

They cannot, he argues, be separated from those centres. Rather,

“their existence is either defined by the centres as all that is excluded from the centre, or as a site of opposition to all that the centre stands for” (1991:276-8). Shields identifies a series of binary oppositions that exist within society: rational and ludic; civilised and nature; centre and periphery; social order and carnivalesque; mundane and liminal (1991:260)

A similar approach to the analysis of margins, associated in this case with the nineteenth-century city, is put forward by Elizabeth Wilson (1991). She has developed a feminist reading of the modern city, aiming to bring out the relationship between women, city space and the construction of their condition of marginality. She attempts to show, through an analysis of the culture of cities, how women have been perceived as the Other of the city, a position which facilitates new opportunities for them. Wilson gives as examples of the Other of the city such figures as the whore or the lesbian, and illustrates how the city comes to be seen as feminine through the promiscuity of crowds, consumption and temptation in male discourse. Woman, for Wilson, is the slippery figure of the Sphinx, who inhabits the other places of the city. As such, the city becomes not so much a place from which women are excluded, but a place whose uncertain spaces offer sites of resistance for women. Wilson’s work portrays women as marginalised Others who reside in the interstitial spaces of the metropolis. Again the marginal is somewhat celebrated as a space of freedom, here for women, to explore their identities and their power.

There are other feminist writers, such as Doreen Massey (1994) and Gillian Rose (1993) who have theorized the spatiality of women’s resistance through conceptions of Otherness. Rose, in particular, offers a seemingly similar analysis to those identified above, through a concept of what she calls ‘paradoxical space’. In her work, however, we begin to see a more complex analysis of the relationship between centres and margins. By paradoxical space she refers to the possibilities of multiple positioning in space that challenge the everyday oppression of women, notably though an objectification by a male gaze in space. By attempting to act differently from social expectations, by “being Other in the territory of sameness” (1993:149), not only do women empower themselves through refusal and constitute for themselves an identity on their own terms, but they also challenge the spatiality of their location, constituting it as an unsettling space. In so doing they create a place for themselves. In contrast to Shields and Wilson, who tend to maintain the separation of centres and margins, Rose wants to think beyond that binary divide. Her concept of paradoxical space is useful in that it suggests that women positioning themselves in ways that resist centrality and marginality offer a way of thinking about space that is not reliant on that neat separation. Paradoxical space creates further interesting paradoxes. It is not just the question of the separation of centres and margins that it puts into doubt, but also the separation of order and resistance to it.

[...]