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ANGELA CARTER

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

With an introduction by ALI SMITH

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PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Introduction by ALI SMITH

Dedication

Epigraphs

THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN

Introduction

1. The City Under Siege

2. The Mansion of Midnight

3. The River People

4. The Acrobats of Desire

5. The Erotic Traveller

6. The Coast of Africa

7. Lost in Nebulous Time

8. The Castle

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Angela Carter was born in Eastbourne in 1940 and later evacuated to live with her grandmother in Yorkshire. She studied English at Bristol University and published the first of her nine novels, Shadow Dance, in 1966. After escaping an early marriage, she used the proceeds of a Somerset Maugham Award to enable her to live in Japan for two years, a transforming experience. Her final novel, Wise Children, was published in 1991, a year before her death from lung cancer at the age of fifty-one. In an obituary from the Observer, Margaret Atwood wrote that ‘She was the opposite of parochial … She relished life and language hugely, and revelled in the universe.’

Perhaps best known for her last two novels, Nights at the Circus and Wise Children, Carter was much admired for her work’s exuberant mix of fantasy, philosophy, science fiction and satire. The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, published in 1972, is, according to Ali Smith, ‘her real, still underrated, classic’.

Both The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault and Heroes and Villains are also published in Penguin Modern Classics

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Hotel World, Other Stories and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy and The First Person and Other Stories.

Introduction

‘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.’ From the intoxicating dream-roses covering the warring city in its opening chapter – so powerfully imagined that they seem to perspire perfume, ‘make the very masonry drunk’, even sing piercing pentatonics heard by the inside of the nose – all the way to the novel’s end and the bloodstained handkerchief that blooms from its hero Desiderio’s pocket, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman was itself, in literary terms, what might be called a matrix of the unprecedented.

It opens Proustianly: ‘I remember everything. Yes. I remember everything perfectly.’ But then, just a couple of pages on: ‘I cannot remember exactly how it began.’ Who can we trust in this or any story, when memory is so human and dream and actuality so inextricable? Our narrator is Desiderio, an old man now, an ageing politician and venerable historic figure, recalling his youth and the bygone era of Doctor Hoffman, a scientist who, by means of mass hallucination, can alter what reality looks like whenever he chooses.

The Doctor resembles a god, ‘probably omnipotent’, and has brought about a state of emergency in this unnamed South American metropolis by playing sumptuously poetic and insidious games with time and space: ‘I often glanced at my watch only to find its hands had been replaced by a healthy growth of ivy or honeysuckle.’ Such disruptive and seductive power messes with trade and challenges state control – anathema to the government of the city. A war of extremes, between rationality and the imagination, is soon raging, a war of power-envy too, between the Doctor and the Minister, who, with their capitalized roles, rule this novel like leftovers from Victorian socio-realism. But this is another literary landscape altogether. The Minister enlists Desiderio, half-Indian, half-outsider, a low-ranking civil servant crucially unmoved, even ‘bored’, by the Doctor’s baroque and beautiful illusions, a good candidate for tracking the Doctor down. ‘It was the day before my twenty-fourth birthday. In the afternoon, the Cathedral expired in a blaze of melodious fireworks.’ Soon everything ex cathedra in this novel is ablaze, and Desiderio, passionately in love with Hoffman’s beautiful and elusive daughter, Albertina, is on a veering picaresque journey that shifts and shimmers like Albertina herself in a postponement of narrative and sexual climax, through landscape after landscape, from seedy British seaside to primitive tribal, to Sadeian, to Swiftian, to Kafkaesque.

In a ‘bouquet of ferocious images of desire’, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman declares itself a post-war novel. It was Carter’s sixth novel, published in 1972. Though she is renowned now for her rewritten fairy tales and the winning characterizations of the winged trapeze-artist and music-hall cockney-girl starlets in her two final novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and Wise Children (1991), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is surely her real, still underrated, classic. This imagistically cornucopic and virtuoso performance is a visionary book for a virtual age.

It takes apart the ‘machines’ of love, of narrative, of social structure, in a fusion (and simultaneous analysis) of fantasy, fin-de-siècle richness, pastiche, sci-fi, thriller, postmodernism, picaresque, quest literature, adventure story, pornography and political and sociological theorizing. It was an unforeseeable leap forward in terms of form, voice and technique, even for Carter (whose novels tended to redefine her originality each time she published a new one). She had specialized in the medieval period at Bristol University: ‘As a medievalist, I was trained to read books as having many layers.’ But this is a work not so much layered with as organically formed by a shimmering body of allusion to the literary and visual arts. Try to pinpoint its influences (Kafka, Swift, Poe, Mallarmé, Freud, the Bible, cinema, de Sade, Shakespeare, Surrealism, Pope, Proust – and that’s just a surface skim) and it’s as if its author has swallowed literary and visual culture whole, from Chaucer to Calvino, de Mille to Fassbinder, Defoe to Foucault.

Perhaps it was too far ahead of its time for critical comfort: ‘Autobiographically, what happened next, when I realised that there were no limitations to what one could do in fiction, was… I stopped being able to make a living.’ It was, she said, ‘the beginning of my obscurity. I went from being a very promising young writer to being ignored.’ Her first five novels had earned her several literary awards and had gone out of their way to reveal the artifice of the literary realism which characterized the 1960s literary novel, outfacing kitchen-sinkism with gaudiness and anarchy. In among the unwashed clothes and pubs and parties, the shops and city streets and parks, Carter unveiled megalomania, sexual mastery, a surreality of social and sexual puppeteering. She saw this as no less realist. ‘I’ve got nothing against realism,’ she said. ‘But there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality.’ She wrote Hoffman in Japan, where she’d gone in 1969 on the money she’d won from a Somerset Maugham award, drafting the novel ‘in three months, in a Japanese fishing village on an island where she seems to have been the only European’, as the critic Susan Rubin Suleiman notes in a seminal essay on Hoffman and Surrealism. ‘Since I kept on trying to learn Japanese, and kept on failing to do so, I started trying to understand things by simply looking at them very, very carefully, an involuntary apprenticeship in the interpretation of signs.’ By all accounts, when she came back both her fiction and her life had been transformed. ‘In Japan, I learned what it is to be a woman and became radicalized.’ She wrote some of her most experimental short stories, later published in her first short story collection, Fireworks (1974), and published this novel, in which the roots of later works like The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Nights at the Circus can clearly be seen, but which arguably remains, on its own terms, her most formally courageous work.

Its demonic Doctor Hoffman was one of the last and best defeated of her recurring megalomaniac male authority figures. By name he alludes to E. T. A. Hoffmann, the highly influential nineteenth-century German Romantic writer whose Tales of Hoffmann she parodies here in her own version of the magician-father/beautiful-but-dangerous-daughter matrix. (Perhaps Heinrich Hoffmann, the German psychiatrist and poet who published the grotesque and arresting collection of gothic morality poems for children, Der Struwwelpeter (1845), is also somewhere in the mix.) Doctor Hoffman’s daughter, the elusive and allusive Albertina, is a cunning mirroring of Proust’s Albertine, the object of desire in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, with a very different Albertine, the eponymous heroine of the Norwegian novel of 1886 by the artist and writer Christian Krohg, the subject of which was prostitution and the realism of which saw it impounded by the police.

But enough about allusion. ‘From The Magic Toyshop onwards,’ as Carter told an interviewer in the mid-1980s, ‘I’ve tried to keep an entertaining surface to the novels, so that you don’t have to read them as a system of signification if you don’t want to.’ This rolling narrative hooks its readers, in the best tradition of storytelling, by means of a meld of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Each of its chapters functions as its own seductive and terrifying peep-show ‘desire machine’. Ever opening to something new while simultaneously (and this is one of its technical feats) repeating itself – in other words, treading new ground over an age-old, echo-filled literary landscape – the novel is very much about the business of entertainment, about what it means to be both liberated and held, fixed in place, by it. It dissects the cheapness and richness of fantasy, from high art to low. Whether we’re in the city, or the land of myth, or an American upper-class country house, or a wet and empty backstreet British seaside resort, we’re just one step away, if we look, from the surreal and the grotesque, and from the same old stalwarts of story: attraction and terror and relief, sex and death and survival.

A thesis on power, it returns repeatedly to images of eyes and notions of vision while teasing apart the connections between the nature of desire and the repeating deceptions, expectations and satisfactions, over time, of what might be called cultural media. It examines continuum and survival alongside the incendiary creative/destructive powers of passion. It is curious about all of these things, but particularly about the connections between passion and power, since this, as it demonstrates, is one of the fundamental ways by which narrative propels itself, in an alternation of boredom and attraction, promise and postponement. What is pure in such a narrative ‘machine’, and what is debauched? Carter always treats both purity and debauchery wryly. One of the great achievements of Hoffman is its liberating revelation of pornography as just another genre. She would shortly publish her devastatingly witty study of de Sade, The Sadeian Woman (1979). Here, in Hoffman, (as, to some extent, in all her work), she is taking issue with ‘ideational femaleness’, the ways in which she perceives women to be the particular victims of social or gender or power fantasies, reduced to ‘benign automata’, ‘sinister, abominable, inverted mutations, part clockwork, part vegetable and part brute’, wearing masks of ‘hideous’ resignation – none of which resemble in any way the brilliant, flashing unpindownability of Albertina herself.

But even for Albertina the land of myth means rape. In The Sadeian Woman Carter would spell out exactly what she thought of myth: ‘… all the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway.’ Here, although she gifts her male protagonist throughout with his own crucial mutability (in a twinning with his beloved), she also demythologizes the spangly mirror-show of desire, putting him through some of the painful objectification with which this novel is centrally concerned. The violent gang rape he suffers at the hands of the Acrobats of Desire begins with the power of the eyes ‘to bind me in invisible bonds’.

Desiderio’s outsider status, the fact that he is part-Indian (descended from a people so lowly in status that they ‘performed tasks for which you do not need a face’), is one of the keys to his survival, his ability to stay fluid and mutable when it comes to identity. But in the end he has become a historic fixture, a statue-man, a bloodless old politician. Carter, a committed socialist, believed the novel had a moral function and that art was always political; this book ends on a note of class war and in a kind of dual triumph and defeat. But the real triumph of Hoffman is that it was, and still is, a new kind of novel – the novel as mutable form – a meld of genres which results in something beyond genre; a hypnotic mixture of poetry, dilettantism and morality; half-fiction, half-lecture and, above all, a thing of beauty in itself (for, as Desiderio says at one point, gazing at Albertina, ‘I did not mind her lecturing me because she was so beautiful’). Its narrative and sexual postponement is Scheherazade-like. It makes practical use of ‘the picaresque, where people have adventures in order to find themselves in places where they can discuss philosophical concepts without distractions… it’s a very eighteenth-century pursuit to make imaginary societies which teach one about our own society,’ as Carter put it later. It leaves its readers questioning and asks them to be wise – both to the structures which work to categorize or limit who and what we are, and to the ways and potentials of the imagination.

It is a book full of curiosity about what’s real, what’s artifice, how we live, and what art can do. It is swooningly romantic, indifferently and knowingly beautiful, rigorously philosophical and cunning beyond belief. Its double act of fidelity to and anatomizing of ‘the death-defying double somersault of love’ makes it timeless. Right now, in the emergence of the virtual age, the age she foresaw nearly forty years ago in her ‘kingdom of the instantaneous’, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman never looked more relevant.

Ali Smith 2010

For the family, wherever they are, reluctantly including
Ivan who thought he was Alyosha.

Les lois de nos désirs sont les dés sans loisir.

Robert Desnos

(Remember that we sometimes demand definitions for the sake not of the content, but of their form. Our requirement is an architectural one: the definition is a kind of ornamental coping that supports nothing.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, his measuring rod and his tuning fork. Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician

Introduction

I remember everything.

Yes.

I remember everything perfectly.

During the war, the city was full of mirages and I was young. But, nowadays, everything is quite peaceful. Shadows fall only as and when they are expected. Because I am so old and famous, they have told me that I must write down all my memories of the Great War, since, after all, I remember everything. So I must gather together all that confusion of experience and arrange it in order, just as it happened, beginning at the beginning. I must unravel my life as if it were so much knitting and pick out from that tangle the single, original thread of my self, the self who was a young man who happened to become a hero and then grew old. First, let me introduce myself.

My name is Desiderio.

I lived in the city when our adversary, the diabolical Dr Hoffman, filled it with mirages in order to drive us all mad. Nothing in the city was what it seemed – nothing at all! Because Dr Hoffman, you see, was waging a massive campaign against human reason itself. Nothing less than that. Oh, the stakes of the war were very high – higher than ever I realized, for I was young and sardonic and did not much like the notion of humanity, anyway, though they told me later, when I became a hero, how I had saved mankind.

But, when I was a young man, I did not want to be a hero. And, when I lived in that bewildering city, in the early days of the war, life itself had become nothing but a complex labyrinth and everything that could possibly exist, did so. And so much complexity – a complexity so rich it can hardly be expressed in language – all that complexity… it bored me.

In those tumultuous and kinetic times, the time of actualized desire, I myself had only the one desire. And that was, for everything to stop.

I became a hero only because I survived. I survived because I could not surrender to the flux of mirages. I could not merge and blend with them; I could not abnegate my reality and lose myself for ever as others did, blasted to non-being by the ferocious artillery of unreason. I was too sardonic. I was too disaffected.

When I was young, I very much admired the Ancient Egyptians, because they searched for, arrived at and perfected an aesthetically entirely satisfactory pose. When every single one of them had perfected the stance which had been universally approved, profiles one way, torsos another, feet marching away from the observer, navel squarely staring him in the eye, they stayed in it for two thousand years. I was the confidential secretary to the Minister of Determination, who wanted to freeze the entire freak show the city had become back into attitudes of perfect propriety; and I had this in common with him – an admiration for statis. But, unlike the Minister, I did not believe statis was attainable. I believed perfection was, per se, impossible and so the most seductive phantoms could not allure me because I knew they were not true. Although, of course, nothing I saw was identical with itself any more. I saw only reflections in broken mirrors. Which was only natural, because all the mirrors had been broken.

The Minister sent the Determination Police round to break all the mirrors because of the lawless images they were disseminating. Since mirrors offer alternatives, the mirrors had all turned into fissures or crannies in the hitherto hard-edged world of here and now and through these fissures came slithering sideways all manner of amorphous spooks. And these spooks were Dr Hoffman’s guerrillas, his soldiers in disguise who, though absolutely unreal, nevertheless, were.

We did our best to keep what was outside, out, and what was inside, in; we built a vast wall of barbed wire round the city, to quarantine the unreality, but soon the wall was stuck all over with the decomposing corpses of those who, when they were refused exit permits by the over-scrupulous Determination Police, proved how real they were by dying on the spikes. But, if the city was in a state of siege, the enemy was inside the barricades, and lived in the minds of each of us.

But I survived it because I knew that some things were necessarily impossible. I did not believe it when I saw the ghost of my dead mother clutching her rosary and whimpering into the folds of the winding sheet issued her by the convent where she died attempting to atone for her sins. I did not believe it when Dr Hoffman’s agents playfully substituted other names than Desiderio on the nameplate outside my door – names such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Andrew Marvell, for they always chose the names of my heroes, who were all men of pristine and exquisite genius. And I knew that they must be joking for anyone could see that I myself was a man like an unmade bed. But, as for my Minister, he was Milton or Lenin, Beethoven or Michelangelo – not a man but a theorem, clear, hard, unified and harmonious. I admired him. He reminded me of a string quartet. And he, too, was quite immune to the tinselled fall-out from the Hoffman effect, though for quite other reasons than I.

And I, why was I immune? Because, out of my discontent, I made my own definitions and these definitions happened to correspond to those that happened to be true. And so I made a journey through space and time, up a river, across a mountain, over the sea, through a forest. Until I came to a certain castle. And…

But I must not run ahead of myself. I shall describe the war exactly as it happened. I will begin at the beginning and go on until the end. I must write down all my memories, in spite of the almost insupportable pain I suffer when I think of her, the heroine of my story, the daughter of the magician, the inexpressible woman to whose memory I dedicate these pages… the miraculous Albertina.

If I believed there were anything of the transcendental in this scabbed husk which might survive the death I know will come to me in a few months, I should be happy, then, for I could delude myself I would rejoin my lover. And if Albertina has become for me, now, such a woman as only memory and imagination could devise, well, such is always at least partially the case with the beloved. I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire. Oh, she was her father’s daughter, no doubt about that! So I must consecrate this account of the war against her father to the memory of the daughter.

She closed those eyes that were to me the inexhaustible well-springs of passion fifty years ago this very day and so I take up my pen on the golden anniversary of her death, as I always intended to do. After all these years, the clothes of my spirit are in tatters and half of them have been blown away by the winds of fortune that made a politician of me. And, sometimes, when I think of my journey, not only does everything seem to have happened all at once, in a kind of fugue of experience, just as her father would have devised it, but everything in my life seems to have been of equal value, so that the rose which shook off its petals as if shuddering in ecstasy to hear her voice throws as long a shadow of significance as the extraordinary words she uttered.

Which is not quite like saying that my memory has all dissolved in the medium of Albertina. Rather, from beyond the grave, her father has gained a tactical victory over me and forced on me at least the apprehension of an alternate world in which all the objects are emanations of a single desire. And my desire is, to see Albertina again before I die.

But, at the game of metaphysical chess we played, I took away her father’s queen and mated us both for though I am utterly consumed with this desire, it is as impotent as it is desperate. My desire can never be objectified and who should know better than I?

For it was I who killed her.

But you must not expect a love story or a murder story. Expect a tale of picaresque adventure or even of heroic adventure, for I was a great hero in my time though now I am an old man and no longer the ‘I’ of my own story and my time is past, even if you can read about me in the history books – a strange thing to happen to a man in his own lifetime. It turns one into posterity’s prostitute. And when I have completed my autobiography, my whoredom will be complete. I will stand forever four square in yesterday’s time, like a commemorative statue of myself in a public place, serene, equestrian, upon a pediment. Although I am so old and sad, now, and, without her, condemned to live in a drab, colourless world, as though I were living in a faded daguerreotype. Therefore –

I, Desiderio, dedicate all my memories

to

Albertina Hoffman

with my insatiable tears.

1 The City Under Siege

I cannot remember exactly how it began. Nobody, not even the Minister, could remember. But I know it started well after my abysmal childhood was mercifully over. The nuns who buried my mother fixed me up with a safe berth; I was a minor clerk in a government office. I rented a room with a bed and a table, a chair and a gas ring, a cupboard and a coffee pot. My landlady was still comparatively young and extremely accommodating. I was always a little bored yet perfectly content. But I think I must have been one of the first people in the city to notice how the shadows began to fall subtly awry and a curious sense of strangeness invaded everything. I had, you see, the time to see. And the Doctor started his activities in very small ways. Sugar tasted a little salty, sometimes. A door one had always seen to be blue modulated by scarcely perceptible stages until, suddenly, it was a green door.

But if remarkable fruits, such as pineapples with the colour and texture of strawberries or walnuts which tasted of caramel, appeared among the apples and oranges on the stalls in the market, everyone put it down to our increased imports, for business had boomed since the man who later became the Minister of Determination took over the post of Minister of Trade. He was always the model of efficiency. I used to put away the files in the Board of Trade. After that, I used to help the Minister with his crossword puzzles and this mutual pastime bred a spurious intimacy which made my promotion parallel his own. He admired the indifferent speed with which I led him up and down the tricksy checkerboard of black and white and I do not think he ever realized the speed was bred only of indifference.

How was the city before it changed? It seemed it would never change.

It was a solid, drab, yet not unfriendly city. It throve on business. It was prosperous. It was thickly, obtusely masculine. Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with and my city settled serge-clad buttocks at vulgar ease as if in a leather armchair. His pockets were stuffed with money and his belly with rich food. Historically, he had taken a circuitous path to arrive at such smug, impenetrable, bourgeois affluence; he started life a slaver, a pimp, a gun-runner, a murderer and a pirate, a rakish villain, the exiled scum of Europe – and look at him lording it! The city was built on a tidal river and the slums and the area around the docks still pullulated with blacks, browns and Orientals who lived in a picturesque squalor the city fathers in their veranda’d suburbs contrived to ignore. Yet the city, now, was rich, even if it was ugly; but it was just a little nervous, all the same. It hardly ever dared peer over its well-upholstered shoulder in case it glimpsed the yellow mountains louring far towards the north, atavistic reminders of the interior of a continent which inspired a wordless fear in those who had come here so lately. The word ‘indigenous’ was unmentionable. Yet some of the buildings, dating from the colonial period, were impressive – the Cathedral; the Opera House; stone memorials of a past to which few, if any, of us had contributed though, since I was of Indian extraction, I suffered the ironic knowledge that my forefathers had anointed the foundations of the state with a good deal of their blood.

I was of Indian extraction. Yes. My mother came from feckless, middle-European immigrant stock and her business, which was prostitution of the least exalted type, took her to the slums a good deal. I do not know who my father was but I carried his genetic imprint on my face, although my colleagues always contrived politely to ignore it since the white, pious nuns had vouched for me. Yet I was a very disaffected young man for I was not unaware of my disinheritance.

When I had enough money, I would go to the Opera House for the inhuman stylization of opera naturally appealed to me very much. I was especially fond of The Magic Flute. During a certain performance of The Magic Flute one evening in the month of May, as I sat in the gallery enduring the divine illusion of perfection which Mozart imposed on me and which I poisoned for myself since I could not forget it was false, a curious, greenish glitter in the stalls below me caught my eye. I leaned forward. Papageno struck his bells and, at that very moment, as if the bells caused it, I saw the auditorium was full of peacocks in full spread who very soon began to scream in intolerably raucous voices, utterly drowning the music so that I instantly became bored and irritated. Boredom was my first reaction to incipient delirium. Glancing round me, I saw that everyone in the gallery was wearing a peacock-green skull cap and behind each spectator stirred an incandescent, feathered fan. I am still not sure why I did not instantly clap my hand to my own arse to find out whether I, too, had become so bedecked – perhaps I knew the limitations of my sensibility positively forbade such a thing might happen to me, since I admired the formal beauty of peacocks very much. All around me were the beginnings of considerable panic; the peacocks shrieked and fluttered like distracted rainbows and soon they let down the safety curtain, as the performance could not continue under the circumstances. It was Dr Hoffman’s first disruptive coup. So I went home, disgruntled, balked of my Mozart, and, the next morning the barrage began in earnest.

We did not understand the means by which the Doctor modified the nature of reality until very much later. We were taken entirely by surprise and chaos supervened immediately. Hallucinations flowed with magical speed in every brain. A state of emergency was declared. A special meeting of the cabinet took place in a small boat upon so stormy a sea that most of the ministers vomited throughout the proceedings and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was washed overboard. My Minister dared walk on the water and retrieved his senior dryshod since there was, in fact, not one drop of water there; after that, the cabinet gave him full authority to cope with the situation and soon he virtually ruled the city single-handed.

Now, what Dr Hoffman had done, in the first instance, was this. Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a wilfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter. Dr Hoffman’s gigantic generators sent out a series of seismic vibrations which made great cracks in the hitherto immutable surface of the time and space equation we had informally formulated in order to realize our city and, out of these cracks, well – nobody knew what would come next.

A kind of orgiastic panic seized the city. Those bluff, complaisant avenues and piazzas were suddenly as fertile in metamorphoses as a magic forest. Whether the apparitions were shades of the dead, synthetic reconstructions of the living or in no way replicas of anything we knew, they inhabited the same dimension as the living for Dr Hoffman had enormously extended the limits of this dimension. The very stones were mouths which spoke. I myself decided the revenants were objects – perhaps personified ideas – which could think but did not exist. This seemed the only hypothesis which might explain my own case for I acknowledged them – I saw them; they screamed and whickered at me – and yet I did not believe in them.

This phantasmagoric redefinition of a city was constantly fluctuating for it was now the kingdom of the instantaneous.

Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they were replaced by some fresh audacity. A group of chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, painted kites over the giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the same for more than one second and the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream.

The boulevards susurrated with mendicants who wore long, loose, patchwork coats, strings of beads and ragged turbans; they carried staffs decorated with bunches of variegated ribbons. They claimed to be refugees from the mountains and now all they could do to make a living was to sell to the credulous charms and talismans against domestic spectres who turned the milk sour or lurked in fireplaces eating up the flames so the fires would not light. But the beggars possessed only the most dubious reality status and at any moment might be caught in the blasts of radar emanating from the Ministry of Determination, when they would vanish with a faint squeak, leaving some citizen with his proffered pennies still clutched in his hand, gazing at empty air. Sometimes the talismans they sold vanished with them even though they had already been stowed away in the household shrines of their purchasers; and sometimes not.

The question of the nature of the talismans was one of both profane and profound surmise, for in some instances the spectral salesmen must have carved their crude icons out of solid wood which did not have the faculty of vanishing but, if so, how could a knife of shadows cut real flesh from a living tree? Clearly the phantoms were capable of inflicting significant form on natural substances. The superstitious fear of the citizens rose to a pitch of feverish delirium and they often raised hue and cries against any unfortunate whose appearance smacked in some way of transparency or else who seemed suspiciously too real. The suspects were often torn to pieces. I remember a riot which began when a man snatched a baby from a perambulator and dashed it to the ground because he complained that its smile was ‘too lifelike’.

By the end of the first year there was no longer any way of guessing what one would see when one opened one’s eyes in the morning for other people’s dreams insidiously invaded the bedroom while one slept and yet it seemed that sleep was our last privacy for, while we slept, at least we knew that we were dreaming although the stuff of our waking hours, so buffeted by phantoms, had grown thin and insubstantial enough to seem itself no more than seeming, or else the fragile marginalia of our dreams. Sheeted teasing memories of the past waited to greet us at the foot of the bed and these were often memories of someone else’s past, even if they still wished us ‘Good morning’ with an unnerving familiarity when we opened our enchanted eyes. Dead children came calling in nightgowns, rubbing the sleep and grave dust from their eyes. Not only the dead returned but also the lost living. Abandoned lovers were often lured into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city even more. But as I often felt I was a half-breed ghost myself, I did not feel much concerned over that! Anyway, the great majority of the things which appeared around us were by no means familiar, though they often teasingly recalled aspects of past experience, as if they were memories of forgotten memories.

The sense of space was powerfully affected so that sometimes the proportions of buildings and townscapes swelled to enormous, ominous sizes or repeated themselves over and over again in a fretting infinity. But this was much less disturbing than the actual objects which filled these gigantesque perspectives. Often, in the vaulted architraves of railway stations, women in states of pearly, heroic nudity, their hair elaborately coiffed in the stately chignons of the fin de siècle, might be seen parading beneath their parasols as serenely as if they had been in the Bois de Boulogne, pausing now and then to stroke, with the judiciously appraising touch of owners of race-horses, the side of steaming engines which did not run any more. And the very birds of the air seemed possessed by devils. Some grew to the size and acquired the temperament of winged jaguars. Fanged sparrows plucked out the eyes of little children. Snarling flocks of starlings swooped down upon some starving wretch picking over a mess of dreams and refuse in a gutter and tore what remained of his flesh from his bones. The pigeons lolloped from illusory pediment to window-ledge like volatile, feathered madmen, chattering vile rhymes and laughing in hoarse, throaty voices, or perched upon chimney stacks shouting quotations from Hegel. But often, in actual mid-air, the birds would forget the techniques and mechanics of the very act of flight and then they fell down, so that every morning dead birds lay in drifts on the pavements like autumn leaves or brown, wind-blown snow. Sometimes the river ran backwards and crazy fish jumped out to flop upon the sidewalks and wriggle around on their bellies for a while until they died, choking for lack of water. It was, too, the heyday of trompe l’œil for painted forms took advantage of the liveliness they mimicked. Horses from the pictures of Stubbs in the Municipal Art Gallery neighed, tossed their manes and stepped delicately off their canvases to go to crop the grass in public parks. A plump Bacchus wearing only a few grapes strayed from a Titian into a bar and there instituted Dionysiac revelry.

But only a few of the transmutations were lyrical. Frequently, imaginary massacres filled the gutters with blood and, besides, the cumulative psychological effect of all these distortions, combined with the dislocation of everyday life and the hardship and privations we began to suffer, created a deep-seated anxiety and a sense of profound melancholy. It seemed each one of us was trapped in some downward-drooping convoluted spiral of unreality from which we could never escape. Many committed suicide.

Trade was at an end. All the factories closed down and there was wholesale unemployment. There was always the smell of dissolution in the air for the public services were utterly disorganized. Typhoid took a heavy toll and there were grim murmurs of cholera or worse. The only form of transport the Minister permitted in the city was the bicycle, since it can only be ridden by that constant effort of will which precludes the imagination. The Determination Police enforced a strict system of rationing in an attempt to eke out the city’s dwindling supplies of food as long as possible but the citizens lied freely about their needs and those of their dependants, broke into shops to steal and gleefully submitted to the authorities the forged bread tickets with which Dr Hoffman flooded the streets. After the Minister sealed off the city, our only news of the country outside the capital came from the terse, laconic reports of the Determination Police and the gossip of the few peasants who had the necessary credentials to pass the guards at the checkpoints with a basket or two of vegetables or some coops of chickens.

Dr Hoffman had destroyed time and played games with the objects by which we regulated time. I often glanced at my watch only to find its hands had been replaced by a healthy growth of ivy or honey-suckle which, while I looked, writhed impudently all over its face, concealing it. Tricks with watches and clocks were pet devices of his, for so he rubbed home to us how we no longer held a structure of time in common. Inside the twin divisions of light and darkness there was no more segmentation, for what clocks were left all told a different time and nobody trusted them anyway. Past time occupied the city for whole days together, sometimes, so that the streets of a hundred years before were superimposed on nowadays streets and I made my way to the Bureau only by memory, along never-before-trodden lanes that looked as indestructible as earth itself and yet would vanish, presumably, whenever someone in Dr Hoffman’s entourage grew bored and pressed a switch.

Statistics for burglary, arson, robbery with violence and rape rose to astronomical heights and it was not safe, either physically or metaphysically, to leave one’s room at night although one was not particularly safe if one stayed at home either. There had been two cases of suspected plague. By the beginning of the second year we received no news at all from the world outside for Dr Hoffman blocked all the radio waves. Slowly the city acquired a majestic solitude. There grew in it, or it grew into, a desolate beauty, the beauty of the hopeless, a beauty which caught the heart and made the tears come. One would never have believed it possible for this city to be beautiful.

At certain times, especially in the evenings, as the shadows lengthened, the ripe sunlight of the day’s ending fell with a peculiar, suggestive heaviness, trapping the swooning buildings in a sweet, solid calm, as if preserving them in honey. Aurified by the Midas rays of the setting sun, the sky took on the appearance of a thin sheet of beaten gold like the ground of certain ancient paintings so the monolithically misshapen, depthless forms of the city took on the enhanced glamour of the totally artificial. Then, we – that is, those of us who retained some notion of what was real and what was not – felt the vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice. We found ourselves holding our breath almost in expectancy, as though we might stand on the threshold of a great event, transfixed in the portentous moment of waiting, although inwardly we were perturbed since this new, awesome, orchestration of time and space which surrounded us might be only the overture to something else, to some most profoundly audacious of all these assaults against the things we had always known. The Minister was the only person I knew who claimed he did not, even once, experience this sense of immanence.

The Minister had never in all his life felt the slightest quiver of empirical uncertainty. He was the hardest thing that ever existed and never the flicker of a mirage distorted for so much as a fleeting second the austere and intransigent objectivity of his face even though, as I saw it, his work consisted essentially in setting a limit to thought, for Dr Hoffman appeared to me to be proliferating his weaponry of images along the obscure and controversial borderline between the thinkable and the unthinkable.

‘Very well,’ said the Minister. ‘The Doctor has invented a virus which causes a cancer of the mind, so that the cells of the imagination run wild. And we must – we will! – discover the antidote.’

But he still had no idea how the Doctor had done it although it was clear that day by day he was growing better at it. So the Minister, who had not one shred of superstition in him, was forced