The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter Page A
Authors: Angela Carter
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simile struck me as admirable. But the Minister bit his lip.
)
MINISTER: How?
(
The Ambassador ignored this question.
)
AMBASSADOR: You are in the process of tabulating every thing you can lay your hands on. In the sacred name of symmetry, you slide them into a series of straitjackets and label them with, oh, my God, what inexpressibly boring labels! Your mechanical prostitutes welcome their customers in an alien gibber wholly denied to the human tongue while you, you madame, work as an abortionist on the side. You murder the imagination in the womb, Minister.
MINISTER: Somebody must impose restraint. If I am an abortionist, your master is a forger. He has passed off upon us an entire currency of counterfeit phenomena.
AMBASSADOR: Do you regard the iconographic objects – or, shall we say, symbolically functioning propositions – which we transmit to you as a malign armoury inimical to the human race, of which you take this city to be a microcosm?
(
The Minister put his knife and fork together symmetrically on his empty plate and spoke with great precision.
)
MINISTER: I do.
(
The Ambassador leaned back in his chair and smiled the most seductive of smiles.
)
AMBASSADOR: Then you are wrong. They are emanations only of the asymmetric, Minister, the asymmetric you deny. The doctor knows how to pierce appearances and to allow real forms to emerge into substantiality from the transparency of immanence. You cannot destroy our imagery; you may annihilate the appearances but the asymmetric essence can neither be created nor destroyed – only changed. And if you disintegrate the images with your lasers and your infra red rays, they only revert to their constituent parts and soon come together again in another form which you yourself have rendered even more arbitrary by your interference. The Doctor is about to reveal the entire truth of the cosmogony. Please wait patiently. It will not take much longer.
(
They brought us fruit and cheese. The Ambassador cut himself a sliver of brie.
)
AMBASSADOR: You do appreciate, Minister, that very soon death, in innumerable guises, will walk these teeming streets.
MINISTER: She does already.
(
The Ambassador shrugged, as if to say: ‘You have seen nothing yet.’ He pulled off a sprig of grapes.
)
AMBASSADOR: Are you prepared to capitulate?
MINISTER: What are your master’s terms?
AMBASSADOR: Absolute authority to establish a regime of total liberation.
(
The Minister ground out his cigarette and cut a portion of Stilton. From the bowl of fruit, he selected a Cox’s Orange Pippin.
)
MINISTER: I do not capitulate.
AMBASSADOR: Very well. Prepare yourself for a long, immense and deliberate derangement of the senses. I understand you have broken all the mirrors.
MINISTER: That was to stop them begetting images.
(
The Ambassador produced a small mirror from his pocket and presented it to the Minister, so that he saw his own face. The Minister covered his eyes and screamed but almost at once regained his composure and went on paring the skin from his apple. The walls of the world did not cave in and the feline smile of the Ambassador did not waver. The meal concluded. The Ambassador refused coffee but, with a return of his original,
de haut en bas
manner, rose to bid us farewell. As he left the restaurant, all the flowers in every vase shed every single one of their petals. I switched off the tape recorder; now I must rely on my memory.
)
I myself ordered coffee and the Minister took his habitual black tea, though this afternoon he tipped into his cup the contents of a balloon of brandy. He had me play over the recording of their conversation and then stayed sunk in thought for a while, lost inside a cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘If I were a religious man, Desiderio,’ he said at last, ‘I would say we had just survived an encounter with Mephistopheles.’
The Minister had always struck me as a deeply religious man.
‘Let me tell you a parable,’ he went on. ‘A man made a
)
MINISTER: How?
(
The Ambassador ignored this question.
)
AMBASSADOR: You are in the process of tabulating every thing you can lay your hands on. In the sacred name of symmetry, you slide them into a series of straitjackets and label them with, oh, my God, what inexpressibly boring labels! Your mechanical prostitutes welcome their customers in an alien gibber wholly denied to the human tongue while you, you madame, work as an abortionist on the side. You murder the imagination in the womb, Minister.
MINISTER: Somebody must impose restraint. If I am an abortionist, your master is a forger. He has passed off upon us an entire currency of counterfeit phenomena.
AMBASSADOR: Do you regard the iconographic objects – or, shall we say, symbolically functioning propositions – which we transmit to you as a malign armoury inimical to the human race, of which you take this city to be a microcosm?
(
The Minister put his knife and fork together symmetrically on his empty plate and spoke with great precision.
)
MINISTER: I do.
(
The Ambassador leaned back in his chair and smiled the most seductive of smiles.
)
AMBASSADOR: Then you are wrong. They are emanations only of the asymmetric, Minister, the asymmetric you deny. The doctor knows how to pierce appearances and to allow real forms to emerge into substantiality from the transparency of immanence. You cannot destroy our imagery; you may annihilate the appearances but the asymmetric essence can neither be created nor destroyed – only changed. And if you disintegrate the images with your lasers and your infra red rays, they only revert to their constituent parts and soon come together again in another form which you yourself have rendered even more arbitrary by your interference. The Doctor is about to reveal the entire truth of the cosmogony. Please wait patiently. It will not take much longer.
(
They brought us fruit and cheese. The Ambassador cut himself a sliver of brie.
)
AMBASSADOR: You do appreciate, Minister, that very soon death, in innumerable guises, will walk these teeming streets.
MINISTER: She does already.
(
The Ambassador shrugged, as if to say: ‘You have seen nothing yet.’ He pulled off a sprig of grapes.
)
AMBASSADOR: Are you prepared to capitulate?
MINISTER: What are your master’s terms?
AMBASSADOR: Absolute authority to establish a regime of total liberation.
(
The Minister ground out his cigarette and cut a portion of Stilton. From the bowl of fruit, he selected a Cox’s Orange Pippin.
)
MINISTER: I do not capitulate.
AMBASSADOR: Very well. Prepare yourself for a long, immense and deliberate derangement of the senses. I understand you have broken all the mirrors.
MINISTER: That was to stop them begetting images.
(
The Ambassador produced a small mirror from his pocket and presented it to the Minister, so that he saw his own face. The Minister covered his eyes and screamed but almost at once regained his composure and went on paring the skin from his apple. The walls of the world did not cave in and the feline smile of the Ambassador did not waver. The meal concluded. The Ambassador refused coffee but, with a return of his original,
de haut en bas
manner, rose to bid us farewell. As he left the restaurant, all the flowers in every vase shed every single one of their petals. I switched off the tape recorder; now I must rely on my memory.
)
I myself ordered coffee and the Minister took his habitual black tea, though this afternoon he tipped into his cup the contents of a balloon of brandy. He had me play over the recording of their conversation and then stayed sunk in thought for a while, lost inside a cloud of cigarette smoke.
‘If I were a religious man, Desiderio,’ he said at last, ‘I would say we had just survived an encounter with Mephistopheles.’
The Minister had always struck me as a deeply religious man.
‘Let me tell you a parable,’ he went on. ‘A man made a
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