Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
The world of an Angela Carter short story is a world at once fantastic and familiar. Tigers, werewolves and other beasts stalk through; Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood and Puss-in-Boots perform new, startling acts. Hollywood, pantomime, the fairground, Shakespearean comedy all lend their forms to have them smashed up and put back together as something quite different.tBut through it all the feeling of familiarity is there, not because we have heard the tale or seen the show before, but because it is our own psyche which is being rummaged through, its murkiest corners revealed in the light of Carter’s brilliance.tBurning Your Boats is the first in a series to be published of the collected works of Carter and it gathers together her four published short story collections, along with early stories and uncollected works. tShe always claimed that what she wrote were not short stories but tales. “The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does,” she said, in the afterword to ‘Fireworks’, her first collection. “It interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience.” Many of the stories in that collection were set in Japan, a country she “ran away to,” in 1969, and where she “learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised.”tIn ‘Journey to the Heart of the Forest’, a 13-year-old brother and sister find carnivorous water-lilies which bite, tree trunks covered in milk-dispensing breasts and an apple tree with fruit so juicy that the girl has to “extend a long, crimson, newly sensual tongue to lick her lips,” for the knowledge the tree imparts is “the hitherto unguessed at, unknowable, inexpressible vistas of love.” And incestuous love, at that.tCarter was not just interested in the moral or psychological function of fairy tales but also in the way they conveyed information about the material lives of those who invented and retold them: “Fairy tales, fold tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world,” she said, in her introduction to The Virago Book of Fairytales.tIn “The Bloody Chamber’ she insists that such tales are not mere repositories for dominant cultural assumptions but metaphors for the deepest sexual dangers and desires. For this and her staking out of the taboo, she was labelled politically correct by some, dismissed as cultish and marginal by others. But many who looked askance while she was alive came to praise her when she died three years ago.tFor to attach the PC catchall to as wayward and wicked a writer as Carter is, of course, ridiculous. As for marginality, she once said: “The tale has not been dealt with kindly by literati, and is it any wonder? Let us keep the unconscious in a suitcase.” She is now the most studied 20th century writer in British universities, a development which her friend Salman Rushdie in his introduction describes as “a victory over the mainstream she would have enjoyed.”tWhat is unusual about Burning Your Boats, is the lack of a sense of development. It seems Carter’s gift emerged almost fully formed. ‘A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home’, begins: “When I was adolescent, my mother taught me a charm, gave me a talisman, handed me the key of the world.” The mother’s gift to her shy son? When awed by people, imagine them on the lavatory for “the bowels are great levellers.” At the end of the story he turns the same question on her with the result that “she crashed forward on to the carpet and lay there, a tree felled,” and he “vanished, laughing into the night.”tHere already are her love of gothic imagery and ideas, her preoccupation with language, her mingling of high culture with low flesh. And from start to finish her concerns remain the same: violence, magic, love, the frailty of the flesh, the strength of the spirit. Each successive volume of stories in Burning Your Boats demonstrates not so much an author extending her range as a wild imagination giving form to itself. It’s like watching a high diver perform one virtuoso display after another, using the same spins and twists to dazzling new effect.tFor that reason, it is not a book which you can read from beginning to end without succumbing to imaginative vertigo. Neither is it one you dip into, in the usual sense. But take a periodic plunge with her into deep, dark Cartesian waters and witness your imagination emerge clutching pearls of “hitherto unguessed at,” richness.
I didn't notice until I was almost finished, but this book has a cool symmetry in its organization. Burning Your Boats opens with three diverse, previously uncollected pieces and closes with three more. Between these bookends, which serve as a sort of "before and after" portrait of Carter as a writer, are her four collections.EARLY WORKThe first story is unremarkable and unrepresentative. The second is prototypical: the dreamlike strangeness that pervades her work is present, as is her signature mingling of the high and the low. The third is subtly disturbing and displays a glimmer of her later more blatant feminism.FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECESThe triptych of Japan stories in this collection—comprising "A Souvenir of Japan," "The Smile of Winter," and "Flesh and the Mirror"—is totally unique in Carter's body of work, and not in a way that I particularly like. The stories are very personal, practically autobiographical, and too self-aware for my taste; they trace Carter's psychological development as she struggles with loneliness and arrives at a kind of awakening while living in Japan (the stories are set in but not really about the country). Although they provide valuable insight into Carter as a human being, her style is not well-suited to this introspective mode; the stories are curiously overwritten and heavy-handed.The rest of the collection is more familiar Carter territory: tales of the surreal and fantastic, often with a feminist twist. A murderous puppet comes to life, a woman transforms into a jaguar, a young brother and sister encounter some very strange plant life in the heart of the jungle. Of special note is the deceptively titled "Reflections," which is not, as I expected, a story about curling up by the fire and pondering placidly days gone by, but may be the single wackiest, most feverishly surreal thing Carter has ever written.THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIESHer most famous work, and for good reason. It's a lot more thematically unified than Fireworks—all of the stories are reinterpretations of, or inspired by, fairy tales—and her style is more comfortable and consistent. You can tell which tales fascinate her the most: Beauty and the Beast and Little Red Riding Hood (both of which can be stripped to a basic girl/beast dichotomy) receive multiple treatments, and she delights in blurring the lines between those two essential roles. I particularly enjoyed the title story, a beautiful retelling of Bluebeard, and her ribald rendition of Puss-in-Boots.BLACK VENUSThis collection is again divided: We get a mixture of tales (“The Kiss,” “Peter and the Wolf”) and historical portraits (“Black Venus,” “The Fall River Axe Murders”). The tales are fun but not quite as substantive as those in The Bloody Chamber; the works of historical portraiture are clearly the crux of the collection. But while her chosen subjects are fascinating (Jeanne Duval, Lizzie Borden, Edgar Allan Poe) I personally did not find these stories quite as involving as her earlier fantasies; her imagination feels a little inhibited by the constraints of history and biography.AMERICAN GHOSTS AND OLD WORLD WONDERSWell, she’s certainly less inhibited here. This posthumous, very loosely organized collection is my second favorite of hers after The Bloody Chamber, and probably her most purely enjoyable to read; she really lets her imagination run riot. Take “Alice in Prague,” my favorite of the bunch, in which Elizabethan occultist John Dee, while on the lookout for angels in his crystal ball, accidentally summons Alice (the Wonderland one), who proceeds to beset him with riddles (answered are provided at the end in a brief appendix). These are also some of her most experimental in form: In one story she reimagines the Jacobean tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore as a Western and writes sections in the form of a screenplay. In “Ashputtle” she gives us three miniature versions of the same tale, a condensation of her Bloody Chamber style. The final story, for the first time since Fireworks, veers into autobiography, but this time the results are flawless and very moving: "When I was in labour, I thought of a candle flame."UNCOLLECTED STORIESThe first story is perhaps her most disturbing and displays a mature, angry feminism. The second is prototypical: the dreamlike strangeness that pervades her work is present, as is her signature mingling of the high and the low. The third, alas, is unremarkable and unrepresentative.
What do You think about Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (1997)?
Any book containing the Lady of the House of Love and the Erl-King is immediately worth five stars, but it's reassuring to see the Bloody Chamber wasn't a one off among her short story collections. Reading all these accumulated its interesting to see her exploring the same ideas, presenting the same images in different ways as she tries to work out the best way to do so and clear them from her head (I am reminded of Barth's comment in an interview that every writer has a certain number of concepts which they merely rearrange in different combinations each time). it's also interesting to see ideas in an previously unpublished short story that she refined and used in Nights at the Circus. This book is another reminder of how tragic the loss of Carter was for modern literature.
—Joseph Kay
I really should have put a review on each of the collections in this omnibus separately. But, in my eagerness, I neglected to do so and now am writing one for the omnibus as a whole, since I can't help but see them in relation to each other.I love how the stories are arranged in more or less chronological order. It really allows one to see how Carter's style improved and evolved over time. The first collection, Fireworks, is by far the weakest of the four and that is in part due to Carter struggling to find out exactly what her style is.Then you have The Bloody Chamber, which is in its own way evolving even during the collection. The stories in the beginning are more straightforward fairy tale retellings - very little changed, no real motivations or choices added, but still managing to make me think of the stories in a different way. But by the end of the collection, Carter has added in the feminist twists that she is so famous for.It makes me think of the essay about McKillip in Fairy Tales Re-Imagined, where it's argued that choices were what differentiated the later Beauty from the early Beauty and were what allowed her to break free of the set fairy tale narrative. By the end of the collection, her characters are making their own choices, though in many ways those choices do still seem inevitable. Next up is Saints and Strangers, which was my favorite collection of the set. There are re-tellings here - but they're not re-tellings of fairy tales, but of other stories and real people. What exactly was Lizzy Borden's motivation that morning? Why did Edgar Allen Poe write as he did? What was the story behind Oberon and Titania's estrangement in Midsummer Night's Dream? Stylistically, its much improved from Fireworks and even slightly better than The Bloody Chamber. The last is American Ghosts and Old World Wonders, which is a mix of fairy tale retellings, other story retellings, and non-retellings. I did love these as well, and would rank it just slightly behind The Bloody Chamber.
—Melanti
Salman Rushdie clues readers in on the fact that Angela Carter was no violet, nor did she do anything halfway in his Introduction to this short-story collection. Angela Carter died from lung cancer in 1992. This collection could have done without the Early Work section – stories written in Angela’s teens -- because I think it may give the reader the wrong impression that Angela Carter “arrived fully-formed”, to use Rushdie’s phrase.Carter is often presented as a writer who retells fairy tales, adding a feminist twist or telling them from an unexpected vantage point. Carter chafed at the description, saying she extracted “latent content” and started new stories (rephrased from the quote in Helen Simpson’s introduction to The Bloody Chamber). Women are no passive objects of desire here. Desire and eroticism are her prevalent themes. Dark. Darker. Darkest.About this collection…Language. Readers will either love or hate it. Almost all the stories are narrative, with very little dialog, so the stories are dense and the reader either falls into the forest or stays distant from it. There is nothing wrong with chunks of prose, but the eyes start skimming it because the writing is overwritten. Carter’s style would make the Minimalist School of Writing, its students and teachers scream for an editor. There were times in my reading that I wished an editor took her to task. Carter writes long sentences, lards them with expensive adjectives and will, more often than not, leave the impression that she writes to impress. Do you like Beethoven hammering the keys or Chopin? It really is a matter of taste. I found that after a while I felt bludgeoned. When a writer overwrites, I interpret it as insecurity, but your opinion may differ. In a word, the writing can get overripe as eggplant and precious, but read her for where her imagination takes her. That is why you should Carter -- for the experience. She shows readers black velvet and the drops of blood that make it darker.
—Gabriel Valjan
