REALITY AS PROACTIVE HISTORIAL NETWORK IN ANGELA CARTER’S THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN
REALITY AS PROACTIVE HISTORIAL NETWORK IN ANGELA CARTER’S THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN

Summary/Abstract: The attempt to locate representative literary works within the whole social semiosis, including the scientific and philosophical ideas pervasive in a phase of culture, owes much to the field concept of quantum physics. From N. Katherine Hayles’s seminal approach to the mutual interaction between the cultural matrix and individual works in The Cosmic Web. Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984) to recent contributions by C. Matheson, E. Kirchhoff, J-M Margaret Sönmez, Mine Özyurt Kılıç, Jago Morrison, Tom Cohen or David Punter, the new paradigm of complexity has been brought to bear upon literary studies defined as culturalist, interdisciplinary, a-material or spectral. Time and space are central to a discussion of the new mapping of fictional worlds modelled on physical concepts such as multiverse, fractals, gut symmetries, complexity. In contrast to the spacetime physics of modernism, quantum physics works with a synchronous temporal model of parallel spacetimes, in which there is no flow of time dividing past actualities from future potentialities. Carter’s City S (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman) spans "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.” Reality has become unpredictable, Hoffman's generators of unreality atoms playing dice with a space where apparitions "inhabited the same dimensions as the living". The “kingdom of the instantaneous (…) no longer held a structure of time in common". The present paper is looking into Carter’s experiment of temporal mapping, for which a new vocabulary is being evolved by interdisciplinary scholars.

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