THE DEEP ONES: "The Snow Pavilion" by Angela Carter

Talk The Weird Tradition

Join LibraryThing to post.

THE DEEP ONES: "The Snow Pavilion" by Angela Carter

2elenchus
Mar 18, 2021, 11:36 am

Reading from The Weird, the introduction noted Carter's respect for surrealists like Leonora Carrington. The story used dreamscapes effectively, with the menace not dissipating so much as strengthening with the intrusion of a dream-like world into the actual world.

It's hard to ignore the pervasive atmosphere of a sexual predator, and the dolls end up being an ironic comeuppance given the narrator's history and current situation.

3housefulofpaper
Mar 18, 2021, 7:48 pm

I read this in Burning Your Boats. I have an unattractive habit of having too many books on the go at once. I read...4/5ths? of the book two years ago, and then stopped. I had to skip forward to the end read this story, which wasn't published prior to its inclusion in this book. I don't think there's any indication of when it was written. It feels somehow 1970s to me, but then Carter strikes me as a writer whose style and spirit are somehow rooted in that decade.

By chance I watched something on YouTube where there was a brief mention of the "unresolved but unhappy" ending (my description, not his), for which there's a technical term in Narratology: Catastrophe.

The reason I mention this is, the speaker said Catastrophe is particularly seen in Weird fiction. I would suggest it's also seen in a great deal of 1970s fiction and drama (I have British middle brow "Lit." particularly in mind - novels and short stories in Penguin paperbacks, the BBC "play for Today" strand, etc.). And it's also here in this story, which as it's both 1970s (in spirit at least) and Weird, is almost too good to be true.

I didn't do any background reading but I did call up the Wikipedia entry for Colin Clout's Come Home Again. Without reading the poem I can't say whether the protagonist of Carter's story ironically identifying himself with the shepherd of Spenser's Pastoral is simply literary namedropping (by him and Carter), or hinting at his not fitting into the world of his mistress - or not even that but a sense of it nothing real -not real compared to his childhood of margarine on white bread for tea. Spenser's poem "intersperses "grim realities" into the pastoral text"..."in a georgic (didactic) tone" (from Wikipedia, as ever).

I'm not sure we're supposed to see him as a sexual predator. Shallow certainly, and possibly a sexual opportunist should opportunity present itself, but maybe intended to be normal for the 1970s (whenever this story was actually written). And this just comes across as much more uncomfortable now, than Carter intended. Not that I think she's "on his side" as it were. I could almost read the ending, in fact, as an epiphany for him, that feeling genuine compassion for the person in the nursery (whatever their state over and above the afflictions briefly listed) is a moment of emotional growth for him.

4elenchus
Mar 18, 2021, 8:38 pm

Ah, I noted the reference to Colin Clouts Come Home Again while reading but forgot to look it up. (I misread it "Colin Clout's Come Home Again" though I guess it doesn't change the meaning much.) Had no idea it was a poem, though perhaps should have guessed given the protagonist, and for whatever reason I mistakenly inferred a World War I reference. Only four centuries off.

I now wonder about all the "insets" typical of a "pastoral eclogue" and whether there's a structural reference within Carter's dreamworlds. But it's too dizzying to fix on what that reference would be, or whether Carter is attempting an allegory.

Interestingly, there's another poem "Colin Clout" which no doubt Spenser alluded to, but I missed that, too, if Carter meant me to pick it up.

The Weird puts Carter's death at 1992 and the story at 1995, but didn't specifically say it was published posthumously. Evidently 1992 wasn't a typo.

5housefulofpaper
Mar 19, 2021, 6:39 pm

>4 elenchus:
John Skelton created the character, apparently (I was back to Wikipedia far too late last night following up on your link) but his is even more obscure than Spenser's version. I think a reference to Skelton would require specialised knowledge, but Spenser can just about be assumed to be on the radar of someone with a wide (but still general) cultural knowledge.

The blurb at the front of my copy of Burning Your Boats confirms Angela Carter died in February 1992. There's no evidence that the story was written in the 1970s, but as I said, all Angela Carter's work that I've read somehow feels of the 1970s.

6AndreasJ
Mar 21, 2021, 9:24 am

Finally read this one today, after doing something I ought have a while ago: getting an electronic copy of The Weird. The e-reader is a good deal handier than the oversize paperback when the 10mo is around.

I didn't take the narrator to be a sexual predator, merely one using his charms to get into the magical circle of the rich. Melissa and her consorts are, it seemed to me, just as much exploiting him - she's getting intimacy and attention from him she isn't from her husband for what's probably a pretty marginal financial investment for her.

Speaking of Melissa, I was half expecting for a while one of the crone's dolls to turn out to be her, all the dolls being dissolute society women somehow transformed into toys when they got on in years, and the narrator having time-slipped some decades into future after the hit on the back of his head. Act'ly, in the hands of someone who isn't me I think there'd be a good weird tale in that idea.

By 1970 Carter had been publishing for a few years, so if all her work is redolent of that decade she started out ahead of her time. Not that I can tell a '60s Zeitgeist apart from a '70s one.

She's routinely billed as a feminist writer, but much like the previous Carter story I've read, "The Lady of the House of Love", I'm not sure I can detect anything distinctively feminist in this one. The narrator has a pretty lousy view of women, but that's common enough in writers who themselves have lousy views of women, and there's no sense he's getting an comeuppance specifically for it.

7AndreasJ
Mar 21, 2021, 9:31 am

Re-reading the Vandermeers' introductory note, I see they call this a "later story". Presumably written in the eighties or very early nineties then.

8cd96
Edited: Apr 5, 2021, 11:35 am

I haven't read this story in a while but as I was reading it in the first instance it struck me as being similar on some levels to Russell Kirk's There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.

9elenchus
Apr 5, 2021, 11:18 am

>8 cd96:
Potentially a future nomination.