Everyone knows, or at least has heard of, Angela Carter’s postmodernist interrogation of fairy tales and the Gothic in The Bloody Chamber. I haven’t selected from that book. My choice isn’t the best short story Carter wrote, but it remains the first of hers that I read and it was a creatively liberating experience. ‘John’s Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ revealed to me, in my early twenties, that the short story can be pretty much anything you want to make it. It can encompass all genres but it can also borrow from, or cannibalise, other forms, from the screenplay to the essay. Carter takes the plot of the Jacobean tragedy by John Ford and imagines it reconfigured as an American Western by a later John Ford, the filmmaker. The result is a taste of a cinematic project that never was… and never would have been. (What Hollywood studio would have backed a story about murderous incest?) Carter intersperses straight prose narrative with excerpts from the original play and fragments of the fictional screenplay. This collage strategy might have an alienating effect on the reader, yet I find the story, at least until its denouement, surprisingly affecting. Postmodernism can offer ways into story as well as exposing story’s artifice. Carter liked to get under the skin of popular genres, from fairy tale to American Gothic. Her imagination was fed by books and films, as ours tend to be. But her writing is never bloodless. And she proves that, contrary to the cliché, you don’t have to confine yourself, as a writer, to ‘what you know’. For what you have read, watched, or imagined, are also known, and portals to the imagination.
First published in Granta 25, Autumn 1988. Collected in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders by Angela Carter, Chatto & Windus, London, 1993, and again in Burning Your Boats: Collected Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995
A Personal Anthology 