Coming or going?: Angela Carter’s itinerant subjectivity in “The Quilt Maker”

Crofts, Charlotte

Abstract

In Angela Carter’s neglected short story ‘The Quilt Maker’, the narrator glosses the Japanese word for orgasm, ikimasu, which she learns from her Japanese lover means ‘to go’ rather than ‘to come’: “The Japanese orgasmic departure renders the English orgasmic arrival, as if the event were reflected in the mirror and the significance of it altogether different” (Burning Your Boats 453). This story deserves greater recognition, and should be read alongside Carter’s other semi-autobiographical stories based on her Japanese experience collected in Fireworks (1974) and her journalistic writings for New Statesman and New Society (collected in Shaking a Leg). The short story travels in time through the four decades of the narrator’s life, sometimes literally evoking physical journeys – the Greyhound bus station in Houston, Texas where she leaves her husband, the cherry blossoms cascading through the open window of a train onto her Japanese lover’s face, the purring Wurlitzer Cadillac via which she anticipates his “hypothetical arrival” year’s later – taking the reader on a nomadic voyage that recognises the flux of identity. As Sage points out, this is not your typical life writing: “we expect autobiographical writing to belong to the confiding realist mode, and this does not; it looks like an ‘exercise’ in literary gymnastics” (27).
Through the use of metalepsis, challenging the boundaries between the protagonist, the narrator and the author, Carter draws attention to the act of narration. Using the analogy of the patchwork quilt, the first-person narrator interweaves autobiography, fiction and intertextual reference, drawing on a range of sources – from abstract expressionism to Elvis and from Adrienne Rich to Charles Baudelaire – into “an infinitely flexible yet harmonious overall design” (444), creating such an ornate pattern that it gives one a sense of vertigo. She explicitly explores the utility of the “patchwork” metaphor, which she finds “synthesises perfectly both the miscellany of experience and the use we make of it” (445) – foregrounding both the complexity of subjectivity and its agency. Barthes also invokes the idea of patchwork in relation to “self-commentary”, as “a kind of patchwork, a rhapsodic quilt consisting of stitched squares” (142), a reference that Carter might well have been aware of in her choice of title, and her exploration of the virtuosity of this “neglected household art” (444). This paper explores how Carter’s highly metaleptic narrative strategy leaves the reader not knowing whether they are coming or going as she explodes the traditional concept of life writing by “stitching together autobiography and fiction” (Sage 42) to craft the eponymous quilt of her patchwork identity.

References
Barthes, R. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. U of California Press, 1977.
Carter, C. Burning Your Boats. Chatto & Windus, 1995.
______. Fireworks. 1974. Virago, 1987
______. Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings. Edited by Jenny Uglow. Chatto & Windus, 1997.
Sage, Lorna. Angela Carter: Writers and Their Work. Northcote House, 1994.

Citation

Crofts, C. (2022, June). Coming or going?: Angela Carter’s itinerant subjectivity in “The Quilt Maker”. Presented at ACS Conference 2022: Nomadic texts and subjectivities metamorphic itineraries in/of Angela Carters’ works, 2022, University of Angers, France

• Presentation Conference Type: Speech
• Conference Name: ACS Conference 2022: Nomadic texts and subjectivities metamorphic itineraries in/of Angela Carters’ works, 2022
• Conference Location: University of Angers, France
• Start Date: Jun 22, 2022
• End Date: Jun 24, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 5, 2023
• Keywords: Angela Carter; Japan; 'The Quilt Maker'; Life-writing; Autobiography
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10289838
• Additional Information: Angela Carter Society Conference