The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, published in the United States as The War of Dreams, is a 1972 novel by Angela Carter. This picaresque novel is heavily influenced by surrealism, Romanticism, critical theory, and other branches of Continental philosophy. Its style is an amalgam of magical realism and postmodern pastiche. The novel has been called a theoretical fiction, as it clearly engages in some of the theoretical issues of its time, notably feminism, mass media and the counterculture.

The novel features Desiderio, an assistant to a government minister in a city which is currently under attack by Doctor Hoffman's reality-distorting machines, in an unspecified Latin American country. Desiderio embarks on a journey to find Hoffman's former physics teacher, eventually bringing him to Hoffman's castle.

Plot summary

The novel presents the story from the perspective of Desiderio, a bureau member in the main city currently under the attack of Doctor Hoffman's desire machines. With these machines, Doctor Hoffman expands the dimensions of time and space, allowing ever-changing mirages to inhabit the same dimension as the living. Desiderio, though indifferent to the haunting apparitions, finds himself visited nightly by a glass woman, the manifestation of Albertina, Hoffman's daughter and Desiderio's lover-to-be. Unlike Desiderio, many people go crazy in response to the apparitions, and the city, severed from communication with the outside world, becomes a place of rampant insanity and crime, thereby prompting a state of emergency. Under the command of the Minister of Determination, Desiderio embarks on an undercover journey to find and assassinate Doctor Hoffman and to investigate the disappearance of the town of S.

In S Desiderio encounters Doctor Hoffman's former physics professor, now a blind peep-show proprietor. During the story, Desiderio views the sexualised exhibits of the peep show a number of times, finding that they bear uncanny resemblance to the events of his own life. Upon reaching the Mayor's Office of town S., he is allocated lodgings in the Mayor's home where he rapes the Mayor's somnambulist daughter, Mary Anne, while she remains unconscious. When Mary Anne turns up dead, members of the Determination Police charge Desiderio, but he escapes. From there on, Desiderio finds himself involved in a number of wild adventures in which the novel features many graphic scenes of eroticism that include sexual taboos. On these adventures, Albertina secretly accompanies Desiderio.

Desiderio spends time living with the river people, Amerindian families who live on barges. He then joins a traveling carnival in which he becomes enthralled with the extraordinary performance of a troupe of acrobats. Following the destruction of the circus in a landslide, he encounters a Lithuanian count who is fleeing from the wrath of a black pimp, and who takes Desiderio into his company. With the count, Desiderio narrowly escapes becoming the victim of cannibalism on the African coast before Albertina reveals herself and leads Desiderio through the landscape of Nebulous Time where a community of centaurs adopts the two. However, the couple's lives become endangered yet again; at which point Hoffman's soldiers appear in a helicopter and take the pair to Hoffman's castle, where Doctor Hoffman explains his plans to reduce the world into its most basic constituents with the help of Desiderio and Albertina. While Desiderio loves Albertina, he ultimately chooses reality over the fulfilment of desire when he kills both Doctor Hoffman and his daughter. As a result, Desiderio becomes the proclaimed hero of the Great War. Nevertheless, he continues to long for his dead lover.

Structure

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is a first person frame narrative. Desiderio recounts the events of his past with several instances of second person. "...it was I who killed her. But you must not expect a love story or a murder story. expect a tale of picaresque adventure or even of heroic adventure..." (14). Carter ornamentally depicts many of Desiderio's events and defamiliarises the reader throughout the novel. In the introduction of the novel, Desiderio essentially gives away the ending and the climax. This formal choice repeats throughout the novel as Carter constantly references the outcome of actions and events that have not occurred in the text.

Characters

Doctor Hoffman – an evil, sadistic scientist akin to Doctor Faustus. The doctor is the antagonist and diabolical adversary of the novel. He masters physics and surpasses his teacher, the proprietor; he later uses this ability to create a new form of reality in which nothing is bound by time or the normal rules of physics. With help from his colleague Mendoza, he discovers that "eroto-energy" can power his desire machines with omnipotent and everlasting energy. He uses his desire machines to fuel energy into his new reality. Desiderio describes Doctor Hoffman's laboratory in cinematic terms as a cross between the laboratory of the antagonist Rotwang in Metropolis and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Desiderio – The narrator and protagonist of the novel. He is now an old man and recounts the events of his life to explain how he became a hero. In his youth Desiderio was a government minister in an unspecified Latin country that works under the Minister, who sent him on a journey to find and inconspicuously assassinate Dr. Hoffman and destroy his machines. At the beginning of his journey he is sardonic and the complex images produced by the desire machines bore him; he can not surrender to the mirages. It is this attitude that keeps him alive. Desiderio, in Italian, literally means wish, longing, and desire. Dr Hoffman's daughter, Albertina, haunts Desiderio's dreams and constantly seduces him. Yet despite his love for Albertina, he eventually murders her.