The Intelligible, the Sensible, and Fictivist Thought: Angela Carter's Window on the Wolves

• Published in: New writing (Clevedon, England) England), 2008-09, Vol.5 (2), p.126-139
• Main Author: McGuire, Jerry
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: academic writing; critical theory; fiction
• ISSN: 1479-0726; 1943-3107
• DOI: 10.1080/14790720802245322

The phenomenological and Derridean opposition between the 'intelligible' and the 'sensible' reflects a distinction between 'theory' (featuring systematicity, noncontradiction, and procedural recoverability) and a 'fictivist thought' - the processual intellectual work of creative writers. The first of these is marked by an impulse towards logical closure (and is coded to the practice of academic theorists) while the second is marked by an impulse to resist or repudiate such closure, a working ambivalence that marks (some) fictive texts. There is a formal contradiction, however, in building an intelligible discourse on the subject of the unintelligible. Angela Carter's sequence of texts (radio play, short stories, screenplay) reworking Red Riding Hood works through this contradiction intertextually to throw light on the use of ambivalence as an intellectual strategy entailing both a structuration (a reflection on ambivalence) and destructuration (the ambivalent refusal to reify ambivalence). She accomplishes this through a formal (and deforming) device: a distinctive imaging of windows that both frames the intelligible and fragments and displaces intelligibility. Because her version of the story situates her heroine as both writer-in-the-making and fairy-tale moral emblem, her fiction articulates (and clarifies) the contradiction at the heart of tensions between 'theorists' and 'creative writers.'