Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. By NICOLA PITCHFORD. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. 2002. 223 pp. 32 [pounds sterling]. ISBN: 0-8387-5487-2.

Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale. Ed.

The title of Nicola Pitchford's critical study of the novels of Angela Carter (including The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Love, and The Passion of New Eve) and Kathy Acker (including Don Quixote, Empire of the Senseless, and My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini) is informed by Michel De Certeau's distinction between the 'tactical' resistance of those subjected to power and the 'strategies' of the powerful. Pitchford defines postmodernism as the historical period in which reality is textually mediated to an unprecedented degree; she suggests that the radical contingency of meaning that results makes possible exercises of agency which actively intervene in relations of power. Pitchford argues for a postmodernism which is compatible with a feminist materialist commitment; she describes the category of 'woman' and the discourse of feminism as 'fictions,' but fictions which are 'operative' and 'tactical' respectively. For Pitchford, then, the conjunction of feminism and postmodernism does not result in a postfeminism which signals the death of feminism; on the contrary, she argues that Acker's and Carter's texts embody and enable tactical readings which expose and contest the textual construction of gender by employing tactics which are informed by and exploit the postmodern culture of which they are a part.

Addressing the risks entailed in the practice of 'complicitous critique' (Linda Hutcheon), Pitchford makes a persuasive case for Acker's and Carter's 'quotational tactics'; arguing that 'postmodern subjects can only create resistant tactics and resistant identities from already co-opted texts and discourses' (my italics) (p. 183). This 'only' might alarm those suspicious of the self-referential, always-already-ironic quality of postmodern fiction. However, Pitchford's interest in the specific and changing characteristics of postmodern historical contexts offsets this concern; the materialist dimension to her feminist postmodernism is evident in a valuable attempt to situate Acker's and Carter's texts within the contexts of a disillusionment with the counter-cultural utopianism of the 1960s and the ascendancy of the New Right in the USA and Britain in the 1980s. Noting that both Carter and Acker have been accused of producing pornographic representations, Pitchford places their texts within the context of the debate between anti-pornography and anticensorship feminist activists and theorists. Catherine MacKinnon's and Andrea Dworkin's refusal to distinguish between actual acts of violence and degradation against women and the representation of such acts is in one sense peculiarly postmodern, though the rejection of the subversive potential of representation is clearly not. Pitchford effectively suggests that capitalism's ability to co-opt feminist demands for sexual self-realization confounded the oppositional politics of the women's movement; in a sense, the new forms which feminist action have taken, and the continuing controversy over the meaning and desirability of 'postfeminism,' can best be understood as representing feminism's different responses to postmodernity's fragmentation of the very idea of an oppositional politics.

Pitchford does not offer to resolve the unease which attends certain aspects of Carter's and Acker's work, including their depiction of violent and exploitative sexuality, but she does offer to make this unease productively meaningful. Indeed, Carter and Acker arguably resemble Carter's fictional Doctor Hoffman (in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman) who is able to render dreams real, abolishing the boundary between the actual and the imagined; like Hoffman, Acker's and Carter's 'dreams' are more often dystopian than utopian, but like Hoffman they also seem to have recourse to the ultimate disclaimer: 'These are not my dreams--but yours.' However, within Pitchford's critical framework, with its emphasis on the agency of the reader, the concern is less with the question of whether and how these authors can be held accountable for the production of these dreams, than with the question of what the reader does with them.

Pitchford refers to the emergence of a 'mythopoeic feminism' in the 1970s, which sought to reclaim female mythic and archetypal figures; Carter's collection of rewritten fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber (published in 1979), is surely both an expression of this interest and a deeply ambivalent critique of any temptation to idealize such figures. In contrast to Pitchford's approach, Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega's edited collection of essays, Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, (originally published as a special issue of the journal Marvels & Tales in 1998) is principally informed by knowledge of the origins and history of the fairy tale as a genre. The collection includes reminiscences and tributes to Carter by fellow writers and collaborators, including Lorna Sage, Marina Warner, Corinna Sargood, and Robert Coover, but also critical readings which draw on deconstructive, psychoanalytical, and Bakhtinian as well as feminist interpretations. A recurring concern is with 'intertextuality' in the sense that the collection acts as a useful resource for the identification of literary and cultural allusions within Carter's texts, most notably the short stories collected in The Bloody Chamber. In this regard, Roemer's essay on the resemblance between the Marquis in 'The Bloody Chamber' and representations of 'Oriental' despots is especially thought-provoking; the extent to which Carter's texts expose or (inadvertently) reiterate problematic representations of cultural or 'racial' difference is an issue which Pitchford addresses (in relation to the culturally hybrid protagonist of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Desiderio) and one which is worthy of further interrogation. Janet L. Langlois discusses a shift in Carter's work from the fairy tale to the legend, and by implication from fantasy to history; the fact that this shift is evident in Carter's rewriting of a New World legend--that of Lizzie Borden--draws attention to an interest in the relationship between American national identity and modernity which a narrow focus on the European origins of the fairy tale might overlook.

Roemer and Bacchilega's collection contributes to an established body of scholarship on the origins of Carter's metafictional texts. On occasion, it also contributes to a form of personal mythologizing--Carter tends to emerge as a postmodern Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy, courted by her own salon of acolytes--to which Pitchford is much more critically alert. More importantly, Pitchford is willing to confront the more troubling and problematic aspects of both Carter's and Acker's texts; by placing these sites of tension within their historical and cultural contexts she seeks to depict them as spaces within which readers can exercise critical agency, rather than as battlegrounds on which critical camps of followers and detractors are polarized.

RACHEL CARROLL

UNIVERSITY OF TEESSIDE