The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
First edition
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| Author | Angela Carter |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Picaresque |
| Publisher | Rupert Hart-Davis |
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Publication date
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1972 |
| Pages | 286 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 31035570 |
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.
Set in an unspecified Latin American country, the novel features Desiderio, a government minister in the main city, currently under attack by Doctor Hoffman's reality-distorting machines. Desiderio embarks on a journey to find Hoffman's former physics teacher, eventually bringing him to Hoffman's castle. Rejecting a caged yet eternal fulfillment of his sexual desires in the form of Doctor Hoffman's sexually ambivalent daughter Albertina, he kills both the doctor and his lover-to-be, thereby restoring reality.
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.
On his way to the first stop on his journey, Desiderio encounters Doctor Hoffman's former physics professor who now works as blind peep-show proprietor. During the story, Desiderio visits the sexualised exhibits of the peep show a number of times to find that they bear uncanny resemblance to the events that occur within his own life. Upon reaching his first destination, the Mayor's Office of town S., Desiderio finds that the Mayor has disappeared. Thereupon he visits the Mayor's home where he has sex with the Mayor's somnambulist daughter, Mary Anne, while she remains unconscious. When Mary Anne turns up dead, dirty 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.
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