The Modern English Visionary: Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor and Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2000 by Edward J. Ahearn

For the reader freed from the burden of Hawksmoor, Angela Garter's The Passion of New Eve may appear as its necessary counterpart, apparently- apparently-opposite in every regard. The narrator spends a last night in London before traversing the United States, from New York City to the desert to California, in a temporal movement that is seemingly modern and forward looking-indeed futuristic and apocalyptic. In ambiguous relationship to the murderous male sexuality in Hawksrnoor, Carter's feminist thematics are hilariously-but also violently-at play.[8] With an androgynous name, the narrator Evelyn, an extremely sexist young man, is forced to undergo a sex change operation, becoming the New Eve of the title. Though Carter eschews the split narration employed by Ackroyd, both novels involve a mutilation and expansion of self that is both threatening and fascinating.

New Eve's version of the United States is a parody of America in the late 1960s. The Blacks are in rebellion, rolling down Park Avenue in tanks and burning down Grand Central Station. So too are women, attacking men in the streets, engaging in guerrilla warfare, and provoking an apocalyptic conflict as the state of California secedes. We see bands of murderous homophobes and the crazed Zero with his harem of enslaved women, recalling the Charles Manson gang. New York exists in a postapocalyptic chaos: "a lurid Gothic darkness," an "entropic order of disorder," "an almost medieval city" (10, 15, 32) with open sewers and street battles between National Guard and urban guerrillas.

These events are presented both as (parodically) apocalyptic and also primordial. Evelyn receives warnings about the end of the world from a young man leaving for India ("imminent heat-death of the universe") and from another who believes that "God had arrived on a celestial bicycle to proclaim the last Judgment was at hand" (12). He also meets the alchemist Baroslav, who celebrates the "fructifying chaos of anteriority, the state before the beginning of the beginning" (14). Amid Carter's antic motifs, Baroslav talks about the death camps and how the Gestapo raped and dismembered his wife. By the final sequence of the book, amid the warfare in California, Eve is "filled with a raging curiosity to see the end of the world" (167). But as James Berger has explained, the apocalypse is always postapocalyptic, explicitly so here. It supposes the beginning of a new world, with an echo of Baroslav's anteriority: "the end and the beginning of the world" (171): "Welcome to anteriority, Eve; now I know we are at the be ginning of the beginning" (166).

This apocalypse mixes satire with a real claim to historicity, myth, and ironic literary allusion. [9] Eve's statement "Historicity in America goes more quickly" (93) perpetuates the European cliche about the New World that underlies the whole book. As the character Leilah claims, "History overtook myth" and "Historicity rendered myth unnecessary" (172, 173). Hence Eve believes that she is witnessing the end of "systems which operated within a self-perpetuating reality; a series of enormous solipsisms, a tribute to the existential freedom of the land of free enterprise" (167). But to what extent is this critique of the capitalist reality system vitiated by the book's pervasive parody?