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

Later, having escaped, Eve and Tristessa freely make love in the desert, incarnating that other serpent-connected figure of androgynous sexuality. As Eve exults, "I know who we are; we are Tiresias" (146). Tristessa had first approached her "as warily as the unicorn in the tapestry at the Musee de Cluny edges towards the virgin" (146), but in his vulnerability he is also like "the veritable, Baudelairean albatross" (147). In their union, finally, they make "the great Platonic hermaphrodite" (148).

Their sexual union creates another sense of reality, abolishing time ("The erotic clock halts all clocks") and the sense of place in the world: "Flesh is a function of enchantment. It uncreates the world." It also uncreates language: "Speech evades language. How can I find words the equivalent of this mute speech of flesh as we folded ourselves within a single self in the desert" (148). The alchemist Baroslav comes to mind, as a cosmic intuition of being is achieved: "The lateral beams of the setting sun melted the gold; it turned to alchemical gold." And

So many stars! And such moonlight, enough moonlight to let a regiment of alchemists perform the ritual of the dissolution of the contents of the crucible [....] I never saw a moon so fat and white and round [....] The silence was absolute [...] the world showed us how round it was and we could see every side of the rim of a horizon that looked near enough for us to be able to stretch out our hands and touch it [....] Neither as man nor woman had I understood before the unique consolation of the flesh. (150)

Such expansion of being inevitably carries with it the awareness of human mortality, this time with an unacknowledged echo of Donne's "The Relique": "I nothing but a bracelet of bright hair around his bones" (151).

Thereafter Eve looks back on the desert as "the place where I became myself' (164). Butjust after her orgasm with Tristessa, she had reflected, "I have not reached the end of the maze yet. I descend lower, descend lower. I must go further" (150). This anticipation of a further experience opens toward the California conclusion (which isn't one). Like the alchemical theme, her anticipation also points backward. New Eve, a novel that like Hawksmoor involves apocalypse as ecstasy at the risk of murderous sexual violence (finally threatening males in both works), also ultimately resembles Ackroyd's book in its revelation of time as regressive, archaic, prehistoric.

Already in the opening pages Baroslav sounds the theme of anteriority. He has pictures of bleeding white birds in bottles, a motif reiterated in the beautiful bird slain in the desert, in Tristessa's role as Baudelairean albatross, and finally in the great seabirds of the California coast. In addition--and here androgyny merges with the abolition of time--Baroslav has a seventeenth-century print of "a hermaphrodite carrying a golden egg that exercised a curious fascination upon me, the dual form with its breasts and its cock, its calm, comprehensive face. (Coming events? ...)" (13). The ancient past and the apocalyptic future draw together in an image of sexual unity.