Dr Hoffman's first disruptive coup was effected in the Opera House where, during a performance of The Magic Flute, the entire audience, except Desiderio, was turned into peacocks. While, as Desiderio writes, the enemy was 'inside the barricades, and lived inside the minds of each of us', he himself remained immune. 'I could not abnegate my reality and lose myself for ever as others did, blasted to non-being by the ferocious artillery of unreason. I was too sardonic. I was too disaffected. (...) I believed perfection was, per se, impossible and so the most seductive phantoms could not allure me because I knew they were not true.' (pp 11-12) Because of his 'skill at crossword puzzles' which 'suggested a facility in the process of analogical thought which might lead me to the Doctor where everyone else failed' (p. 40), Desiderio is asked to become a secret agent for the Minister of Determination, the single-handed ruler of the city. This assignment results in a 'journey through space and time, up a river, across a mountain, over the sea, through a forrest', a quest that leads us from the 'masculine' city past the most bizarre civilisations and landscapes to the enemy headquarters where, finally, he is forced to choose between the harsh, logical positivism of the Minister of Determination and the kaleidoscopic unreality of Dr Hoffman and his beautiful daughter Albertina. In the end he prefers the 'barren yet harmonious calm' to the 'fertile yet cacophonous tempest' and kills both the doctor and his beloved Albertina, concluding that 'the impossible is, per se, impossible.' (p. 221)

The novel is written shortly after the euphoria of the late 1960s which Angela Carter describes as 'a brief period of public philosophical awareness that occurs only very occasionally in human history; (...) truly it felt like Year One.' Despite this seemingly positive appraisal of the period, Dr Hoffman can be seen as a disillusioned response to the counter-culture which emanated graffities like 'Be realistic: demand the impossible'. This interpretation seems to be substantiated by the author in a 1985 interview in which she says that Dr Hoffman was meant to be a bleak celebration: 'It was clearly a departure from the 1960s. With regret and homesickness I ended up at the side of rationality, of logical positivism.'

Several critics have pointed towards this allegorical reading. David Punter, for instance, writes that 'we can read the text as a series of figures for the defeat of the political aspirations of the 1960s, and in particular of the father-figures of liberation, Reich and Marcuse.' While Punter reads the novel elegiacally, Ricarda Smith reads it completely different, that is to say, as a critique of the counter-culture. 'Carter does not write about a revolution that went wrong, because (...) [the] reactionary forces were still too strong,' she argues, 'but about the painful insight that such a revolution would not be liberating.' Smith also sees the doctor as an allegory of Marcuse but asserts that Carter, instead of taking an ambiguous stance towards the Doctor/philosopher, critically 'contradicts Marcuse's optimistic view that (...) highly advanced productivity makes a "non-repressive civilisation" possible.'

Susan Rubin Suleiman writes that she finds both Punter's and Smith's readings plausible, but she is 'surprised' that neither one mentions Surrealism, because 'Dr. Hoffman is, both textually and representationally, much more of a Surrealist than a Marcuse.' Although her main argument holds that Dr Hoffman is 'a novel of as well as about Surrealist imagination', and despite the fact that she repeatedly describes the 'Doctor-poet' as a 'Surrealist image-maker' she denounces the fact that he is simply an allegory of Surrealism. 'If he is an allegory of anything,' she suggests, 'it is of the technological appropriation (but I prefer the gallicism "recuperation") of Surrealism and liberal philosophy─precisely that recuperation that Marcuse himself, not at all optimistically, analyzed as early as the 1961 preface to the re-edition of Eros and Civilization.' So she denounces Punter's and Smith's readings but at the same time there is a truth to her statement that she finds both readings plausible, for she combines the tone of melancholy voiced by Punter with the disenchantment that Smith perceives. The liberating potential of the imagination of the counterculture is actual, she seems to say, but it simply fails to resist dialectical recuperation. The aspired triumph of the Pleasure Principle over the Reality Principle is obstructed by what Marcuse called 'repressive desublimation'. 'The immense capabilities of the advanced industrial society', writes Marcuse, 'are increasingly mobilized against the utilization of its own resources for the pacification of human existence. (...) The modes of domination have changed: they have become increasingly technological, productive, and even beneficial; consequently, in the most advanced areas of industrial society, the people have been co-ordinated and reconciled with the system of domination to an unprecedented degree.'

Suleiman then turns to Guy Debord's La Société du spectacle, which mirrors Marcuse's pessimism. 'All the life of societies in which modern condition of production dominate presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles', claims Debord. 'Everything that was directly lived has distanced itself in a representation.' Suleiman continues stating that '[i]f we now think of Dr. Hoffman's desire machines for projecting representations on the world, we may see in Carter's mad scientist the nightmarish synthesis of repressive desublimation and the society of the spectacle.' What then, she asks, is the fate of Surrealist imagination in the society of the spectacle? It is not good, she concludes. 'At best,' she writes, '"la révolution surréaliste" becomes a private passion, not a means to change the world.' The same, she seems to say, goes for the counterculturalists, whose revolutionary aspirations had dissipated by the early 1970s. Having been embraced and, consequently, rendered null and void by mainstream common sense, their imagination too has proved unable to resist dialectical recuperation, or, as Regis Debray writes: 'The sincerity of the actors of May was accompanied, and overtaken, by a cunning of which they knew nothing (...) They accomplished the opposite of what they intended. (...) Capital's development strategy required the cultural revolution of May.'

Whereas Suleiman and Debray see the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s as what Deleuze calls a 'deterritorialisation' which is immediately 'reterritorialised' by capitalism, Daniel Bell regards the dominant culture and the opposition to it as two sides of the same coin:

This interpretation of the counter-culture is more or less tantamount to some other critics' reading of Dr Hoffman. Elaine Jordan, for instance, who to some degree follows all aforementioned critics, writing that Hoffman is 'both the surreal, liberatory opposition to [the Minister] and capitalist control of desire through the media', concludes that 'in fact [Hoffman] and the Ministers are brothers really. Their war makes the world we live in.'

With a reference to William Blake's prose poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Colin Manlove comes to a similar conclusion:

The text seems to substantiate this interpretation, presenting Albertina, rather literally, as the loss that comes with this choice. '[F]rom beyond the grave, her father has gained a tactical victory over me and forced on me at least the apprehension of an alternate world in which all the objects are emanations of a single desire. (...) [A]t the game of metaphysical chess we played, I took away her father's queen and mated us both.' (p. 13-14)

On the basis of this stalemate in which the book ends Cornel Bonca concludes that the novel is 'furiously pessimistic.' She agrees with Manlove that Carter has little sympathy with either side of the conflict: 'Carter's got no sympathy for [the Minister's] position. Yet it turns out she has little sympathy with Dr. Hoffman's revolutionary eroticism either. (...) The liberation of imagination and desire (...) creates its own power vacuum, which authoritative impulses rush to fill. So It's not just Reason that suppresses, as the liberal tradition insists; the images of Dr. Hoffman's desire machines, when totally unrestrained, create their own inexorable logic of domination.' Because the novel 'offers no middle position where the powers of eros and the powers of reason can negotiate', because it 'lacks a vision that transcends the gap', Desiderio remains 'locked into the dialectic of excesses that characterizes the masculine power struggles of the minister and Dr. Hoffman'. This deadlock, Bonca concludes, simply 'overwhelms the possibilities of a positive vision.'

Andrzej Gasiorek agrees with Bonca that the Minister and Dr Hoffman are 'locked into a rigid dualism', but nevertheless concludes that Desiderio, 'as a result of the experiences that he undergoes (...) is enabled to see through the debilitating dichotomy of lawlessness and moralism' and that the book therefore does contain a positive vision. He arrives at this conclusion by means of yet another allegorical, but highly original, reading of the novel:

Gasiorek claims that in the Republic Plato appears to oscillate between two negative conceptions of literature: on the one hand, it is trivial; on the other hand, it is extremely important because it can corrupt. 'Plato', he writes, 'seems to veer from the view that literature is outside the moral realm altogether to the view that it directly competes with philosophy's truth-claims and is therefore its most dangerous rival.' The young Desiderio, as we have seen, conceives of the conflict between the Doctor/poet and Minister/philosopher in equally stark terms, saying the two alternatives could not possibly co-exist (p. 207). The old Desiderio, however, looking back on his life, thinks less of the benefits conferred by an ordered society than that of the price it exacts. This price, of course, is Albertina, who, as Gasiorek suggests, is the evidence that 'eros may be energizing without being destructive.' This loss, continues Gasiorek, 'helps to break down the assumption that the Minister and Hoffman offer a straightforward choice between morality and licentiousness' and thus enables Desiderio to see that both options are 'flip-sides of the same coin: totalitarianism.' It is in this sense that the old Desiderio is closer to the Plato of Phaedrus than of the Republic:

Gasiorek concludes that the novel's 'aporetic' form of closure resists a dualistic conception of reality that can only pit philosophy and poetry against one another. This hostility to binary thinking, he observes, is symptomatic for the 'theoretically explicit form of critical fiction' which Carter starts to write in the 1970s. Her novels from this era 'break down dichotomies such as (...) order/chaos, reason/passion, and exploit the ambiguous space that opens up between them. (...) Liminal states, thresholds, margins─all these surface again and again in Carter's work because they undermine intellectual certainties, thereby providing her with a point of entry for her own cultural critique.'

We are thus presented with various ideas about Carter's evaluation of the counterculture of the 1960s and its waning. They range from the melancholy Punter perceives to the disillusionment that Smith registers, from the pessimism voiced by Bonca to the optimism implicit in Gasiorek's realisation that eros may be energising without being destructive. Suleiman, as I pointed out before, combines melancholy with disillusionment about the libertarian movement which had been recuperated dialectically by the mainstream. This idea is shared by Sarah Gamble who writes:

This reflects both melancholy, for it did give Carter a point of entry for her cultural critique, and a tone of disenchantment which parallels Desiderio's disillusionment when he realises that he 'might not want the Minister's world but [...] did not want the Doctor's world either', because the latter 'might know the nature of the inexhaustible plus, but, all the same, he was a totalitarian.' (p. 207) It left Carter, according to Gamble, 'on the edge', in an 'ex-centric' position─again, just like Desiderio. The action of the book, she writes, is motivated by Desiderio's contradictory engagement with his desire to move from margins to the centre. But 'while he dreams of inclusion, he does not actually want it,' she argues pointing at the murder of Albertina for proof. 'And certainly, on the terms offered by Albertina, inclusion is not an attractive prospect. (...) [H]e would [have to] exchange the dubious freedom of life on the margins for an even more dubious slavery to Dr Hoffman.' Gamble finally reads the book as a celebration of marginality, writing that Desiderio's 'inability to surrender his ex-centric position proves to be his salvation as well as his curse, showing that a place on the margin has its merits, after all. (...) [E]ver the inveterate observer, Desiderio, watches and narrates in horrified fascination from the sidelines.'

Here we see that Gamble not only integrates melancholy and disillusionment when trying to describe Carter's stance on the counterculture, but also parallels Gasiorek's optimism in that she seems to say that Carter, seeing through the debilitating dichotomy that appears to offer a straightforward choice between morality and licentiousness, has finally found her own voice. Carter, she writes, creates in her 1970s writings an authorial persona which 'publicly constructs her as a marginal subject on the personal, cultural and historical level.' She tries to explain Carter's 'adoption of a "stranger's eye" with regard to her own culture' by means of her two-year period of voluntary exile starting in 1969. Travelling around the world on the proceeds of the Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions, she ended up in Japan where she, tall and blond, obviously, remained an outsider. Carter's essay 'Fin the Siècle' seems to support Gamble's interpretation that she feels ill at ease in 1970s London in which graffities 'chart the ideological blossoming, waxing and waning of the consciousness of a decade, of the sixties.' She says she sees 'innumerable signs of change here─but no signs of growth. (...) Returning to London. It is like coming to a new city, where all the signs have changed and people speak another language.' Gamble specifies these changes and Carter's reaction as following:

Lorna Sage also observes that Carter was in the aftermath of the 1960s becoming more and more obsessed with the notion that 'what we accept as natural is the product of a particular history.' Sage also sees Japan as triggering in this respect: 'Self-consciousness had been her bane from the start, hence the anorexia. But, while most women come out to the other side and learn to act naturally, she managed not to, and Japan is the shorthand, I think, for how. She discovered and retained a way of looking at herself, and other people, as unnatural.'

Suleiman, however, points at another reason for the foundering of the 'surrealist imagination' on the shoals of the society of the spectacle. She acknowledges, as we saw, that this imagination is recuperated dialectically because the people had been co-ordinated and reconciled with the system of domination to an unprecedented degree, and in this she parallels Punter analysis. At the same time, however, she seems to agree with Smith, that the novel is about the realisation that this revolutionary imagination would not be liberating. Dialectical recuperation is only possible when opposition remains partial, and as Bonca and Jordan point out, the Minister and Dr Hoffman are 'brothers' in their 'male conceptions of sexuality' and thus, Suleiman concludes, the revolutionary potential is not realised because of its inherent sexual politics. Carter allegedly comes to realise that the revolutionary imagination of the counterculture is not liberating for women.

Both Gamble and Sage acknowledge this turn to feminism as an second important explanation of Carter's new critical position. Carter herself combines these two explanations in various essays. 'In Japan', she wrote, 'I learnt what it was to be a woman and became radicalised.' And: '[M]y female consciousness was being forged out of the contradictions of my experience as a traveller.' But the seed was planted in the sixties, as she writes in her 1983 article 'Notes from the Front Line':

She continues with the statement that she is 'in the demythologising business' because myths are 'consolatory nonsense' and 'extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree.' Myths, she writes in the 'polemical introduction' to The Sadeian Woman (1979), deal in false universals, in order to ease the pain of particular circumstances. This, she claims, is especially true for the mythical representation of the relations between the sexes:

So, we can say, that Carter is in the denaturalising business, or in Gamble's words, in the defamilliarising business: 'stripped of their veneer of "naturalness", [ideologies] can be exposed as the constructions they are, and thus capable of being dismantled and rebuilt in different forms.' And in those 'heady days of the early 1970s' in which it was possible to 'lump all the oppressive, life-denying systems together under one label─patriarchy' her primary goal seemed to be the dismantling of that 'social fiction' called femininity, that mythical representation of the relations between the sexes.

There are only very few critics that completely disregard Carter's feminist coming out when discussing Dr Hoffman. There is, nevertheless, considerable disagreement on the question whether the book is, as Cornel Bonca claims, 'Carter's last novel where "sexuality" isn't gendered', or, rather, her first novel which, as Sarah Gamble writes, 'finds [its] expression of protest in the language of feminism.'

David Punter, seeing the novel as a historical allegory, seems to agree with Bonca. He writes that both Dr Hoffman and Carter's subsequent novel, The Passion of New Eve (1977), 'are to do with the unconscious and its shapes, and thus to do with sexuality' but, he continues, 'what is new in New Eve is that the issue of sexuality is linked directly to the different issue of gender.' He claims that the two novels relate to each other 'precisely along the lines of the development of recent theoretical debate about [subject] construction, and specifically about the exact point at which gender enters as a structuring principle.' Andrzej Gasiorek, portraying the development of Desiderio as parallel to that of Plato, does read in this narrative a deconstruction of the traditional dualistic conception of reality that separates reason from passion, but, like Punter, asserts that only Carter's subsequent novels criticise traditional accounts of gender 'suggesting that its representations (...) are deceptions, shadow dances behind which lie complex structures of power.' What remains implicit in his analysis is explicated by Colin Manlove who writes that, in opposition to New Eve which, he claims, clearly has something to say about gender, Dr Hoffman has 'no clear "theme", no evident social, political or even sexual meaning. The whole book seems to occur on a metaphysical level that puts it beyond ordinary concerns, seems too to be self contained, a fantasy that is about the making of fantasy itself.'

Gamble agrees that Dr Hoffman is a narrative about narrative but argues that 'it would be inaccurate to thus conclude that Hoffman's attention is focused totally inwards upon the issue of its own formation. On the contrary, it engages with the world of the "real" more radically than any of Carter's novels have done before.' And what it engages with, she claims, is precisely what Gasiorek identifies as being behind the shadow dances of the cultural iconography of the gender difference: 'this novel is an extremely politicised analysis of power and colonisation,' writes Gamble, and she finds kindred spirits for this opinion in Susan Suleiman, and Sally Robinson. 'Where culture's master narratives are losing their authority in this deconstructing textual world,' writes the latter, 'the power relations embedded within white capitalist patriarchy remain intact.' And Suleiman, as we have seen, also points to the fact that women's place remains identical in both the Minister's logical positivism and Dr Hoffman's 'surrealist imagination'. 'Technology and capitalism change with the times─modern/postmodern, industrial, mechanical/digital', she writes, but 'sexual politics, by contrast, is timeless, transcultural, international.'

Carter's essay 'The Alchemy of the World' seems to confirm Suleiman's conviction that Dr Hoffman is a novel of and about surrealist imagination. 'Like many libertarians, Breton had, in action, a marked authoritarian streak', she wrote. And: 'The surrealists were not good with women. That is why, although I thought they were wonderful, I had to give them up in the end. (...) When I realised that surrealist art did not recognise I had my own rights to liberty and love and vision as an autonomous being, not as a projected image, I got bored with it and wandered away.' However, Carter comes to the same conclusion with regard to the sexual liberation of the sixties, which, she came to realise, did not equate with feminist liberation: 'Still and all there remained something out of joint and it turned out that it was, rather an important thing, that all the time I thought that things were going so well I was in reality a second-class citizen.' Hence the tone of disenchantment.

Albertina could stand for Carter's ambiguous relation towards both surrealism and counterculturalism. About the surrealists she wrote, as I quoted above, that she thought they were wonderful, and about the graffities of those 'dear dead days' of counterculturalism she writes that they are 'beautiful thoughts for the pure in heart.' So, while she had to give them up in the end, she was left with a feeling of homesickness, mirroring the insatiable tears Desiderio sheds for Albertina. Hence the tone of melancholy.

All the same, as Carter herself says, 'writers like Marcuse and Adorno were as much part of my personal process of maturing into feminism as experiments with my sexual and emotional life and with various intellectual adventures in anarcho-surrealism.' Thus, we could see the sixties and her initial admiration of 'anarcho-surrealism' as a necessary step towards the realisation that she was, as she writes, suffering a degree of 'colonisation of the mind'. It is in this sense that the battle between the Minister and Dr Hoffman, despite the fact that, as Elaine Jordan writes, they are 'brothers really' who are, in Bonca's words, locked in masculine power struggles, can be seen as productive and affirmative, not only in Gasiorek's metafictional evaluation, but also for feminism. It enabled her to mature into a truly authentic 'ex-centric' voice. Hence the tone of optimism.

It is ultimately unimportant whether Dr Hoffman is a novel of and about surrealist imagination or countercultural imagination, for i think both readings are possible. What is more important, I think, is to conclude whether or not it is a novel of and about feminist imagination. The answer to this question is two-fold and shines a light over the aforementioned discussion regarding this subject.

The answer is no when we, as mainstream feminism did at the time, define 'feminist imagination' as a separate ur-imagination of the sisterhood. Carter, however, ex-centric as she was not only to the mainstream, but also to the margins, in this case feminism, has repeatedly distanced herself from such a position and calls it 'the Utopian aspect of traditional feminism.' In 'The Language of the Sisterhood' she argues that a 'women only' language faces a curious paradox. It creates a universality which is both true and false. 'It is imaginative compensation for historical powerlessness yet is rooted in a perfectly real sense of camaraderie of impotent yet sensitive condition.' A concentration on the particularity of female experience, she writes, conceals the real economic nature of the─similarly real─bond between women. It would thus not be engaged in the decolonisation of 'our language and our basic habits of thought', not actively precipitate change, but rather mythologise things a bit more.

It is, I think, this denunciation of female essentialism that has led to the often fierce feminist criticism against Carter. I think this also played a role in Bonca's reading of Dr Hoffman. The question that underlies her analysis is whether a text that so acutely details the dangerous economies of male desire lurking behind narrative and representation does not simply reinforce the power of these economies and thus closes of the possibilities of changing them. 'How', in Robinson's words, 'can a text that seems so violently to foreclose on female subjectivity be read as a feminist critique of narrative structures?' Carter's answer to this question lies, I think, in the assertion in The Sadeian Woman that 'sexual relations between men and women always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and if described explicitly, will form a critique of those relations.' Thus, we could conclude, the extreme and violent misogyny which recurs throughout the novel, has a critical function. Robinson speaks of a 'strategic engagement' with traditional representations of women. This, she says, brings to the surface what usually remains underground: the complicities between desire and domination.

Thus, I think, Dr Hoffman is a novel of and about feminist imagination, but it addresses this subject in a way which was highly uncommon at the time of writing. Reading Bonca's article carefully, one will see, at various points, references to an alleged need for a 'specifically female sexuality'. Because there is no such thing in Dr Hoffman, the novel 'written at the tail end of an era that failed to bring many promises to fruition' would be 'furiously pessimistic'. But this, I think, does not do right to Carter's ex-centric position which does not straightforwardly reprove the liberation of imagination and desire that was sought for by the counterculturalists (or the surrealists, for that matter). Rather, I would say, she is continues this struggle, but does so on her own, feminist, terms. As she says, with regard to the surrealist revolution: 'La lutte continue. It continues because it has to. This world is all we have.'

It is in this committed materialism in which she finds an ally in Gilles Deleuze. It is especially the parallels and divergences between Dr Hoffman and the first product of Deleuze's long-term collaboration with Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, that I want to consider. In this book, which is published in the same year as Dr Hoffman, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise the machines désirantes, translated in 1977 as desiring machines. I believe that this terminological similarity should be read as one of the many intertextual references Carter makes in Dr Hoffman, but I do not propose to rest my case on a direct relationship between the two books. I intend rather to focus on Carter in the context of contemporary poststructuralism and to demonstrate the fundamental ties between the Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisations and Carter's fictional criticism. This thesis is in no sense intended as a denial of the possibility of influence along similar lines from other sources─other poststructuralists such as Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes have been identified as possible sources for Carter's imaginative adventures in philosophy─although, as I intend to show, there is more than a single verbal echo of Anti-Oedipus in Dr Hoffman. I will simply use Deleuze and Guattari's poststructuralist appropriation as a point of reference, that is as a point of entry to and a point of departure from poststructuralism, in order to illuminate Carter's feminist position. My reading of the relation between Carter and Deleuze and Guattari reflects the negotiation between positive politics and negative critique is said to be typical of recent feminist attempts to theorise identity politics for women. What I want to elucidate is that the 'ex-centric' position Carter adopts in Dr Hoffman is not so much idiosyncratic but rather anachronistic, and is in fact close to what Julia Kristeva calls the 'third phase of feminism'. I will focus upon this point in more detail in chapter three, but I will first, in chapter two, give a bird's-eye view of the conceptualisations of Deleuze and Guattari which can be put in resonance with Carter's fiction.