Wait a minute! Wait. Wait. I'm having a thought. Oh yes. Oh yes. I'm going to have a thought. It's coming. It's coming. ...It's gone.

There is a six-inch scar across my abdomen. The investigation following the assault that produced it makes me feel like I am on trial. I am no longer sure who had agency in this confrontation. Angela Carter's entangled fiction pushes a third degree that makes it difficult to offers absolute answers. Or to know which questions are the important ones. Or whether the Quest for Truth I undertake is at her authorial behest or something I have brought upon myself. Scarred or not, have I indeed been victimized? Is she the perp or the Dick-or both? Her writing is attentive to these ideas, ideas of opposing forces, blacks or whites of truth, but indifferent to them. Carter interrogates the 'between' areas until white and black no longer seem to exist, especially in the fuliginous grays of sexuality. She seems to refuse simple partitioning, acknowledging the already expressed oppositions of sexuality. Are we to have only opposing alternatives: male/female, perp/vic, masculine/feminine, aggressor/receptor? And the black/white list goes on: is sex a lubricious act from which we should protect our children? Is it 'simply' a comfortable and natural biological function? And if so, do we position rape with a discussion in terms of power, of sex, of legality?

Raising such questions creates a cliff of contention-with a ledge guarded by a self-appointed few. Society, science, spirituality, scholars, et al, assuming the right of guardianship of the cliff, impose perimeters on this precipice and mark the territory within which we work. The foil I'm constructing here-the Guardians-represent arguments so long argued there a collusion of cultural forces assuming that the right answer has already been offered-but just which alternative is correct has not yet been determined. Those who would be Guardians no longer question the questions.

If you peer surreptitiously between their pamphlets and barbed-wire, however, you will see a card table set up, teetering willfully on the cliff's beetled flange, a sign reading 'lover's leap: 50 pence,' and Angela Carter, that table's sentry, laughing and looking conveniently in the other direction. What's she laughing at? you will think. What is down there, damnit, that she can cackle so knowingly and cryptically behind the backs of my un-elected Guardians? You will run full speed. And when you are launched over that precipice, look down.

Carter's 1972 novel "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" (hereafter DM) forces me to take that leap-foisting me upon her text, trying to make sense of the grayness that floods the space between those hard and fast distinctions. She achieves, more importantly, a frustrating dynamic between her reader and her text, forcing the audience to position its bodily, readerly self in relation to her sexually charged creation, and especially its narrator. I am not allowed objective analysis, the luxury of removing myself to the abstract while I escape into her fiction. Her novel bruises, reminding me that my brain is still corporal. That leap from the abstract world of fiction to the immediacy of my own physicality is insisted upon precisely because those directions and meditations on the nature of sexuality proscribed by the Guardians cannot account for the story Carter weaves. The questions themselves become suspicious; the thoughts she provokes, contradictory.

Desiderio, the protagonist, begins the story with the Proustian assertion 'I remember everything.' He has been asked, as a hero of the city (but not clearly hero of the novel) and a founder of the new constitution, to recount the story of his youth, during which, most notably, the physicist poet Doctor Hoffman unleashed the subconscious desires of the world onto itself. Nominated by the Minister of Determination to find the Doctor and end his reign of terror on the city, Desiderio travels the world in search of the Doctor, often accompanied (led?) by Hoffman's daughter-Desiderio's love-Albertina (in various disguises). He is not altogether sympathetic to his own picaresque mission; after leaving the walls of the city, Desiderio episodically encounters different subcultures-the travelling fair, the River People, the centaurs-and essentially adopts the value systems of his surroundings. And thus he nearly abandons his quest repeatedly before finally killing Doctor Hoffman and his daughter Albertina, Desiderio's love, because-well . . . his motive is dubious, anyway.

Fiction-especially Carter's brand-offers me a useful way to begin to wrap my mind around the idea of questioning the questions. Perhaps she can offer a way, through her fiction, to provoke questions that do not assume answers which must be black and not white, subject and not object; a way that somehow subsumes 'opposites' so that they can no longer be easily separated. Carter identifies complications that can begin what some rape theorists call the 'process of unraveling the cultural texts that have obsessively made rape both so pervasive and so invisible a theme' which 'involves listening not only to who speaks and in what circumstances, but who does not speak and why.' Language has been the property of the Guardians for quite some time. Carter herself says:

"Writing is only applied linguistics; this, of course, is why it's so enormously important for women to write fiction as women. It is part of the slow process of decolonizing our language and our basic habits of thought. It is to do with the creation of a means of expression for an infinitely greater variety of experience than has been possible heretofore; to say things for which no language has previously existed."

One can infer Carter's effort to decolonize language in the way she manipulates her words and concepts with unexpected substance and locution. I am forced to ask myself self-consciously: why am I surprised? Using such phraseology as 'penetrated her flesh,' and 'my erotic, giggling toy,' Carter both buys the Guardian's stock in sex trade and distorts it, magnifying it. That's her uppercut. Suddenly and unexpectedly, Carter drops a Promethean metaphor like 'she had the waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard' (53) and with conventional attributes of beauty, such as a smooth complexion or delicacy, she magnifies it to demonstrate its own absurdity. DM is encrusted with meretriciously lyrical language. The exaggerated romance of the prose is interrupted by the impetus behind each sex act; Carter uses the Guardians' language, traditionally used to suggest beautiful passivity, to describe violence, not romance or invited pursuit.

This style confounds her critics. Reading criticism of Carter's work is like using toenail clippers to snip through the Guardian's barbed wire. Or trying to stretch out the individual squares in the fence; you are allowed to reach through with one appendage, or peer with one eye, but your view is incomplete. You are not allowed to leap but to see only fragments of what she peddles. The density of her allusions and the complexity of her philosophy virtually begs her critics to lay a matrix over the text and assign meaning to each word, offering innumerable but irreconcilable points of access to DM.

This impulse is understandable; wishing to read DM without allowing myself to be confused, confounded, frustrated, and irritated, I look for a lens through which I can look to decipher the seeming paradoxes Carter imposes on her reader. Without such a lens, I feel as if I cannot begin to address integral textual questions. For instance, how should I interpret Desiderio's narration? Carter's style seems to employ what Wayne Booth terms 'unstable irony'; 'the author-insofar as we can discover [her], and [s]he is often very remote indeed-refuses to declare [her]self, however subtly, for any stable proposition, even the opposite of whatever proposition [her] irony vigorously denies.' I have a difficult time deciding where she writes with a sardonic wit; and, alternatively, where she commiserates with her picaro.

The inability to answer fundamental questions about authorial sympathy pushes many of her critics toward finding a 'key' to her novel. 'If I could just understand this one allusion, this one school of thought, I would get it! I could laugh in concert with this bewitching peddler.' No one likes to feel laughed at, and I surely feel that Carter has looked over the shoulder of her critics (me included) and chuckled about the predicament in which she has placed us. Booth argues that 'there is reason to believe that most of us think we are less vulnerable to mistakes with irony than we are.' I want to win, to 'get it', to climax, to beat the text at its own game. With other novels, I can-and have-made convincing arguments framing the allegory, intention, and 'true reading' of a particular text, and comfortably placed it in relation to its referential texts. Although I have never made a definitive claim, I have written, in an objective voice, criticism that pretends I am not frustrated. In this conventional style of literary criticism, a certain dialogue does take place, but it assumes access to a plane removed from self-consciousness and physical embodiment. Each piece places itself as the 'last word' on the text, aiming to 'cover the field,' filling in the gaps of the discipline, as one scholar of the essay put it.

Many of Carter's critics-again, myself included-have tried to analyze this novel with an authoritative voice. The first time I wrote about DM, I did a close reading of a particular dream scene, when Albertina visits Desiderio as a black swan, and attempted to extrapolate that interpretation and lay it on the novel entire, as if Carter's agenda were consistent-and apparent-throughout the story. Not only that, her agenda was laid out somehow in that particular scene: 'Desiderio's assimilation of the female with the erotic, natural, mysterious swan signals his naturalization of the female association with physicality. In each new environment he encounters, he relegates the women to this position.' This reading, done a few years ago, is rather na•ve and heavy-handed, but it illustrates my point: the voice I used needs no qualifications, no modal operators; it is the absolute understanding-an unexamined 'feminist' (101) account.

Other critics have also used a specific pandect to 'decode' DM. Especially because I am working against this formal kind of discussion, I do not wish to seem dismissive of it. Read as a body of work, the pieces together enrich the possibilities of DM. Separately, however, they convey a critical inclination to unravel novels. Like any article of clothing, though, this sock becomes meaningless when reduced to threads. Considered as a whole-its fabric, color, even washing instructions-her navy blue wool socks can be discussed reflectively, rather than as a problem that needs solving, a single unattached thread. Attempting to simplify the novel as if it had basic constituents can essentially destroy the reason it was written as a novel at all; Carter chose the medium of fiction for a reason. If it is construed as an amalgamation of independent theories, DM ultimately becomes unintelligible, not to mention impossible to wear.