Angela Carter’s Metaleptic Turn: The Possibilities of “a Mutation, of a Revolution in the Propriety of the Symbolic Systems”

Angela Carter’s experiences in Japan molded her post-Japan writing: she became more preoccupied with the nature of reality and the status of the subject, which operates for her like Roland Barthes’s empty sign, whose sole reality is its appearance. Carter sought a new model of writing too, which she found partly in bunraku. This paper analyzes the role of bunraku in triggering Carter’s overlapping narrative and ontological frames. That metaleptic turn enables her to disclose the constructedness of the subject in general and the gendered subject in particular. In “The Loves of Lady Purple” and “Flesh and the Mirror,” Carter draws on bunraku for a system of representation that metatextually discloses itself as an aesthetic construction and of its subjects as discursive productions of subjectivity.