The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter Read Free Book Online Page B

authentically pieces of time and can tell everybody whatever time they like. I am especially happy for the clocks. They used to have such innocent faces. They had the water-melon munching, opaquely-eyed visages of slaves and the Doctor has already proved himself a horological Abraham Lincoln. Now he will liberate you all, Minister.
    MINISTER: But ought the roads to rule the city?
    AMBASSADOR: Don’t you think we should give them a crack at the whip now and then? Poor things, forever oriented by the insensitive feet of those who trample them. Time and space have their own properties, Minister, and these, perhaps, have more value than you customarily allow them. Time and space are the very guts of nature and so, naturally, they undulate in the manner of intestines.
    MINISTER: I see you make a habit of analogies.
    AMBASSADOR: An analogy is a signpost.
    MINISTER: You have taken away all the signposts.
    AMBASSADOR: But we have populated the city with analogies.
    MINISTER: I should dearly like to know the reason why.
    AMBASSADOR: For the sake of liberty, Minister.
    MINISTER: What an exceedingly pretty notion!
    AMBASSADOR: I certainly did not think
that
answer would satisfy you. What if I told you that we were engaged in uncovering the infinite potentiality of phenomena?
    MINISTER: I would suggest you moved your operations to some other location.
(
The Ambassador smiled and dissected a translucent sliver of sole.
)
    MINISTER: I began to perceive a short while ago that the Doctor intended utterly to disrupt any vestige of the social fabric of my country of which he himself was once one of the finest intellectual ornaments.
    AMBASSADOR: You speak of him as if he were a piece of
famille rose
!
(
The Minister ignored this gentle reprimand.
)
    MINISTER: I can only conclude he is motivated purely by malice.
    AMBASSADOR: What, the mad scientist who brews up revengeful plagues in his test-tubes? Were his motives so simple, he would, by now, I assure you, have utterly destroyed everything.
(
The Minister pushed back his plate. I could see he was about to speak direct from the heart.
)
    MINISTER: Yesterday the cathedral dissolved in a display of fireworks. I suppose the childish delight many showed when they saw the rockets, the catherine wheels and the vari-coloured stars and meteors affected me most of all, for the cathedral had been a masterpiece of sobriety. It was given the most vulgar funeral pyre that could possibly have been devised. Yet it had brooded over the city like the most conventual of stone angels for two hundred years. Time, the slavish time you despise, had been free enough to work in equal partnership with the architect; the masons took thirty years to build the cathedral and, with every year that passed, the invisible moulding of time deepened the moving beauty of its soaring lines. Time was implicit in its fabric. I am not a religious man myself and yet the cathedral stood for me as a kind of symbol of the spirit of the city.
It was an artifice –
    AMBASSADOR: – and so we burned it down with
feux d’artifice
–
(
The Minister ignored him.
)
    MINISTER: – and its grandeur, increasing year by year as it grew more massively into time itself, had been programmed into it by the cunning of the architects. It was an illusion of the sublime and yet its symmetry expressed the symmetry of the society which had produced it. The city and, by extension, the state, is an artifice of a similar kind. A societal structure –
(
The Ambassador raised his beautiful eyebrows at these words and tapped his painted nail against his teeth as though in amused reproof of such jargon.
)
    MINISTER: (
intransigently
) A societal structure is the greatest of all the works of art that man can make. Like the greatest art, it is perfectly symmetric. It has the architectonic structure of music, a symmetry imposed upon it in order to resolve a play of tensions which would disrupt order but without which order is lifeless. In this serene and abstract