Angela Carter and Folk Music: 'Invisible Music', Prose and the Art of Canorography (Bloomsbury Studies in Global Women’s Writing)

From her unique standpoint as singer-songwriter-scholar, Polly Paulusma examines the influences of Carter’s 1960s folk singing, unknown until now, on her prose writing. Recent critical attention has focused on Carter’s relationship with folk/fairy tales, but this book uses a newly available archive containing Carter’s folk song notes, books, LPs and recordings to change the debate, proving Carter performed folk songs. Placing this archive alongside the album sleeve notes Carter wrote and her diaries and essays, it reimagines Carter’s prose as a vehicle for the singing voice, and reveals a writing style imbued with ‘songfulness’ informed by her singing praxis. Reading Carter’s texts through songs she knew and sang, this book shows, from influences of rhythm, melodic shape, thematic focus, imagery, ‘voice’ and ‘breath’, how Carter steeped her writing with folk song’s features to produce ‘canorography’: song-infused prose. Concluding with a discussion of Carter’s profound influence on songwriters, focusing on the author’s interview with Emily Portman, this book invites us to reimagine Carter’s prose as audial event, dissolving boundaries between prose and song, between text and reader, between word and sound, in an ever-renewing act of sympathetic resonance. Paulusma examines the influences of folk singing praxis on Angela Carter’s prose writing. Recent critics have analysed Carter’s profound relationship with folk and fairy tales, but her somatic experience of folk singing requires a discrete analysis. A newly-unearthed private archive of Carter’s folk song notations and recordings, her diaries, essays, album sleeve notes and undergraduate dissertation, together suggest a reimagining of Carter’s prose as a vehicle for her ‘singing’ ‘voice’, revealing a ‘canorographic’ writing style imbued with ‘songfulness’ which she learned from singing. Voice theorists (Idhe 1976, Connor 2002, Dolar 2006) suggest we become occupied by the imagined ‘voice’ of the text when we read, but not enough attention has been paid to the porous boundaries that exist between song and prose, nor to qualities of ‘songfulness’ described in relation to song by Lawrence Kramer (2002), here applied uniquely to prose. Paulusma reads Carter’s texts ‘through’ the songs she knew, and shows, from influences of rhythm, melodic shape, thematic focus, imagery, ‘voice’ and ‘breath’, how she buried folk song’s features structurally into her writing to produce ‘canorography’ — song-infused prose, informed by the pleasures of her singing experience, and emergent in the semantic excesses of her prose syntax and its sounded potential in ‘performance’. Paulusma focuses on gender fluidities, sonic geographies, picaresque journeys, and the significances of chimeric avianthropes, to reveal Carter’s singing ‘voice’ imbricated in the text, and then analyzes musicologically the folk songs of contemporary artist Emily Portman, to show Carter’s onward ‘songful’ trajectory in a cycle of influences. This original methodological approach stitches together aspects of archival, literary and musicological research to present a truly interdiscipinary body of work. Paulusma proposes further research into ‘canorography’, and the implications of reimagining prose as audial ‘performance’, before concluding that Carter asks us to ‘perform’ every time we read her, creating, between her text and the body of the reader, an ever-renewing sympathetic resonance. Cover Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents Figures Folk songs and links Abbreviations Acknowledgements Preface 1 Songful influences Critical silence on Carter and folk song Carter and fairy tales Why folk song differs from folk and fairy tale forms ‘Songfulness’ A holistic critical approach 2 ‘a singer’s swagger’: Angela Carter, the folk singer Carter’s textual engagement with folk song Carter’s prosodic engagement with folk song Carter’s melodic engagement with folk song Carter’s engagement with folk song performance 3 ‘me and not-me’: folk songs, narrative perspectives and the gender imaginary in Shadow Dance Folk singing and the gender-fluid ‘I’ position The songs – overview The songs – rhythmic influences Carter’s Shadow Dance – rhythmic figures The songs – melodic influences Carter’s Shadow Dance – melodic influences Songs and Shadow Dance – thematic influences Conclusion 4 ‘an invented distance’: folk songs, sonic geographies and the Erl-King’s greenwood The topography of folk songs The folk song greenwood The greenwood’s rhythmic influences ‘Wooziness’: the greenwood’s melodic influences The greenwood’s thematic influences Conclusion 5 ‘moving through time’: folk songs, journeys and the picaresque in ‘Reflections’ and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman The picaresque in the folk song tradition ‘Died for Love’ [17] and Hoffman ‘The Leaves of Life’ [33] and ‘Reflections’ Conclusion 6 ‘only a bird in a gilded cage’: folk songs, avianthropes and the canorographic voice in‘ The Erl-King’ and Nights at the Circus Avianthropes in folk songs Birds and voice in ‘The Erl-King’ Birds and voice in Carter’s Nights at the Circus Conclusion 7 ‘continued threads’: Angela Carter and the folk singer Emily Portman Emily Portman Method 1: direct influence from Carter’s fiction Method 2: Same source material (song) Method 3: Songs inspired by Carter’s tale collations Method 4: Carter’s fiction and traditional songs Conclusion 8 Sympathetic resonances Appendices Notes Bibliography and Discography Index