KidLit Forum

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES
by Angela Carter
I am going to depict some postmodern characteristics of the story:

When describing the fearceness of the wolves the author deals with MINIMALISM for she deliberatedly presents a character and an event that are taken from the everyday life: “…there was a woman once bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni”

TEMPORAL DISTORTION is used in a small passage, as the author jumps forward and backward in time when she talks about the hunter who once trapped the wolf in a pit. The narration is suddenly interrupted by 2 other small narrations that are pasted in between in order to emphasize the bad things the wolf has done to an old man and to a girl looking after her sheep. Then the story goes on from where it was left. Then again 2 other stories follow about a witch that turned an entire wedding party into wolves and about a girl who married but she was deserted by her husband on the wedding night. Here irony and black humour are to be detected.
We can talk about temporal distortion with historical reference when we find out that the young man accompanying the girl in the forest has got a compass in his pocket; a cultural reference could be traced as temporal distortion by the presence of the Bible in granny’s house, as well as the “two china spaniels with liver – coloured blotches on their coats and black noses ( that ) sit on either side of the fireplace.”

MAGICAL REALISM is used in the passage when the disappeared husband comes home (the return of the previously “deceased” character), realises that her wife has remarried and then he turns to a werewolf (which is quite unexpected) and tears off the eldest boy’s foot. The introduction of fantastic or impossible element into the narrative that otherwise is normal, makes us state that magical realism is used.

HYBRIDIZATION (pastiche) - added horror when describing the wolves (in the very beginning) and what they are capable of doing as one comes across them because “the wolf is worst for he cannot listen to reason”; legends or popular beliefs are used to describe werewolves: “They say there’s an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on. Or, that he was born feet first and had a wolf for his father and his torso is a man’s but his legs and genitals are a wolf’s. And he has a wolf’s heart. Seven years is a werewolf’s natural span but if you burn his human clothing you condemn him to wolfishness for the rest of his life, so old wives hereabout think it some protection to throw a hat or an apron at the werewolf (…). Yet, by the eyes, those phosphorescent eyes, you know him in all his shapes; the eyes alone unchanged by metamorphosis. Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips stark naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.”

HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION (it is when actual historical events or characters are fictionalized) I think that this is best referred to at the end of the story when the author states that “it is Christmas day, the werewolves birthday”.

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Monika Bandi