Carter can like a Sardine Can

on Angela Carter and Sardines

Sometime around 2013,  I took Susannah Clapp’s A Card for Angela Carter out of the Toronto library, the only sort of biography available of her then. I hadn’t read Angela Carter at college, but discovered her in the aftermath mess of working and wanting to be a writer eating my way through all her books like crisps. Clapp notes that Carter ‘ “invested in what she claimed to be the largest collection of sardine tins in southern England; she liked the look of them, and made, through her fascination with their design, a lifelong friend of fellow enthusiast, the artist Corinna Sargood” Edmund  Gordon’s later biography The Invention of Angela Carter notes that her collection started in Bristol, during her disappointing and lonely marriage,  where at an auction house she bought an enormous collection of sardine tins, describing it as “wilfully eccentric and whimsical behaviour”

I picked up this obsession as significant to me in part quite simply because I was poor and eating a lot of tinned beans, fish and vegetables and it  allowed me to see beauty and joy in a period of deprivation. Carter’s obsession helped spark a mirror one in me which came to define my first collection of stories, The Doll’s Alphabet where tinned food became a central image in every story. It is also worth noting that tinned fish is having a trendy moment, and one longs to know what Carter would have said about it. Angela Carter’s obsession sent me down a wormhole of tinned history.Though methods of preserving food existed before- smoking, salting, jam, wine,  oil- sardines themselves were packed in earthenware jars under oil, preserved food as we know it was invented during the Napoleonic wars for the army. Nicolas Appert successfully kept sterlised meat and vegetables in corked glass bottles submitted to a hot bath to sterlise them and exclude air, but it was in England where a man, after reading Aperts book on preserving, but the food in tins instead of glass as tin was more readily available in Britain. According to Sue Shepaed’s Pickled, Potted and Canned the first tinned sardine factory was in Nantes, where the smell and noise caused it to be banished to the outskirts of town. She also reports the difficulty of early can openers. One Mary Hodgson who trying to open a tin of bologna in 1900 wrote “the sausage was in a tin which had in the hurry been badly opened, and it would not allow itself to be pushed out; the poor thing had a great wound in its side from the tin-opener, and every time I attempted to cut off a slice the sausage would recede.”

Soon almost everything could be bought in a can- at the great exhibition at crystal  in 1851, turtle soup, custard, mutton, oysters, partridges were all on view in tins, which most of the British public had not seen before.

In Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, Finn takes Melanie through the ruins where on the way Melanie “kicked a tin which lay on the pavement. It had once held pineapple rings if its label was to be believed.”

Pineapple is a symbol of empire, as the Angela Carter scholar Marie Mulvey-Roberts told me. Tinned food brought stolen, chopped up, entombed bits of the world Britain colonised to the plates of the British, including meat from Australia.

James Collins, in the Story of Canned food notes that in the 19th century  people now had an access to a “a regular Arabian Nights garden, where raspberries, apricots, olives, pineapples always ripe grow side by side with peas, pumpkins and spinach.”

I was most fascinated by ambitious failure: Tinned cans of food weighing almost twenty pounds-  well over a stone. Much harder to completely sanitise, most of these ended up being putrid.  The factory responsible for an outbreak of rotten meat meant for the navy ingredients included  hearts, tongus, liver, ligaments of the throat.

I wrote a story, Hungarian Sprats, in which a man has all of his possessions canned to protect them, only  to have it mixed up with a batch of tinned food- his possessions dispersed to many households inspired in part by the Schrodinger’s cat like quality of every tin- you do have to trust the label for the product is hermetically sealed.

I differ from Angela Carter, in that I throw out beloved sardine tins after I eat the contents. I presume, hope,  the ancient tins she bought in Bristol were empty. A deep fear of botulism stops me from keeping them too long: they go into spaghetti dishes eventually. The empty tins,oily sharp,  and smelly are abject objects, the keeping of which suggests a disorderliness like the landlord in Carter’s Elegy for a Freelance, who keeps his money in old Hoburn tobacco tins and lives  festering with cats surrounded by “ the open cans of condensed milk, the stopped clock, the yellowing circulars…”a state in my flat I am always on the verge of.   If I were craftier, I would clean them and turn them into beds for toy mice,  a place to put earrings or a child’s toy of a rudimentary telephone.

The rise in popularity of tinned fish, and I think Carter’s attraction to them, is along with austerity and nostalgia, the packaging.  In our era of refinement culture, when everything is becoming slick and plainer, and art, the plaything of billionaires less everyday for every one, they present themselves as edible  and affordable paintings. Most fish tin designs are old or  anachronistic, a stalwart maintainer fanciful designs of past eras. They encompass the very philosophy of Angela Carter’s work to me- aesthetically beautiful and gothic, socialism and the common woman with a hearty dose of Freud.

It was in the news recently that Lyle’s Golden Syrup is changing its packaging to be plainer, less morbid and biblical, removing the illustration of a dead lion surrounded by bees. In Nights at the Circus, Lizzie, the stand in mother of Fevvers,  says ““out of the strong comes forth sweetness” as it says on the Golden Syrup tins” . Out of the old tins, comes forth inspiration.  If all tins become as plain as the ones at britain’s tesco which are pallid ancestors of Warhol prints, think of all the art and ideas we will lose.

The Waitrose brand sardine tin could have been illustrated by Eric Ravilious, it has a serene Englishness. The mandala shaped Ortiz suggests an art deco glamour, Nuri from Portugal evokes the  19^th century arabesque obsession , though I can no longer eat that brand because an ex boyfriend would give them to me, stuffed in one of his green hunting socks, along with French sausages.  Catrineta sardines have a collage like package, a woman in an old diving suit like the one Salvador Dali wore to give a speech at the surrealist exhibition in London in 1936.  Minerva, illustrated with its namesake the heady Greek Goddess and perhaps denoting, how good fish oil is for the brain. She is hardly encountered, outside of museums these days, unless on the tinned shelf of a corner shop.  One my favourites is Rizzoli’s Anchovies in Spicy Sauce with an illustration of gnomes. One has, for a morbid moment, looking at it, the fear the tin will contain the tiny bodies of  naked, bearded men rather than fish. The Rizzoli factory invented the ring pull tin which gives the modern fish tin its tongue like quality.

Like all good art, fish tins evoke something beyond aesthetic pleasure.

Freud says the name uncanny  applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open. There is always the momentary repellence  at the smell and look when a fish tin is opened, the ornately illustrated lid peeled back like a tongue  and you have to remind yourself: this is why I’ve I’m here. Headless and finless,  sometimes boneless, with a loose dress of silver, floating in a tiny sea of oil . “severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm, feet that dance by themselves- all of these have something highly uncanny about them” wrote Freud in The Uncanny.

On the sardine, the head and the bottom are gone which reminds us of the Sawing a woman in half magic trick, as if we have received one third of the box.

In The Magic Toyshop, Melanie encounters a hand in a drawer of cutlery. It would be equally interesting to find one in  a just opened tin, which in many ways, resembles a coffin, especially those fanciful ones you see in British funeral homes, decorated with football team logos or pop stars.  Angela Carter once noted pork pies at a wake “possess a semiotic connection with the corpse in the coffin – the meat in the pastry”, 

Fish tins also resemble; opera houses, train stations, beds, open mouths, cars,  fish themselves as Carter notes in Wise Children Dora observes people fishing in Brighton: “someone pulled up A mackerel that shone like a new tin can. Or perhaps it was a tin can”

Fish tins also resemble little homes when homes are unaffordable. In a Guardian article from 2023 Thea Everett, suggest fish tins  “ have a collectability and are pleasing to put on our shelves and call our own, when so many other things remain financially out of reach.”

The feuille like layers of delicate fish flesh have sexual connotations, like an unwashed and alluring vagina. Freud noticed that neurotic men stated that to them there is something uncanny about the female genitals .

Carter was well aware of the sexual connotations of fish.

In wise Children, she describes return to a party from an escapade with :, ripped stockings, smelling of dead fish, smiling like the cat who got the cream, and pregnant” while in Love a woman is “ was astonished; she felt herself handled as unceremoniously as a fish on a slab, reduced only to flesh.”

In the Fall Axe Murders  “Oh lizzie in all this heat,  this dreadful heat Twice cooked fish you know how quickly fish goes off in this heat. It was lizzie’s time of the month, too. “

The uncanny, says Freud is also doubt as to whether a lifeless object might not be animate.  Carter stated in The Sadeian Woman “the word fleisch in german provokes in me an involuntary shudder. In the English language we make a fine distinction between flesh which is usually alive and typically human, and meat which is dead, inert, animal and intended for consumption.”

In Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman, Carter offers us a doll fish:

“She offered me the doll so that I could play with it myself, I saw it was not a doll at all but a large fish dressed up in baby clothes whenever the fish began to rot, mama exchanged it for a fresh one just like it so that though the doll was always changing it always stayed exactly the same.”  Though a fish, this doll imitates a real baby more completely than a fake one, as it smells fresh from being pushed out of a female body and is mortal like the rest of us.  

As the cliché goes, ‘packed like sardines’, and the old children’s game, there is something uncomfortable  in the closeness of many bodies- Orgies, incest, claustrophobia. In the Ealing studio film Dead of Night, a girl playing ‘Sardines’ at a country house, a version of hide and seek where people hide together if they find each other, a girl meets a ghost child, murdered by his half-sister. Angela Carter was over dotted on  and coddled by her parents then emotionally smothered by her first marriage-perhaps an empty sardine tin, or a full one, in some way resembled her narrative of escape.

In the Magic Toyshop, Melanie Walks into the larder

“What did they eat? Tins of things; tinned peaches, there was a whole stack of tins of peaches. Tinned beans, tinned sardines. Aunt Margaret must buy tins in bulk. There were a number of cake tins and Melanie opened one and found last night’s currant cake.”

Melanie is, in a sense, in a giant tin herself, the claustrophobic and sex laden house of her uncle. Like all tins, the house is wonderfully, colourfully decorated, but contains something meaty, edible, perhaps sickening,  something she will have to digest.

I am surprised this is, to the best of my knowledge, the only time tinned sardines are mentioned in her fiction.

In his biography of Angela Carter, Edmund Gordon states the various phobias of Angela Carter’s mother, Olive, “She was suspicious of tinned food, which, much of it being foreign-made, might have been poisoned”

No surprise, her husband, Hugh Stalker’s first piece of journalism was reporting on a case of botulism  in Scotland caused by potted meat.  (An aside on foreign made: growing up in Canada with immigrant Slavic grandparents, big on herring, my grandfather would go to the fancy department stores of Montreal and buy all sorts of  oily tinned fish to eat with his second wife, a Romanian chemist. To me, tinned fish was a little pocket of Europe, sliced out of the old country, soviet tins the most alluring of all.)

Hugh, was from a Scottish port town, which like many others, fished herring, called in Scotland ‘Silver Darlings’ which was salt cured and preserved in barrels.Gordon says the town had an inordinate amount of fishmongers and the family dwelling a pervasive reek of fish. The British food company Crosse and Blackwells produced ‘ Scotch herrings’ preserved in tomato sauce, the tin a wonderfully vivid green and red.

 In the story the Quilt Maker Carter notes “Canned fruit was a very big deal in my social class when I was a kid and during the age of austerity and food rationing and so on. Sunday teatime, guests, a class bowl of canned peach slices on the table.”

Tinned food is a particular signifier in literature, mostly used to create an atmosphere of want, poverty, nostalgia, dystopia or war.  I wrote a story in which one of the only available food items is tinned meat and golden syrup. In Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure, three sisters on an isolated compound eat tinned peaches until their teeth rot.  

Tin as a cheap material appears a lot in Carter’s work- tin flutes and toys, tin makeup container, tin wash basins, a material now mostly replaced by the eternal plastic, with the exception of tinned foods.

I recently visited the tin biscuit collection at the Victoria Albert museum. There are wonderful tins shaped like castles, boats, cars, ovens, birds nests,bucolic mills, horse drawn carriages, suitcases, cages, caskets, birds, kitchen ranges. There is something exciting or offputting in opening, for example the casket or the bird, to eat the biscuits. What is inside? A biscuit? A body? Or an idea?

A book is like a bottle a container  for an idea said Carter. I like to see her books as a tin can- beautiful, ornamental, containing something moreish and thoughtful.