"In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world"
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A real miracle, Angela Carter suggests, would have to arrive wearing the cheap costume of a con. That paradox is pure Carter: sly, profane, and tuned to a late-20th-century culture where belief has been routed through institutions of suspicion - journalism, science, the courtroom, the marketplace. In a secular age, the default posture is not faith but fraud-detection. So the miraculous can no longer present itself as radiance; it has to slip in sideways, disguised as trickery, because only the debunkable gets taken seriously enough to be examined.
The line also skewers the modern hunger for authenticity. We say we want the real, then demand it be verified by the very systems that flatten mystery into evidence. A miracle that announces itself as a miracle reads like marketing or cult recruitment. A miracle that looks like a hoax, though, earns attention: it provokes investigation, argument, spectacle. Ironically, skepticism becomes the new pathway to belief. The world grants "credit" not to the sacred but to the contested.
Carter's fiction is crowded with this logic: magic that feels like theater, desire that masquerades as ideology, the gothic rendered as stagecraft. She’s writing in the shadow of postwar disenchantment and mass media, where the uncanny is constantly simulated and sold. The subtext is not anti-faith so much as anti-naivete: when everything can be faked, only what risks being called fake can still carry the charge of the impossible.
The line also skewers the modern hunger for authenticity. We say we want the real, then demand it be verified by the very systems that flatten mystery into evidence. A miracle that announces itself as a miracle reads like marketing or cult recruitment. A miracle that looks like a hoax, though, earns attention: it provokes investigation, argument, spectacle. Ironically, skepticism becomes the new pathway to belief. The world grants "credit" not to the sacred but to the contested.
Carter's fiction is crowded with this logic: magic that feels like theater, desire that masquerades as ideology, the gothic rendered as stagecraft. She’s writing in the shadow of postwar disenchantment and mass media, where the uncanny is constantly simulated and sold. The subtext is not anti-faith so much as anti-naivete: when everything can be faked, only what risks being called fake can still carry the charge of the impossible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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