Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter's penultimate
novel, epitomizes her wildly inventive, highly idiosyncratic mode
of fiction, centered as it is on Fevvers, a Cockney artiste who
claims to have grown wings. Most critics and reviewers have seen
the main thrust of the novel to reside in the portrayal of Fevvers
as a prototype of the New Woman whose wings help her to escape
from the nets of a patriarchal nineteenth century culture into
a twentieth century feminist haven of freedom. The novel ends
with Fevvers astride her American lover, Walser (she now playing
the missionary role), enjoying apparently two triumphs - sexual
and psychological - in one: "'To think I really fooled you!'
she marveled. 'It just goes to show there's nothing like confidence'"
(295). Yet when Carter was asked by John Haffenden what Fevvers
means by this, she replied, "It's actually a statement about
the nature of fiction, about the nature of her narrative"
(90). The more you look closely at this novel, the more you realize
just how literal Carter was being in that reply. More than any
other of her works of fiction, Nights at the Circus takes
as its subject the hypnotic power of narrative, the ways in which
we construct ourselves and our world by narrative means, the materiality
of fiction and the fictionality of the material world, and the
contract between writer and reader that, according to Carter,
invites the reader at the end of this book "to take one further
step into the fictionality of the narrative, instead of coming
out of it and looking at it as though it were an artefact"
(Haffenden 91). It is not just Fevvers who triumphs at having
fooled Walser. It is Carter gloating over having fooled the reader
into following her own narrative to this end point - and beyond.
What this suggests is that this entire novel operates in an important
way as a form of metanarrative: one of its main concerns is with
the potentialities and limits of the act of narration. On reflection
one remembers that many of Carter's other works of fiction begin
by making the narrative act their subject. The "Introduction"
to The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)
opens with "I remember everything" (11). Four pages
later Chapter 1 opens: "I cannot remember exactly how it
began" (15). Memory is part of the bewilderingly contradictory
nature of the art of narration. "Flesh and the Mirror,"
a story collected in Fireworks (1974) immediately implicates
the protagonist in the narrative act by starting: "It was
MIDNIGHT--I chose my times and set my scenes with the precision
of the born artiste" (67). "Ashputtle or The Mother's
Ghost," a story collected posthumously in American Ghosts
and Old World Wonders (1993) is subtitled "Three Versions
of One Story." The first version begins:
But although you could easily take the story away from Ashputtle
and center it on the mutilated sisters - indeed, it would be easy
to think of it as a story about cutting bits off women, so that
they will fit in, . . . nevertheless, the story always
begins not with Ashputtle or her stepsisters but with Ashputtle's
mother even if, at the beginning of the story, the mother herself
is just about to exit the narrative because she's at death's door:
"A rich man's wife fell sick, and, feeling that her end was
near, she called her only daughter to her bedside." (110)
Right from the opening sentence of this story we are invited to
meditate on what follows as an exercise in narrative options.
The actual opening of the story within the narrative framework
is relegated to a quotation, drawing our attention to the fact
that all narratives originate with the human voice telling a story
and that all of them are retellings of an earlier telling. The
emphasis is not on the what but the how, not on the fabula or
story but on the syuzhet or way in which it is narrated.
Nights at the Circus opens with a similar focusing on the
extraordinary nature of the act of narration:
"Lor' love you, sir!" Fevvers sang out in a voice that
clanged like dustbin lids. "As to my place of birth, why,
I first saw the light of day right here in smoky old London, didn't
I! Not billed the 'Cockney Venus', for nothing, sir, though they
could just as well 'ave called me 'Helen of the High Wire', due
to the unusual circumstances in which I come ashore - for I never
docked via what you might call the normal channels, sir,
oh, dear me, no; but, just like Helen of Troy, was hatched.
(7)
We are plunged straight into the narration of a very unusual narrator
whose peculiar combination of Cockney English and classical erudition
suggests her status as half human and half mythical - precisely
the status of narrative itself. Her voice and her origins constitute
an anomaly. Like narrative, she hasn't come from nowhere, but
the method of her arrival in the world removes her from the realm
of the normal. Even her choice of language veers from the clichéd
("first saw the light of day") to the witty use of an
extended metaphor with double entendre ("come ashore
. . .docked . . . the normal channels") Fevvers disembarks
from what Salman Rushdie has called "the Sea of Stories."
She is at once an original and an already established narrative
type or actant. As Carter explained, Fevvers "is, fundamentally,
the archetypal busty blonde: prototypes include Mae West, Diana
Dors..." (Kemp 7). She originates in the vast narrative storehouse
of performing heroines, but Carter then grafts onto this model
additional characteristics (her wings) that belong to a quite
different stock figure - goddess or (fallen) angel or bird-(wo)man.
Both as narrator and narrative subject of her own narration, Fevvers
is an oxymoron, characterizing in the way she tells her story
the utterly contradictory nature of the narrative act she is embarking
on (to continue the metaphor).
Like a writer, she is a performer whose stage (and narrative)
act gives off "the greasy, inescapable whiff of stage magic"
(16). Like any good artist she is a bit of a confidence trickster
whose very appeal depends on her being suspect. The possibility
that she may be a hoax is what draws her audiences, and Walser,
and the reader. In this sense, as Michael Bell suggests, "her
very authenticity is a fake" (30). Even the flight of this
bird-woman, which has commonly been interpreted as "predominantly
an image of liberation" (Palmer 199), is just as much an
image of the precarious balancing act in the performance of narration.
It is not a coincidence that in the introduction to Expletives
Deleted (1992), a collection of her essays, Carter uses the
image of the trapeze artist to characterize narrative: "We
travel along the thread of narrative like high-wire artistes"
(2). Consider Fevvers' first attempt at flight from the mantelpiece
in the drawing room of Ma Nelson's brothel when for the shortest
moment she hovers before falling flat on her face: "and yet,
sir, for however short a while, the air had risen up beneath my
adolescent wings and denied to me the downward pull of the great,
round world, to which, hitherto, all human things had necessarily
clung" (31). That feeling of suspense, of being momentarily
exempted from the laws of material existence, is the narrative
effect Carter herself is attempting to achieve in this novel.
Narrative temporality usually involves a duality or opposition
between story time and narrative time. Narrators use one time
scheme in order to evoke another. What is the true significance
of the sound of Big Ben striking midnight again and again while
Fevvers and Lizzie are telling their story? In the Envoi to the
novel Fevvers admits that she and Lizzie, her cockney step-mother,
played a trick on Walser that night with the aid of Ma Nelson's
clock (292). But how could they interfere with the mechanism of
Big Ben, at that time the time-keeper for the entire civilized
world? What she must mean is that they cast a narrative spell
on him, made him think that the passage of time was put on hold
when it really wasn't. For the duration of their story they maintain
the illusion that time is suspended. As Carter says elsewhere
about the art of narration, "a good writer can make you believe
time stands still" (Expletives Deleted 2). Big Ben
and the external world of normality that it regulates is made
temporarily to conform to the perpetual midnight recorded on Ma
Nelson's clock, which itself acts as "the sign, or signifier
of Ma Nelson's little private realm," where the only permitted
hour was "the dead centre of the day or night, the shadowless
hour, the hour of vision and revelation, the still hour in the
centre of the storm of time" (29). Ma Nelson's realm is not
just conjured up by an act of narration, but acts as a representation
of the timeless fictive world created by narration. But the spell
is by its nature temporary. And Carter positively revels in such
temporal disruptions, because, as she writes elsewhere, in this
way the reader is "being rendered as discontinuous as the
text" (Shaking a Leg 465). She embraces the postmodern
to the extent that it forces the reader into an active relationship
with the text. In the third section of the novel Carter even manages
to construct an internal double time scheme whereby Fevvers and
Lizzie observe that in less than a week of their time Walser has
managed to grow a long beard. Carter might well be parodying the
most famous instance of a double time scheme in Othello,
especially as she twice quotes from this play (228, 264). Most
critics agree that the contradictions between short and long time
in the play are meant to escape the notice of the audience. Carter,
by comparison, has Lizzie draw attention to the discrepancy in
order to demonstrate the power narrative has over our normal sense
of measurable time in the external world. For a limited duration
the imginative world of narrative can supplant the dictates of
material reality. Imagined time coexists in our consciousness
with measured time. Neither is more real and each has its turn
at preeminence.
Narration, especially oral narration, needs an audience, just
as a spectacle or performance does. And the audience needs to
be kept in suspense until the end of the act. Will she reach the
other end of the rope? Or, if she falls, will she really be able
to use her wings to save herself? "[I]f she isn't suspect,
where's the controversy? What's the news" (11)? Who better
to represent the audience than the sceptic, Walser? Just as the
larger audience gets its kicks from suspecting that Fevvers the
performer may be a hoax, so Walser reflects this attitude by suspecting
that Fevvers the narrator may be a hoax. Like all readers of fiction,
Walser has to be lured out of his sceptical frame of mind and
induced to accept the improbabilities of a world of invention.
In fact Walser is the preeminent representative in the novel of
the material world that relegates the stuff of fiction to a subordinate
role - one of entertainment. An American reporter, he cultivates
"the professional necessity to see all and believe nothing"
(10). A "connoisseur of the tall tale," he is questioning
Fevvers "for a series of interviews tentatively entitled
'Great Humbugs of the World'" (11).
Fevvers, however, proves more than his match. For all his professional
detachment, he quickly becomes "a prisoner of her voice .
. . Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren's"
(43). Half mythical, she shares with Homer's fabulous female creatures
their hypnotic attraction - and their potential destructiveness.
Indeed, Walser feels half stifled by Fevvers' overpowering presence:
"If he got out of her room for just one moment . . . then
he might recover his sense of proportion" (52). What he fears
for is the loss of his fragile sense of self, which is also described
in terms of the narrative pact between writer and reader: "there
were scarcely any of those little, what you might call personal
touches to his personality, as if his habit of suspending belief
extended even unto his own being" (10). Notice that Walser
suspends belief, not disbelief. He adopts an atheistic attitude
towards the power of the artistic imagination. He stands opposed
to Coleridge's (and most imaginative writers') desire to create
"a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows
of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the
moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (Coleridge). Walser
doesn't believe in either Fevvers' (narrative) act or himself.
As the representative of the sceptical materialistic world, he
is shown from the start to be flawed by his failure to admit into
his life the world of fantasy, dreams and invention--at least
until he meets Fevvers. It is his consequent lack of belief in
himself that makes him vulnerable to her superior linguistic skills.
Fevvers has to overcome his scepticism by the sheer power of her
rhetoric. Or rather, Fevvers and Lizzie between them (because
the number of narrators in this novel multiply) "unfolded
the convolutions of their joint stories together" (40). (Lizzie
is an interesting counterpart to Fevvers, a more realist - and
Marxist - narrator compared to Fevvers with her risky flights
of fantasy.) Walser feels like "a sultan faced with not one
but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories
into the single night" (40). Nights at the Circus
aspires to be a miniature condensed version of A Thousand and
One Nights, that classic quintessence of the act and art of
narration. Fevvers knows as well as Scheherezade that to come
to the end of her story is to face her own form of death - the
death of the heroic persona she has constructed within her narrative.
So she has to cast a spell over Walser with her voice. "Fevvers
lassooed him with her narrative and dragged him along with her"
(60). "The voice," Carter has asserted, "is the
first instrument of literature; narrative precedes text"
(Shaking a Leg 476). A defiant phonocentrist, for Carter
"the really important thing is narrative" (Expletives
Deleted 2). Where does she find the magic for her spell-binding
use of narrative? Ostensibly she inherits it from Ma Nelson, the
keeper of the brothel which was home to her as a child. She bequeaths
Fevvers her ceremonial sword that she would "sometimes use
as a staff with which to conduct the revels - her wand, like Prospero's"
(37). Where Ma Nelson conjures up the sexual revels that take
place in her house of ill fame, Fevvers becomes a different kind
of "Mistress of the Revels" (49), conjuring up with
her seemingly magical eloquence the spirits and baseless fabric
of her vision, her story. Her greatest gift is not her ability
to fly off the solid ground, but to retell the story of her flights
of fancy that leave the ground of fact to which Walser is bound
by his scepticism.
However Walser undergoes his own seachange under the spell of
Fevvers' narrative wand or sword. The relationship between Fevvers
and Walser develops into something similar to that between an
oral narrator and a writer of narrative. Walser becomes at once
Fevvers' amanuensis and a narrator in his own right. As Part One
draws to a conclusion he finds himeself turning more and more
a recording instrument for Fevvers and Lizzie. His desire to shape
her narrative to conform to his own ideas of narrative reliability
gradually succumbs to the force of her torrential narration. Fact
or fiction? The distinction soon loses its clarity as it becomes
clear that Fevvers needs to blur the two concepts in order to
capture the interest of her audience in her performance - theatrical
and narrative. "The hand that followed their dictations across
the page obediently as a little dog no longer felt as if it belonged
to him" (78). As "a passionate amateur of the tall tale,"
he can only admire Fevvers' narrative power: "What a performance!
Such style! Such vigour" (90)!
But once he has decided to follow the circus to Russia, his role
changes. Fevvers and Lizzie are no longer the principal narrators
of the story. The anonymous third person narrator who is present
in Part One takes over the main burden of the narration in Part
Two. Meantime Walser has himself become a convert to the world
of art - both a performer (an apprentice clown) and a narrator
of events as they unfold. His first attempts at imaginative writing
are clumsy and stereotyped.His typed despatch back to his editor
smacks heavily of the overladen style of the travel writer:
Russia is a sphinx; St Petersburg, the beautiful smile of her
face. Petersburg, loveliest of all hallucinations, the shimmering
mirage in the Northern wilderness glimpsed for a breathless
second between black forest and the frozen sea. (96)
His narrrative style is no match for Fevvers. But even his use
of language stresses the illusionistic element that characterizes
all forms of imaginative narration, with its references to the
solid presence of the city as the "loveliest of all hallucinations"
and a "mirage." Walser, the hard-boiled reporter, finds
himself indulging in "the sugar syrup of nostalgia,"
which in turn is responsible for his "elaboration of artifice"
(97).
No matter who assumes control of the narrative, the story teller
of the moment is immediately overwhelmed by the narrative's need
to extend itself beyond the factual and the verifiable. In Part
One the mouthless Toussaint is forced to tell in written form
the last part of the story of Madame Schreck which only he witnessed.
The whole episode involving Madame Schreck, like that concerning
Mr Rosencreutz, invokes and simultaneously parodies the genre
of Gothic horror tales. Toussaint tells how he found the clothes
of Madame Schreck but nothing in them, like "the shed carapace
of an insect" (85). He is the first witness "to find
her - not dead, for who can say, now, when she died, or if she
had ever lived, but . . . passed away" (85). No sooner are
we caught within the fabric of this Gothic fantasy than Lizzie
detaches us with her metafictional appraisal of his performance:
"That Toussaint! . . .He's a lovely way with words"
(85). Carter may well have acquired this narrative oscillation
from her admiration for Poe's Gothic horror stories. "His
theatricality," she has written of him, "ensures we
know all the time that the scenery is cardboard, the blade of
the axe is silver paint on papier maché, the men and women
in the stories unreal, two-dimensional stock characters, yet still
we shiver" (Shaking a Leg 482). Like Poe, she inviters her
readers to exercize both their sense of fantasy (and fear) and
their objective critical faculties simultaneously.
This alternation between immersion in the narrative and detachment
from it is typical of the way Carter balances the claims of fact
and fiction throughout the novel. The factual is invariably exposed
as a flawed account of the totality of human experience. Yet once
we, like Walser, have been trapped in the dark interior of a fictional
world such as Ma Nelson's or Madame Schreck's, Carter lets in
the light of day to reveal the cheap and sordid props that have
been used to create the illusion that had us in its grip. Just
before the prostitutes abandon Ma Nelson's house they open the
curtains for the first time since they've been there. "The
luxury of that place had been nothing but illusion, created by
the candles of midnight, and, in the dawn, all was sere, worn-out
decay. We saw the stains of damp and mould on ceilings and the
damask walls; the gilding on the mirrors was all tarnished and
a bloom of dust obscured the glass . . ." (49). The passage
from which this comes is not simply a symbolic representation
of the passing of the Victorian age. It is also one instance of
the many occasions when Carter demonstrates to her readers the
power of narrative. Look, she seems to be saying, like Fevvers,
I've fooled you again.
Then, before we know it, she is plunging us back into another
strand of fictive narrative, transforming what has just been exposed
to the light of day into a newly convincing fictive illusion:
"... the parlour itself began to waver and dissolve before
our very eyes. Even the solidity of the sofas seemed called into
question for they and the heavy leather armchairs now had the
dubious air of furniture carved out of smoke" (49). An alert
reader will note that the narrator's (Fevvers') use of "smoke"
neatly anticipates the action of the prostitutes that follows,
which is to burn the house to the ground. Fevvers concludes: "And
so the first chapter of my life went up in flames, sir" (50).
This is metafictional with a vengeance. As narrator, Fevvers naturally
shapes her life into digestible fictional chapters. She is simultaneously
referring to the end of her life in the brothel now that it is
burnt down, the end of her existing means of living, and to the
end of the first segment of her narrative, the veracity of which
can only be vouchsafed by the two objects saved from the fire
- Lizzie's clock and Fevvers' sword (or wand), both items that
appear to defy the normal laws of physics. The fictive illusion
lasts for as long as it is being narrated, after which it doesn't
simply end; it is consumed and turns to smoke. Yet, like the phoenix,
it is destined to rise from its own ashes. Well-told narrative
is powerful enough to expose its own procedures to the light of
day and yet be confident in its ability to plunge the reader back
nito the nighttime world of fictionality. Carter seesm to be implying
that neither the world of fact or fiction is sufficient unto itself.
Epitemologically opposed to one another, they nevertheless require
the other for completion, that is, for an adequate explanation
of life as we know it.
It has been observed that the movement of the novel "toward
increasingly foreign and remote places is accompanied by a movement
away from any stable ground of reality and toward the ever more
fantastic" (Michael 495). Carter has described Part Two:
St Petersburg as "very elaborately plotted, like a huge circus
with the ring in the middle." She adds, "A circus is
always a microcosm" (Haffenden 89). Inevitably many critics,
like Paulina Palmer, have seen the circus ring "with its
hierarchy of male performers" as "an effective symbol
of the patriarchal social order" at the turn of the century
(198). But it is more than just that. It offers an image of the
world at large. Its ring is described as "the wheel whose
end is its beginning, the wheel of fortune, the potter's wheel
on which our clay is formed, the wheel of life on which we are
all broken" (107). The world in its totality can only be
comprehended by the use of such literary tropes. Like any other
artistic performance the circus offers creation ("the potter's
wheel") and destruction (the wheel of the torturer). It can
"absorb madness and slaughter into itself" (180), as
the clowns can, as the Princess and her tigers can, as the world
of art and the imagination can.
In this section Walser, no longer just a reporter, finds himself
drawn into Fevvers' ongoing story by a desire for her that has
been generated by her spellbinding narration of her extravagant
past life. Even love can owe its origins to the power of narration.
When the tiger's attack blows Walser's cover the excuse he offers
to Fevvers - "I'm here to write a story. . . About you and
the circus" (114) - represents the appeal of one narrator
to another. Walser has become simultaneously a performer in word
and deed - "your correspondent, incognito" (91), and
young Jack, the apprentice-clown. And his new occupation as a
performer affects his performance as a narrator. Looking over
his copy for his paper, he realizes the extent to which he has
been precipitated into the language of hyberbole by his new occupation.
"Walser-the-clown, it seemed, could juggle with the dictionary
with a zest that would have abashed Walser-the-foreign-correspondent"
(98). Clowning with words is now his dual occupation. In effect
Walser now recognizes the inescapable ambiguity of the langauge
he sought to tame and confine to the factual. Language juggles
with its users as readily as its expert users juggle with language.
Walser has become caught up in the poststructuralist world of
signification disseminating without end. Nor can his developing
sophistication in the use of language be separated from his developing
maturity as a human being. Dressed in his clown's outfir Walser
"experienced the freedom that lies behind the mask, within
dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and indeed, with
the language which is vital to our being" (103). Narration,
then, is no mere escapist fantasy for Carter. We remake ourselves
by retelling our stories about ourselves better.
Walser, however, is a mere amateur in a community of professional
circus performers. Not only do they outperform him in their acts;
they also prove superior narrators. Buffo, the chief clown, tells
a story about a multiple tragedy in his family in which all those
he loved were wiped out in one fell swoop. When he is forced to
perform the same afternoon, his grief-stricken cry "The sky
is full of blood" only produces more gusts of laughter from
the audience. In introducing it he says that this story is not
just told about himself but "has been told of every Clown
since the invention of the desolating profession" (120).
He goes on to explain to his naive apprentice-clown, Walser, "This
story is not precisely true but has the poetic truth of myth and
so attaches itself to each and every laughter-maker" (121).
Stories have their own form of truth and operate independently
of their tellers, attaching themselves willy-nilly to protagonists
of their choice, protagonists who fulfil a similar function in
different times and places. Buffo here displays a sophisticated
knowledge of the nature of the narrative act, possibly even an
acquaintance with the theories of Propp or Greimas, both of whom
recognized that a particular role or actant in a story
can be filled by any number of successive characters or acteurs.
It is also significant that the clowns' function is described
in such a way that it exactly parallels that of the tellers of
stories:
...even if the clowns detonated the entire city . . . nothing
would really change. Nothing. The exploded buildings would float
up into the air insubstantial as bubbles, and gently waft to earth
again on exactly the same places where they had stood before.
(151)
As comic performers they parallel Carter's own role as narrator
of this book which she has said "was intended as a comic
novel" (Katsavos 15). The clown and comic writer are each
offered the same mixed blessing: "you can do anything you
like, as long as nobody takes you seriously" (152). They
play at life, creating the illusion that life is nothing but play.
And yet Carter clearly believes that fiction has more to offer
than sheer play.*
The circus is filled with performers each of whom has a different
way of narrating his or her story. There is the Colonel, the comic
representative of American capitalisman, unceasing player at the
Ludic Game: "'Bamboozlem.' Play the game to win" (147)!
There is the Princess who never speaks yet whose story nevertheless
gets mysteriously told, as the omniscient narrator is quick to
point out. There is Mignon, a waif of a woman, whose fictional
ancestry derives from Goethe via Alban Berg (Haffenden 82), and
whose past profession consisted of posing as a dead woman returned
to visit her grieving relations, yet another variation on the
art of artistic illusion. She and the Princess end up overcoming
their language differences by communicating through their music.
Once again art proves the channnel for the discovery of love.
Art may be nothing but illusion; but the illusion can be powerful
enough to transform the lives of those caught up in it. Above
all there are Lamarck's Educated Apes. They teach themselves writing
in order to be able to write out their own contract which gives
them an escape clause and a bonus. Carter hilariously juxtaposes
humans and apes in the scene where the Professor (an ape) gets
Walser to strip (apart from a dunce's hat) and declaim Hamlet's
well known soliloquy, "What a piece of work is man!"
Meanwhile the class of apes solemnly take notes on his method
of voice production to the background accompaniment of the Strong
Man's accelerating grunts as he reaches orgasm with Mignon. The
tragic is transformed into the comic as that piece of work, man,
makes a fool of himself in Walser's case, and proves more animalistic
than the apes in the Strong Man's case. Walser's borrowed Shakespearean
eloquence only serves to place him on a lower rung of the chain
of being than the self-educated apes.
Narrative can not only stimulate love in those caught in its spell:
it can also lead to death. Even before much of the circus menage
is blown up by rebels in Part Three: Siberia, its final performance
in St Petersburg is marred by the Princess's enforced shooting
of the jealous tigress, and Walser's narrow escape from being
slaughtered as a chicken by the drink-crazed Buffo. Part Two ends
with Fevvers' near death as a free woman at the hands of the Grand
Duke intent on turning her literally into a bird in a gilded cage.
Carter brilliantly juxtaposes the exit from the circus of the
dead tigress and of Fevvers on her way to the Grand Duke: "At
the courtyard gate, a glamorous droshky stood ready to receive
her, behind the melancholy van from the knacker's yard. As a befurred
footman handed Fevvers into one, the Strong Man pitched the carcass
into the other" (182). The narrational meaning is clear:
Fevvers is in danger of meeting a similar fate to that of the
tigress, despite the glamorous trappings of her carriage. Critics
such as Magali Michael see the Grand Duke's plan as a typical
male attempt at "objectification," one more example
of "the daily victimization of women" (502). But it
is equally an attempt to freeze Fevvers in her role as freak performer,
another object in his collection of exquisite miniatures. From
the start of the novel Fevvers' appeal has been that of a spectacle:
"Look! Hands off" (15)! She owes her independence to
others' desire to look at her. "All you can do to earn your
living," Lizzie tells her, "is to make a show of yourself"
(185). Fevvers comes closest to extinction when the Grand Duke
almost succeeds in fixing her for ever as an artistic object to
be gazed at. In effect he would have robbed her of her ability
to narrate her own story and so determine her own destiny. The
act of narration is both employed and shown to be a self-liberating
act. We can invent stories for ourselves that free us - socially,
psychologically and politically - from those inherited stories
of the past that serve to inhibit and constrain us. I narrate;
therefore I become.
The gaze occupies an important place in this book. In his essay
on "The Uncanny" Freud first theorized the operation
of the gaze as a phallic activity linked to a desire for sadistic
mastery of the object which is cast as the passive, masochistic,
feminine victim of the gaze .Carter shows at least some acquaintance
with the theory, perhaps via Laura Mulvey's appropriation of it
in her celebrated essay on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema." She employs it not just to exemplify the way the
masculine gaze subordinates the woman to his voyeuristic needs,
but also to demonstrate how the gaze operates in the sado-masochistic
relationship between writer and reader. In attracting the gaze
of others, Fevvers is also reflecting the narrator's need to command
the attention of listeners or readers. What she is inviting them
to gaze at is the enigma of her status as a performer and narrator
of her performance. "'Is she fact or is she fiction'"
(7)? But the narrative act is filled with dangers. Fevvers' invitation
to enjoy her as spectacle invites more aggressive responses than
those of the non-touching curious public. Even Walser is seized
by a desire to master this riddle and journalistically cut her
down to size. More threatening are the attempts of Mr Rosencreutz
and the Grand Duke to appropriate her otherness to themselves,
to force her into becoming a subordinate part of their story,
an exclusive object of their gaze.
The gaze involves a degree of reciprocity. The writer gazes at
the world and then offers the world a narrative version of itself
to gaze at. This interactive relationship is given fictional embodiment
in this novel in Section Three where Carter describes the establishment
by the Countess P--, an undiscovered murderess, of a panopticon,
a prison for condemned murderesses built according to a design
first outlined by Jeremy Bentham. The interaction between the
Countess and her prisoners parallels that between a writer and
her readers:
It was a panopticon she forced them to build, a hollow
circle of cells shaped like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall
of which was composed of grids of steel and, in the middle of
the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded
by windows. In that room she'd sit all day and stare and stare
and stare at her murderesses and they, in turn, sat all day and
stared at her. (210)
Like the novelist, the Countess makes herself mistress of all
she gazes at. Yet she is trapped by her own construction. She
needs her gaze to be returned to reassure her of her power which
involves deceiving her captive audience into thinking she is looking
at them day and night (just as the omniscient narrator deceives
her readers into thinking that she is omnipotent and present everywhere
in her fictional world). In the end the prisoners find a way of
planning their escape which appropriately enough involves their
writing secret notes using their own bodily fluids. Isn't this
a metaphor for readers' freedom to impose their own interpretation
(based on their own bodily experiences) on the narrative, especially
when it is what Barthes calls a "writerly" text? "The
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author,"
Barthes wrote (Image - Music - Text 148), and death is
exactly what awaits the Countess when her prisoners are born into
their new life in which they are free to construct their own narrative
of their lives.
However much Carter claims, both within the text and in her
comments about the ending, to be inviting the reader to become
a producer rather than a consumer of the text, the fact remains
that she continues to exercize tight if inconspicuous control
of the narrative throughout its duration. This raises interesting
questions about how Barthes' advocacy of the writerly text is
to be interpreted. Accoring to Barthes, "the writerly text
is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world
(the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticize
by some singular system (Ideoogy, Genius, Criicim) which reduces
the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity
of languages" (S/Z 5). Barthes is offering an eloquent
and partisan defense of the essentially polysemantic nature of
all fictional texts. Like most writers living in a poststructuralist
age, Carter accepts the basic reality of such texts. But that
does ot stop her from attempting to exclude specific interpetations
of her text on which he launches preemptive strikes. When the
female ex-convict determine to found their own utopia which will
exclude any members of the male sex, they are forced to ask the
male Escapee for a pint or two of sperm so that they can "ensure
the survival of this little republic of women" (240). Carter
allows Lizzie to deliver a blistering Marxist critiqe of this
particular fantasy of forming an all-female socety: "'What'll
they do with the boy babies? Feed them to the polar bears? To
the female polar bears?" she asks (240-1). It is ironic that
one feminst critic still manages to insist that in the novel "the
perspective becomes increasingly woman-centered . . . and the
emergence of a female counter-culture is celebrated" (Palmer
180). This only goes to show that, while on the one hand no author
is prepared to accept their death at the hands of the newly born
text, on the other hand an author's attempts to place limits however
minimal on the galaxy of signifiers that constitute the writerly
text (according to Barthes) is doomed to be thwarted by its readers.
The difference between readerly and writerly texts is a matter
of degree, not of kind. In laying bare this novel's narrative
strategies and incorporating both writer and reader within the
fiction, Carter is merely edging the text in the direction of
the ultimately unattainable writerly extreme of the specrum.
Fevvers barely eludes the Grand Duke's carefully plotted scheme
(he would make a good thriller writer) to reify her as an art
object. How she contrives to escape is by a double act that constitutes
one of Carter's most brazen instances of narrative manipulation
in the book. While she puts on a sexual performance for the Grand
Duke (masturbating him), she puts on a purely fictional performance
for the reader. While bringing the Duke to a sexual climax she
brings her fictional life in St Petersburg to its own climax by
escaping in the Grand Duke's miniature replica of the Trans-Siberian
Express:
In those few seconds of his lapse of consciousness, Fevvers ran
helter-skelter down the platform, opened the door of the first-class
compartment and clambered aboard.
"Look what a mess he's made of your dress, the pig,"
said Lizzie.
The weeping girl threw herself into the woman's arms... (192)
Before we readers have time to protest over the impossibility
of such an escape (it defies all the laws of space-time), the
new strand of narrative has caught us up and hurried us on into
a new self-contained world of fiction that is of course just as
reliant on illusion as was the last one.
In fact this new fictional world is the most extravagant of the
three settings in the novel, a Siberia of the mind, a land given
life purely by the narrator's brilliant use of language: "Outside
the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness
where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked
splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half
a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the
wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it
the entire sky" (197). Vivid images like that of the wolves
sweep us along with the narrative flood, and Carter has such confidence
in its power that she can afford to leave hints of the wholly
invented ("unimaginable") nature of a landscape that
only "seem[s]" to be how it is described as being. Within
another page Carter feels able to puncture our suspension of disbelief
with impunity: "we were progressing through the vastness
of nothing to the extremities of nowhere" (198). A little
later the linguistically fabricated nature of this landscape is
made even clearer by the use of a telling metaphor: "The
white world around them looked newly made, a blank sheet of fresh
paper on which they could inscribe whatever future they wished"
(218). The Siberian landscape is nothing but an inscription on
paper, and no sooner has she persuaded us of its presence than
she destroys the illusion in typical postmodern fashion. Why?
Because she believes that fiction constitutes not "a timeless,
placeless dream world," but a form of "heightened reality"
(Shaking a Leg 459). As such it needs to combine the tricks
of the illusionist with the exposés of the sceptic.
When the train carrying the circus is blown up by outlaws Carter
offers an equally brilliant instance of how words can be conjured
with to make us believe anything, however improbable. The tigers
had been housed in the "wagon salon" with its mirrors.
After the crash "the tigers were all gone into the mirrors"
(205). Carter's explanation of this surrealistic phenomenon is
as intellectually convincing as it is mimetically impossible:
And, as for the tigers, as if Nature disapproved of them for their
unnatural dancing, they had frozen into their own reflections
and been shattered, too, when the mirrors broke. As if that burning
energy you glimpsed between the bars of their pelts had convulsed
in a great response to the energy released in fire around us and,
in exploding, they scattered their appearances upon that glass
in which they had been breeding sterile reduplications. (206)
The repetition of "as if" and the stress on "reflections"
and "reduplications" clearly invites us to reflect ourselves
on the nature of fictive reflection. The way the tigers survive
as fragments of relected images is very reminiscent of René
Magritte's paintings such as Le Faux Miroir (The False
Mirror) where the reflection of sky and clouds has become the
color of an eye's iris. Carter explains, "if dreams are real
as dreams, then there is a materiality to symbols; there's a materiality
to imaginative life and imaginative experience which should be
taken quite seriously" (Haffenden 85).
Part Three continues Carter's exploration of the nature, the power
and the limits of the narrative act. Where Part One borrowed heavily
from the genre of autobiography, with two digressions into Gothic
horror, and where Part Two with its intricate plotting parodies
the well-made novel, Part Three pushes the limits of the picaresque
mode to an extreme. Carter defines the picaresque as "a certain
eighteenth-century fictional device . . . where people have adventures
in order to find themselves in places where they can discuss philosophical
concepts without distractions" (Haffenden 87). The concepts
that are discussed in this final section are not confined to those
of gender, as many of Carter's critics appear to assume. An equally
dominant concept is the place of illusion in human life and consciousness,
or rather the illusionistic nature of human experience. Where
Fevvers was Carter's main vehicle in Part One for the exploration
of this concept, it is Walser who enables her to pursue it into
a surrealist world of dreams and visions in Part Three.
Suffering from amnesia, Walser accepts without question the value
systems of the Shaman whose task "was the interpretation
of the visible world about him via the information he acquired
through dreaming. When he slept, which he did much of the time,
he would, could he have written it, have put a sign on his door:
'Man at work'" (253). The Shaman, then, exists almost entirely
in a world of dreams and fantasy. And it is fitting that Walser,
previously the representative of a materialist civilization obsessed
by facts should fall under the influence of this comic representative
of the irrational and the surreal. Even the bear he lives with
is "both a real, furry and beloved bear and, at the same
time, a transcendentasl kind of meta-bear, a minor deity..."
(257). Carter has great fun exposing Walser to the upside down
values of the Shaman's shadowy world. But she is also clearly
not interested in a narrative world that is nothing but illusion.
Fact or fiction? As she has said, "Part of the point of the
novel is that you are kept uncertain" (Katsavos 13). So Fevvers
is reintroduced to counter the Shaman with her distrust of "mages,
wizards, impresarios" who "came to take away her singularity
as though it were their own invention" (289). In the god
hut she turns the tables on him and restores Walser, not to the
material world, but to the ambiguous world of narrative, where
she needs him to restore her confidence in herself as enigmatic
bird-woman: "'That's the way to start the interview!' she
cried. 'Get out your pencil and we'll begin" (291). The novel
ends where it begins, with the act of oral and written narration.
Both Fevvers and Walser, like the other characters in the novel,
are repeatedly exposed to the reader as fictional constructs,
illusionistic materializations of language. According to Carter,
"Fevvers starts off as a metaphor come to life - a winged
spirit" (Haffenden 93). In subscribing to the postmodern
consensus that we as subjects are constructed by the symbolic
order of language, Carter is simultaneously celebrating the power
of language, especially narrative language, to shape human destiny.
Fevvers' personality is produced by the employment of literary
tropes, especially paradox and oxymoron. Both the descriptions
of her and her actions rely on a conjunction of seeming opposites:
"Cockney Venus," "Helen of the High Wire"
(&), "winged barmaid" (16), "the Virgin Whore"
(55), "the Madonna of the Arena" (126). In each case
her mythological/religious status is undercut by an attribute
that is thoroughly earthy. If wings make one think of angels and
goddesses, the rest of her physique has been "thrown on a
common wheel out of coarse clay" (12). She has "the
shoulders of a voluptuous stevedore" (15), writes Carter,
hilariously transferring the epithet "voluptuous" from
Fevvers' shoulders to the stevedore. Fevvers is a combination
of the mythic and the mundane. The champagne Fevvers drinks is
kept in the toilet jug that is packed with fishmonger's ice to
which still cling some fish scales. She has the "voice of
a celestial fishwife" - another instance of oxymoron (43).
In fact everything about is her and her story is distinctly fishy.
Fevvers also displays a highly unlikely range of learning that,
when brought into juxtaposition with her use of Cockney English,
provides a preeminantly verbal source of humor throughout the
novel. Abducted to Mr Rosencreutz's paradoxically newly built
Gothic mansion, Fevvers has only to listen to his mumbo-jumbo
for a short paragraph's length to be able to accurately place
him in an esoteric world of pseudo theology-cum-metaphysics: "This
is some kind of heretical possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic
Rosicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie! I
exort myself" (77). The "thinks I" and "girlie!"
belong verbally to a totally different social and intellectual
discourse from what immediately precedes them or from her use
of "exort" after them. Similarly her conduct veers from
the god-like to the avaricious. "She was feeling supernatural
tonight. She wanted to eat diamonds" (182). What imbues
Fevvers with her vibrant sense of fictional life is just this
conjunction of opposing qualities. At once venus and Scrooge her
subjectivity is intertextually constructed out of paradox and
enigma.
Walser adopts a different trajectory. Starting out as a sceptic
who puts all his faith in facts, he has to lose his protective
shell and acquire an inner life, "a realm of speculation
and surmise within himself that was entirely his own" (260-1).
Like the reader, he has to learn to accept illusion as playing
as valid a role in human life as fact. Already in Part Two when
he first makes his face up as a clown "he experienced the
. . . freedom to juggle with being ..." (103) Walser here
is given the same godlike powers as the novelist to reconstruct
himself as a different subject. Yet he secretly continues his
life as a reporter and exposer of the illusions he has become
a part of. So in Part Three Carter has him undergo a form of death
(memory loss after the train crash) and rebirth into a world far
more illusionistic than that found in realist fiction. When in
the last section of the book he becomes the Shaman's assistant,
he enters a realm in which "there existed no difference between
fact and fiction; instead, a sort of magic realism" (260).
Walser is literally made to enter Carter's magic realist world
of fiction where the miraculous forms an accepted part of the
normal. Carter herself uses magic in her fiction because for her
fiction is magic, with its "ability to create an absolutely
convincing illusion" - which instantly exposes itself (Goldsworthy
6). She has called this book "a sort of Dickensian novel
about people who absolutely could not exist" (Smith 75).
It is no coincidence that at the end of the book Walser, like
Fevvers, is "hatched out of the shell of unknowing"
(294). Both arrive ab ovo, hatched from the fertile brain
of their narrative inventor.
Once again Carter wishes to foreground the fictional means by
which her characters are constructed at the same as she is convincing
her readers of their credibility. Think back to Madame Schreck,
for instance, whom Carter builds up as a money-grasping, exploitative
old witch, only to expose the course Gothic accoutrements out
of which she has been constructed after Fevvers has flown with
her to the ceiling and left her hanging on the curtain rail. Here
is Toussaint's account of her end:
It came to me that there was nothing left inside the clothes
and, perhaps, there never had been anything inside her clothes
but a set of dry bones agitated only by the power of an infernal
will and a voice that had been no more than the artificial exhalation
of air from a bladder or a sac, that she was, or had become, a
sort of scarecrow of desire. (84)
Carter is going to considerable trouble to focus our attention
on the artificiality of this character, clothed like a scarecrow
(to frighten us) and given seemingly human qualities by a voice
produced, like an organ's, by means of bellows, and by emotions
(will and desire) that mechanistically animate her from within.
In a similar vein Walser in his sceptical days wonders who had
made Fevvers into "a marvellous machine and equipped her
with her story" (29). But in many ways we all make ourselves
up. Fictional subjects, like "real" subjects, can seem
mere puppets manipulated and given a semblance of life by their
narrator. Watching Fevvers and Lizzie walking home over Westminster
Bridge Walser notes how they appear "the size of one big
doll, one small doll" (90). In the same way the clowns are
eclipsed by the faces they choose for themselves; they become
what they choose, although once they have made their choice they
are stuck with it for the rest of their professional life. Sitting
down to dinner their white faces "possessed the formal lifelessness
of death masks, as if, in some essential sense, they were themselves
absent from the repast and left untenanted replicas behind"
(116). Here we are at a double remove from the original subject,
first painted to look other than himself, then revealed to be
a fictional replica of that painted subject. Yet does not the
double replication of fiction, which Carter makes sure to draw
to our attention, serve to bring the artificiality of our own
construction as subjects equally to our notice? Her metafictional
commentary reminds us of our own discontinuity as subjects.
In this novel in particular Carter constantly draws our attention
to the mechanics necessarily used by any narrator and always visible
to any reader who cares to look for them. As we have seen she
frequently resorts to metafictional interventions to ensure that
we are not mistaking her narrative construct for the real world,
however much it might parallel it. When Lizzie tells how they
gave Sophie her nickname, she explains: "'Fevvers" we
named her, and so she will be to the end of the chapter"
(13). Fevvers' existence coincides with the duration of the narration.
Yet no sooner has she drawn attention to the fictional status
of her creature than Carter tempts us back into her fictive world:
"'Let's get your make-up off, love" (13). One sentence
will do the trick. Carter is not above having a little fun at
the expense of literary critics and theorists who tend to resemble
Walser at the start of the novel. When he reaches the climax of
his act in the ring, Buffo "starts to deconstruct himself"
(117), being nothing but a textual construct in the first place.
And when the Escapee asks Fevvers to explain the significance
of the mystic disappearance of the clowns who had been blown off
the face of the earth, Fevvers responds: "'Look, love,' I
says to him eventually, because I'm not in the right mood for
literary criticism. 'If I hadn't bust a wing in the train-wreck,
I could fly us all to Vladivostok in two shakes, so I'm not the
right one to ask questions of when it comes to what is real and
what is not..." (244). Yet this extra-textual reference to
the likely reception of the text is simultaneously a defence of
fiction's right to validate the irrational and the magical. That
"significance" is thought to be the main concern of
literary criticism is seen to be an impoverishment within the
text itself.
The fictional text, then, celebrates its own fictionality, its
capacity to dazzle and deceive. Fevvers' spreading laughter at
the end of the novel is that of the comic narrator enjoying her
narrative triumph in bringing off this book-length sleight of
hand. In deceiving Walser she has also deceived the reader into
believing in her, wings and all. Walser asks Fevvers, "why
did you go to such lengths, once upon a time, to convince me you
were the 'only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world'"
(294)? Fevvers, as she begins to laugh, responds, "'I fooled
you, then!" After her laugh has spread to infect the entire
globe "as if a spontaneous response to the giant comedy that
endlessly unfolded beneath it," she concludes: "It just
goes to show there's nothing like confidence" (295). An alert
reader will pick up on "once upon a time," "the
giant comedy," and "confidence." e The entire fictional
narrative is a gigantic confidence trick, meant to fool us as
convincingly as Fevvers fooled Walser, the fact-laden and skeptical
auditor of her narrative. As Carter has explained, ending with
Fevvers' "I really fooled you" (295) "doesn't make
you realize the fictionality of what has gone before, it makes
you start inventing other fictions..." (Haffenden 90). In
fooling Walser, Fevvers has transformed his life. Dreams, fantasies
and imaginings have now become a legitimate part of his consciousness.
At the same time the absurdity of the Shaman's total immersion
in this world alone has forced Walser and the reader to return
to the outer world, although trailing clouds of glory with them
. The end of this novel refuses closure in typical postmodern
fashion. How can narrative die, especially in a world of unending
signification? Less typical is Carter's resistance to endorsing
either fact or fiction in isolation. Each world is dependent on
and incorporates the other. So in returning the control of the
narrative to the reader Carter ends by not ending her narration.
Instead she returns it to the extra-narrational world of her readers
who will have learnt from the book to recognize the necessary
place in their lives for the ageless act of narration.
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Copyright 1998 Brian Finney