Chapter 3

As discussed in the previous chapter, Walser’s attempt to read Fevvers by taking on the role of a clown does not result in a termination of his project. What, then, happens during Siberia, that seems to enable the desired for union between reader and text? As I have tried to show in the above, the seeming empowerment of the reader in the allegory, which turns out to be the opposite, is a tendency which may also be seen mirrored in the way Carter’s novel itself works on its reader. Seeking to further illuminate the nature of the relationship between reader and text, which has been discussed earlier in relation to Rabinowitz, Gadamer and Iser, I will in the following turn to its erotic aspect, entering the argument via the concepts of Socratic dialogue and Socratic irony as they appear in Plato.

Socratic dialogue refers to a philosophical method of systematic doubt and questioning of another to elicit a clear expression of a truth, while the term Socratic irony designates the pose of ignorance and of willingness to learn as one interrogates another on the meaning of a concept. In Plato’s works Socrates feigns ignorance, as well as an eagerness to be instructed by his partner in conversation by asking him questions that leads the dialogue to a definition.

...if any of you think that I am allowing myself to assume what is not true, he must interrupt and challenge me. I am not speaking dogmatically from the certainty of assured knowledge; I am simply your fellow explorer in the search for truth. (Georgias: 115)

In principle, Socrates hesitates to put forward an argument or a view; rather he makes the other take a stand in questions he asks him. Seemingly, then, Socrates tries to avoid any claims, still seeking, however, to make the other think in specific terms. On the surface Socrates furnishes his partner with a great deal of power when it comes to providing the answer to the problem under discussion, while he is in fact directing the other to an answer he already seems to know. Socrates’ questions, the frame he sets for the discussion, seem to be what in the end determine its outcome, his aim being clearly didactic. As Socrates himself tells one of his interlocutors, it is his aim to prove a point to him “in order to persuade you, if I can, to change your mind ” (Georgias: 93 emphasis added). As the Socratic dialogue consists in teaching by questioning, it deceptively empowers the pupil by letting him provide the answers. As will be argued below, the relationship between Fevvers and Walser may be characterised in similar terms.

Like Socrates, Fevvers also has a didactic project, obviously wanting to mould Walser. “Let him hand himself over into my safekeeping, and I will transform him” (281). Apart from her didactic aspiration, Fevvers’ real name, Sophia, and her greed for money do in fact seem to link her closer to Socrates’ contemporaries, the Sophists.[32] Plato was at pains to distance Socrates from the Sophists, his main charge against them being that they used the dialectic of antilogic[33] only for the purpose of winning an argument, and not in order to ascend to an understanding of the forms, i.e. the truth. (Kerferd: 247). Fevvers must also be seen as differing from Socrates in this respect, where his aim is to lose himself through dialogue, by letting language or truth speak, Fevvers’ dialogue with Walser is intended solely to sustain her self.

According to Roland Barthes in his Retorikken, the relationship between the two participants in a dialogue is of an erotic kind (14), which is also, as will be discussed below, the one between reader and text. If, following Plato’s ideal, the participants in a dialogue regard the process as a mutual help towards knowledge, aiming to settle a problem rather than to prove the other wrong, an amorous relationship between the two will result. The challenged participant will come to love the one who asks him questions, and seek his company (Næss: 96). The dynamics of such a dialogic relationship may be viewed as analogous to that which governs the reading process as presented in Carter’s allegory, love and the erotic being important features of the relationship between Walser and Fevvers. Throughout “London” Fevvers constantly challenges Walser’s conceptions of reality and thus forces him to revise his opinions, whereupon Walser falls in love and decides to follow Fevvers to Petersburg. As will be argued in the following, the dynamic between Socrates and his antagonist, being enabled by the former deceptively giving the activity of the other prominence, is mirrored in the relationship between Walser and Fevvers in “Siberia”. Fevvers apparently needs Walser to tell her the truth of her being, while, in the end, as foreboded by her assuming control in “London”, he is forced to give in to a dialectic whose premises are given by her alone.

“Siberia” starts off with Fevvers’ own first-person narration, accounting for the travels of Colonel Kearney’s circus on the Transsiberian railway, heading for Japan. The train suffers an explosion, however, and the crash causes Fevvers and Walser to be separated. While Fevvers and the rest of the party are kidnapped by outlaws, Walser is rendered unconscious by a blow on the head and buried alive in “stored away tablecloths and napkins, some clean, some soiled” (209). Paradoxically, the journey Walser has undertaken in order to experience a union with Fevvers leads to their separation. The description of his accident echoes the episode in “London” when Walser, for fear of getting drunk (losing himself as reader of Fevvers) tries to get rid of his glass without knocking his head on the mantelpiece, only succeeding “in dislodging a noisy torrent of concealed billets doux, bringing with them from the mantelpiece a writhing snakes’ nest of silk stockings, green, yellow, pink, scarlet, black, that introduced a powerful note of stale feet” (9). While in “London” Walser’s self is challenged by the effect of Fevvers’ narratives on his conceptions of reality, in “Siberia” he loses himself in a literal sense in an intensifying repetition of the first event. [34]

In contrast to the occasion in Fevvers’ dressing room, this time Walser is not able to evade the knock on his head, which results in him virtually reverting to the state of an infant. When he wakes up he has lost all linguistic conceptions that earlier served as categories in which to order his experiences and impressions. “Walser no longer knew enough to ask ‘Where am I?’ Like the landscape, he was a perfect blank” (222). His first word is “mama” (222), and just as in the case of an infant, Walser’s being is now governed by bodily senses rather than by his mind: “He is a sentient being still, but no longer a rational one; indeed, now he is all sensibility, without a grain of sense, and sense impressions alone have the power to shock and to ravish him” (236). The rational, almost scientific attitude that governed Walser’s reading in “London” is now all gone. The “professional necessity to see all and believe all” (10) is replaced by the primacy of sense impressions over rationality, and later a philosophical attitude replaces the one of empirical verification. The questions he asks Fevvers as they are reunited towards the end of the novel: “Have you a Soul. Can you love?” (291), display a radical change in his attitude as compared to the one witnessed in “London”. As mentioned earlier, though, this change from mind to body, from sense to sensibility has been in process throughout the section of “Petersburg”.

As the train crashes, it seems, the transformation that was first generated by Walser’s falling in love, starting already in “London”, is brought to a climax. The incident may be viewed as a literalisation of Walser losing himself as a reader of Fevvers, or, as Iser puts it, of the reader’s “leaving behind the familiar world of his own experience” (218) and his suspension of the “ideas and attitudes that shape [his] personality” (225).

With reference to Brian McHale’s Postmodern Fiction, Beth A. Boehm argues that love in post-modern fiction is often a metaobject which “characterises not the fictional interactions in the text’s world, but rather the interactions between the text and its world on the one hand, and the reader and his or her world on the other” (203). In Nights at the Circus one finds love in both these senses, as the allegorical relationship between Walser and Fevvers establishes love and desire as important features of the relationship between text and reader. In an article on the narcissism of current literary theory, Maria Margaroni also points to the parallel between the lover and the reader, considering the literary critic’s desire for a union with the text as analogous to the lover’s desire for union with the beloved. “It is, then, to this final erotic embrace, this coming together in language, in the critic’s commentary on the text, that criticism has always aspired, and for the sake of which the critic has felt the need to abdicate the self” (“From Medusa’s gaze to the myth of Narcissus”: 77).

The aim of Margaroni’s article is to show that the narcissism of current literary theory may not necessarily render it as unhealthy and unproductive as it is often accused of being. Thus, she consistently writes of the literary critic’s, rather than the reader’s relationship to the text. Still, keeping in mind the already discussed views of Iser, Booth and Gadamer, I think that the parallels Margaroni draws between the critic and the amorous subject is apt also when it comes to the reader’s relation to the text. Thus, the act of reading may be viewed as an act of lovemaking between reader and text, the reader aiming at a union with the truth of the text through the process.

According to Margaroni, the anxiety concerning the narcissism of current literary theory rests on its differentiation of current theory from traditional literary criticism. Theory is accused of its “inflated interest and projection of itself” and the infertility of its “abnormal, irresponsible, destructive and self-destructive erotic fixation with the self” (75), that is, its own discourse. Unlike traditional literary criticism, which is regarded as “outward-looking, heteroerotic (...), healthily related to the other” (75), current theory has betrayed the other (the text, Echo), thus cutting off the romantic love relation. While (narcissistic) theory indulges in its own discourse, traditional literary criticism humbly approaches the text as some kind of divinity that holds the truth that he or she desires to glimpse through the abdication of the self (Margaroni: 77). The discourse and attitude of the traditional critic, then, may be seen to resemble the lover’s discourse about the loved being.

Like the speaking agent in Roland Barthes’ simulation of the discourse of the amorous subject in A Lover’s Discourse, [35] the traditional critic/reader is commonly seen to approach the beloved (the text) with a sense of his/her own inadequacy and an awareness of the inability to find words to express its otherness. Just as the lover in Barthes sees the beloved as an object that cannot be adequately represented, the critic/reader engages with the text with the awareness that it will never be understood or captured in its entirety. In the words of Barthes’ amorous subject: “The other whom I love and who fascinates me is atopos. I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique” (Barthes: 34). “Being Atopic, the other makes language indecisive: one cannot speak of the other, about the other: the other is unqualifiable (this would be the true meaning of atopos)” (35).

Despite the awareness of the other as atopos, the “dream of the total union with the loved being” persists (Barthes: 228). Although the realisation of the dream is impossible, the desire for its fulfilment, the desire to fully understand the object, grasp its otherness or truth, is what drives the lover and reader forward. The dream of union as the driving force of reading is reminiscent of Iser’s concept of the tension between the reader’s illusion of coherence and the text’s polysemantic nature as constituting the dynamics of a text, as well as of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. As discussed earlier, it is such a dream of penetration of Fevvers’ truth, a desire for the closure of an unambiguous meaning, which makes Walser join the circus and causes him to undertake a journey which ends in him being rendered “a perfect blank”(222), the abdication of his self.

“I am engulfed, I succumb” (10), cries Barthes’ lover, and this has, Margaroni points out, “traditionally been the critic’s cry in the face of the text” (76), as the text is seen as charming, enchanting and casting a spell on the critic/reader. The relationship between Fevvers and Walser in “London” is characterised precisely by these factors. Walser is seduced by Fevvers’ narratives; he becomes “a prisoner of her voice” (43), time and situation magically standing still as Big Ben strikes midnight three times. He has set out to make Fevvers his quarry, but she assumes a position of authority, which soon makes Walser realise that his prey has trapped him instead (9).

In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes links the discourse of love to violence. In the first fragment of “Ravishment” he refers to two myths of the relationship between lovers, one ancient and one modern. The former refers to the view of love as a violent ravishment where the active male part sweeps the passive female part off her feet and carries her away, “in the ancient myth, the ravisher is active, he wants to seize his prey, he is the subject of the rape (of which the object is a woman, as we know, invariably passive)” (Barthes: 188). In the modern myth, however, love is conceived of as passion (in the obsolete sense of suffering), and the object of the ravishment turns into the active, suffering part, as the other draws back. “This singular reversal”, Bathes proposes, “may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the ‘subject’ (since Christianity) is the one who suffers” (189). As such, the distinctions and shift between the archaic and modern myths set up by Barthes seem to be historically determined. In the subsequent fragments, however, he uses these shifts to simulate the lover’s discourse in different stages of a particular love relationship. In the discussion below, the opposition between Barthes’ ancient and modern myths will be used in both these senses, illustrating how the relationship between Fevvers and Walser develops in time, and also how Fevvers’ reversal of the gender roles of the ancient model may be viewed as part of her subversive project. The manner in which Barthes’ scheme seems to be unsettled by the notion of the narcissistic text will also be discussed.

In his first meeting with Fevvers, Walser sets out according to the ancient myth of the active, male ravisher, wanting to seize his prey, the passive woman, the object of his rape, but Fevvers soon manages to reverse these roles. In “London” she is the seductive teller, Walser the told, the object of her verbal ravishment, rendering the section her overturn of the traditional relationship between male seducer/ravisher and his female object. Fevvers’ words are the ones that start (as well as end) the novel. Throughout the section of “London” she is clearly the one with the initiative and the one in control, thus reversing conventional gender roles which link the feminine to passivity and the male to activity.

This reversal in turn causes Walser to take on the role of the ravished object of Barthes’ modern myth of love-as-passion, as Fevvers becomes “the ravisher [who] wants nothing, does nothing; [s]he is motionless” (188). In “London” this shift is foreboded in the instances where Fevvers ceases her narration and narcissistically turns in on her own image in the mirror. After their first meeting in London, Walser is the one who actively pursues their relationship, deciding to follow her to Petersburg. He goes from being the passive “object of capture” to becoming “the subject of love”, the active, amorous subject.[36] Consequently, Fevvers, the subject of his conquest, moves into the class of loved object.[37] Walser’s relationship to Fevvers is an allegory of the reader who takes the ever-elusive text as object of his desire. Accordingly, Fevvers may in “London” be seen to play the role that Margaroni attributes to the text as “the active (male) member of the pair which assaults and seduces the critic/lover, changing him irrevocably” (76). After being seduced through “London”, the ravished Walser takes on the role of the amorous subject. The reversed gender roles persist, though, as “the lover – the one who has been ravished - is always implicitly feminized” (Barthes: 188-89).

In Barthes’ model, the aspect of violence in the relationship between the lover and his object is, as mentioned, clearly present. With similar connotations, Geoffrey Hartman uses W. B. Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” as a metaphor for the hermeneutic activity, viewing this as a violent seduction, a rape, which for the reader “seems to contain the promise not only of mastery but also paradoxically, of joining oneself to an overwhelming intent even at the cost of being subdued” (22).

Paradoxically, then, reading involves not only a desire to penetrate the truth of the text, but also an invitation to be penetrated, as in the joining of a text’s authorial audience. Or in the words of the amorous subject: “You have every mastery over me, but I have every knowledge of you” (Barthes: 229). The mastery over the other gained through the knowledge of its truth will paradoxically always also involve the surrender to it.

In “London” Walser’s desire for mastery over Fevvers through knowledge is evident. With his sharpened pencil poised, he is ready to penetrate the image of Fevvers, “to ‘puff’ her” (11), clearly considering himself to be an emissary of truth. He wants to write the truth of Fevvers, to be the only one to know her. Like Barthes’ amorous subject, Walser, as lover and reader, seeks to understand his other, to be the one who possesses the truth she conceals, or to possess her in her truth. “[O]nly I know him”, says Barthes’ lover, “only I make him exist in his truth” (229). Walser intends to use Fevvers’ story as part of his own writing, the series called “Great Humbugs of the World” (11). Initially, then, he seems to want to write Fevvers in his own truth by proving her false, rather than to penetrate and possess her in her truth. As, according to Barthes, there is always the narcissism of self-representation involved even in amorous discourse,[38] this is also an aspect of Walser’s reading activity. He is, however, as his reading progresses, ready to abdicate his self (as illustrated in his playing the clown in “Petersburg”), ready to be mastered in order to gain knowledge. Thus he may be seen to resemble Leda in her surrender to the divinity of the swan, the novel’s ending - Fevvers hovering on top of Walser - being an evocation of this rape and the yielding to it.

Throughout “Petersburg” and parts of “London”, Walser is presented as the amorous reader of Fevvers. In “Siberia”, though, yet another reversal of Barthes’ scheme occurs. Just before the train crashes it is obvious that Fevvers, too, is falling in love. She is no longer merely the object of Walser’s desire; she is also a desiring subject, seemingly wanting to reach the true Walser, the man underneath the make-up: [39]

Immediately after Fevvers’ outburst of desirous thoughts, the train crashes and she is separated from her love object. “Of my young man no sign” (205), she laments. After the separation Fevvers seems to take on the active role of the amorous subject, longing for and seeking a union with Walser, the object of her love. She gets down on her knees before the train wreck, wanting to excavate him from a place her “bewildered eyes thought they’d glimpsed a movement” (206). With disappointment, however, she has to conclude: “of the young fellow who was my quest” (206), there is still no trace. In “Siberia” Fevvers seems to establish Walser as the one holding the truth she wants to possess “The young American it was who kept the whole story of the old Fevvers in his notebooks; she longed for him to tell her she was true” (273). Walser himself, on the contrary, lives according to a cosmology where no truths exist, as there are no falsities. Interestingly, parallel to Fevvers’ change from being a loved object to becoming an amorous subject, “Siberia” features extensive instances of her first person narration.

In the allegory, then, the text assumes an active, male part, as Walser, who sets out to puncture the flying wonder, is seduced by her narration instead. After this ravishment, however, Fevvers becomes passive, thus causing Walser to take on the active role of the ravisher, following her to Petersburg. Towards the end, another shift takes place, as in “Siberia” Fevvers, the text, seems to put on the role of the amorous subject, with Walser, the reader, as her loved object. Fevvers’ pursuit of Walser, though, is primarily of the narcissistic kind. She seems to need her love object as a mirror to confirm her own truth, more than she desires to penetrate his truth. “She longed to see herself reflected in all her remembered splendour in his grey eyes” (273). Unlike Walser as amorous subject, looking to penetrate the truth of Fevvers, she is less willing to abdicate her self; indeed, her quest is rather the avoidance of such an abdication. She needs Walser less as a lover, it seems, than as a means to (re)establish her own self. “Think of him, not as a lover, but as a scribe (285)”, Fevvers tells Lizzie. “Her misery was exacerbated by the knowledge that the young American, to whom she had taken such a fancy was so near, but yet so far away. Exacerbated, but not caused. Her gloom had other causes” (272). Feeling that she has “mislaid some vital something of [herself] along the road” (273), Fevvers needs Walser to confirm her being, her truth. “The young American it was who kept the whole story of old Fevvers in his notebooks” (273), a story she has provided him with.

As mentioned earlier, a narcissistic aspect is always present in amorous discourse, but to Barthes’ amorous subject, as to Walser as lover, this narcissism is manifested only in the power of the knowledge of the other, the knowledge of which truth will always also imply surrender to it. Fevvers, it seems, wants power through the possession of her own truth alone, gained through her love object’s surrender to it. Fevvers’ fear of solitude is a fear of the loss of the self. In the same manner that Fevvers needs Walser, Carter’s text, itself, may seem to need a/n (authorial) reader. As mentioned earlier, both Fevvers and the novel need a reader to recognise the ironies and doubleness so essential to their identity for these features to take effect at all. When united with Walser, Fevvers, “horror of horrors” (289), sees that he considers her to be perfectly normal, as to Walser, in his new state, seeing is believing. When he no longer seems capable of scepticism, thus being disabled as reader, Fevvers suffers her worst crisis:

As Fevvers’ existence depends on others questioning its authenticity, in the same manner as a subversive or ironic statement needs a reader to perceive it as such in order to retain its essential doubleness, Walser’s new state is a threat to her. The importance of the dialectic relation of a text to its reader, the lingering between the latter’s belief and disbelief, is evident. Fevvers wants mastery over herself through Walser by making him read and reflect her identity the way she intends it to be perceived, but his eyes seem “to have lost the power to reflect” (289). As a last resort she spreads her wings, attracting the gaze of all those present in the god-hut, their “eyes fixed upon her with astonishment, with awe, the eyes that told her who she was” (290). As she sinks down in a curtsey before Walser, the haze clears from his eyes. This act seems to form a contrast to her appearance in London where she leaves her ability to fly to Walser’s imagination (Ch 1: 15).

In the novel’s first section the limits of narrative representation are presented as that which engages the reader’s imagination and thereby enables the text’s coming into existence. In Siberia, however, Walser and Fevvers are for the most part separated, thus such a dynamic is inhibited. In addition Walser has, as mentioned, lost his place in language, a fact which causes his eyes to lose “the power to reflect”. When they are reunited, however, Fevvers plays less on her ambiguity and to a greater extent forces an image of herself upon Walser and the rest of her audience. In Iser’s terms she may seem “to set the whole picture before [her] reader’s eyes” (218) instead of activating the reader’s imagination in order to involve him in the shaping of the text. In the case of Fevvers it is her extra attributes rather than her lacks that draw attention, thus the reader is left with less productive power than in Iser, where s/he is to “fill in the gaps”. In the end Fevvers seems to be less interested in the dialectic itself, the affirmation of her self being her ultimate aim. This lack of dialectic is foreboded in the already discussed image of Walser’s impeded play as reader of Fevvers, likened to a kitten “tangling up in a ball of wool” (40). However, even though Fevvers may seem to “set the whole picture before her reader’s eyes” in the end, the reader is still never sure whether her wings are real or not. While Walser was “putty” in the hands of Fevvers “since the first moment he saw her” (294), he, in turn, seems to have no power in moulding her. Walser undergoes a tremendous change, whereas Fevvers, as Lorna Sage puts it, “stays her own woman throughout, and keeps her mystery, the picaresque heroine whose experience rolls off her like water off a duck” (Angela Carter: 47). This tension between Fevvers’ stable image of herself as a self-conscious text and her need for an audience who questions the authenticity of her existence, pervades the whole novel, and is, as will be argued later, linked to the paradox of metafiction.

The “Envoi” depicts a Walser who has learned that total union with the other is an illusion. Still being uncertain as to what to believe, he has, however, accepted this as a fact of reading, seemingly having given up the desire for mastery over / penetration of Fevvers, recognising her as atopos. He has become the passive part, the loved object, the object of the lover’s rape. Thus one may read the ending - the winged Fevvers on top of Walser, urging him to surrender to her truth, and his subsequent yielding - as a re-enactment of Leda’s rape. Still there is a disturbing ambiguity in this image, as it evokes the notion of prostitution at the same time. Walser’s willing surrender to Fevvers may be seen as him selling himself / his self for knowledge of her. Walser’s activity as clown in “Petersburg” is also linked to prostitution. Putting on the mask of the clown, believing it will allow him to “juggle with being”, he ends up losing himself behind it instead, becoming a “whore of mirth”, condemned to be laughed at. His lack of control is evident also as Fevvers’ laughter ends the novel, Walser not being quite sure “whether or not he might be the butt of the joke” (295).

If one reads the novel’s ending as a re-enactment of Leda’s rape, the relationship between Walser and Fevvers seems to have reverted back to Barthes’ ancient scheme of the ravisher / ravished relation, only with inverted gender roles. The allegory of Nights at the Circus, however, seems to destabilise the two kinds of relationships between reader and text that may be read from Barthes’ myths. In the end Walser seems to occupy the role of the feminine part of the ancient myth, with Fevvers as his male ravisher. Still, Fevvers may also be regarded as re-feminised, as the ravished and suffering amorous subject of the modern myth. Her suffering is what seems to set her apart from the ravisher of the ancient myth, yet her extensive narcissism distinguishes her from the amorous subject. As argued, Fevvers seems to be after Walser’s truth about herself, the verification of her own truth, rather than his truth through the abdication of her self. However, like Barthes’ amorous subject, who “cannot write his love story” (93), Fevvers needs Walser to tell her own story. “Only the Other could write my love story, my novel” (93). The paradox of Fevvers, who needs Walser to write her story, is similar to that of the metafictional text which calls for the reader as co-producer, but at the same time pre-empts its own reading. As Linda Hutcheon puts it, “the point of metafiction is that it constitutes its own first critical commentary, and in so doing, (...) sets up the theoretical frame of reference in which it must be considered” (Narcissistic Narrative: 6). Thus one may actually regard Fevvers as the narcissistic text that in her suffering decides to turn to her reader, her Echo, who cannot but repeat her narrative. (Which is what Walser does in “London”.) Fevvers is in the end the amorous subject who “[d]espite the difficulties of [her] story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it” (Barthes: 22), wants to re-enact the love story. “Let us begin again” (24), cries Barthes’ lover. “That’s the way to start the interview”, Fevvers cries, “Get out your pencil and we’ll begin!” (291).

Let us briefly return to the discussion of narcissistic theory versus traditional literary criticism. Maria Margaroni tries to refute the claim that current theory is less productive than traditional literary criticism because of its narcissism. The pleasure the so-called healthy outward-looking literary criticism or commentary takes in “its knowledge of and about the text, in its exaltation of the eye / I that sees and pronounces (...) its presumption to speak in the name and for the other” (82), she claims, is clearly of a narcissistic kind. The overt self-reflexivity of contemporary theory, in contrast, “should not be perceived as ego-centric”, since “reflexivity never leaves the ego intact” (83). By putting itself within the frame, current theory challenges and interrogates its own existence, rather than glorify and reinforce it. Paradoxically one loses the self by making it the object of one’s gaze. The productive and self-renewing aspect of overt narcissism opposes the hidden, but essential narcissism of traditional criticism that is seemingly “healthily related to the other”, but for which the Swan’s rape of Leda serves as a better metaphor. The lover’s discourse about the loved object has already been established as analogous to the discourse and attitude of the traditional literary critic. By way of the last reversal of Barthes' scheme, caused by Fevvers’ narcissism, she is in “Siberia” also linked to the discourse of the lover, sharing its obscured self-interest. Fevvers is the narcissistic subject deceptively turning to her other, only to make him reflect her self, a Narcissus who rapes Echo.

Likewise, the self-reflexivity of Nights at the Circus renders its relation to the reader an ambiguous one. At one level the metafictional quality of the novel seems to empower the reader, in that it makes the reader aware of her role in constructing the fictional universe.

Although the reader is given status as co-creator of the text, its metafictional aspect also serves to restrict her freedom, since the text’s constructedness cannot be ignored as a vital aspect of its meaning. If the metafictional aspect of Carter’s novel is not taken into consideration, it will easily, as witnessed in the readings of See and Mars-Jones, be read as affirming the narrative strategies and structures (in its widest sense) which it parodies and seeks to subvert. The reader is in other words “manoeuvred by the work into a ‘proper’ position from which to perceive the paradoxically hidden, but perceptible, structure of meaning” (Hutcheon: xvi), in a manner which brings to mind the dynamic of the Socratic dialogue.

In “London”, initially in the allegory, the text seems to favour the point of view of Walser (representing the reader in the allegory), in the end, however, he may, as argued in Chapter 1, be established as deprived of his status as “the real narrator” of this section, albeit only as Fevvers’ echo and on her request. The allegory may consequently be read as illusory when it comes to the freedom and power given the reader. Fevvers seemingly invests her reader with a considerable amount of power in the construction of her identity. As it appears in the allegory, however, the self-representation of the text (Fevvers) appears to be enabled only at the cost of the identity/subjectivity of the other, rendering text(ual meaning) the product of the rape of the reader. Fevvers allegorical rape of her reader may be read as mirrored in the novel’s own imposition of a closed perspective through its metafictionality.

Fevvers as text is on the surface a discourse “healthily related to the other”, but her narcissism disguised as love resembles the narcissism Margaroni attributes to traditional criticism.[40] As this kind of narcissism is all about self-affirmation, it is a less healthy and productive one than the overt narcissism of literary theory, which consists in the continual questioning of itself. According to Yvonne Martinsson, Carter’s allegory in Nights at the Circus is a critique of Barthes’ failure to recognise the other in the reading process.[41] My claim, however, as argued in the above, is that the importance of the power and freedom of the reader in the construction of the text turns out in the allegory to be an illusion, and that this feature may also viewed as mirrored in the way Carter’s novel itself works upon its reader. The self-conscious Fevvers, as well as the novel she inhabits, has obvious didactic aspirations, a quality that Linda Hutcheon regards as a characteristic feature of all metafiction, inevitably giving its discourse a hint of authority. “Textually self-conscious metafiction today is a most didactic form. As such, it can teach us much about both the ontological status of fiction (all fiction) and also the complex nature of reading (all reading)” (xi-xii). Paradoxically then, even a novel such as Carter’s, which aims at exploring the difficulty or impossibility of textual closure, does so “by overt, self conscious control by an inscribed narrator / author figure that appears to demand by its manipulation, the imposition of a single closed perspective” (xiii).

Even though, as already discussed, the end of Carter’s novel avoids a pure reproduction of Barthes' ancient myth, the allegory, in invoking another myth, that of Leda’s rape, may still seem to face the problem of subversion by reversal of gender roles alone. This becomes particularly evident when considering how Carter uses the same motif with solely negative connotations in The Magic Toyshop. In this novel the orphaned Melanie is forced by her puppeteer uncle to play Leda in his theatre, so that he may symbolically rape her through manipulating the swan puppet. In The Sadeian Woman Carter argues that the fear of rape is “a fear of physical terror”, as well as “a fear of a loss or disruption of the self” (6). The enactment of Leda’s rape in The Magic Toyshop, with Melanie playing the role of the victim, may in these terms be read as a metaphor of her psychic disintegration, her reduction to “the feminine object required by a patriarchal social order” (Jean Wyatt: 66). Viewing Uncle Philip’s household as a microcosm of patriarchal relations, Wyatt reads this scene as Uncle Philip’s way of inscribing Melanie into a world defined by the male gaze, her learning to see herself as men see her, i.e. as an object (67).

The Magic Toyshop depicts a patriarchal society where, as Wyatt points out, “becoming a woman requires a ‘rape’, an alienation of a woman’s subjective agency that amounts to mutilation” (77). In Nights at the Circus, however, the tables are turned, as the woman assumes the role of the violent and mutilating swan, hovering over the man:

Just like woman’s identity in The Magic Toyshop is seen as erased as she is inscribed into the patriarchal order, so is the reader’s subjectivity violated in the allegory of Nights at the Circus. Fevvers has, as argued, taken over the role as the subject in the love relation. When she wrestles Walser towards the end, he is to her a faceless it, an object.

According to Wyatt, “The rape of Leda (...) illustrates the power relations that patriarchal culture misinterprets as love relations” (72). Likewise, in Carter’s allegory, the violence of the interpellation of the reader may be seen as masked by the dynamic of love that apparently produces it. In “Siberia” Fevvers seemingly needs her lover/reader in order to be fulfilled. “Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?” (290) she desperately asks herself when reunited with Walser, apparently lacking her former power over her own image. In the end, however, it turns out that there exists no such distinction as her two questions point to, as Walser, like Leda, “half stunned (...) yet [himself] impassioned” (28), puts on her knowledge. The eyes that tell Fevvers who she is, does so, it seems, merely by reflecting her image the way she has constructed it. Walser having lost language and thus a subjective centre from which to organise the world, enables Fevvers’ interpellation of him, his objectification. If one considers Iser’s claim that “[t]he convergence of text and reader brings a literary work into existence”, Fevvers’ allusions to being the product of Leda’s rape may, as argued above, refer symbolically to her interaction as text with her reader as the moment of her coming to life. Consequently, the ending, Fevvers’ sexual union with Walser, allegorically enacts her (and her novel’s) coming into being. Carter’s rewriting of the myth to the woman’s advantage consequently seems to be enabled only at the cost of Walser’s subjectivity, and is thus just as brute and cruel as its original.

According to the ancient myth, the rape of Leda was also the conception of Helen of Troy, whom Fevvers seems to identify with, “- 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). Ironically, the mythic Helen was also the cause of the Trojan War, subject of one of the most central works of the Western literary canon, the status of which is questioned through the intertextuality deployed in Carter’s novel. This may suggest a recognition of the paradox that subversion inevitably consists in the simultaneous rejection and affirmation of its object. Consequently, when Fevvers alludes to Leda’s rape as being the instance that brings herself to life, “my own primal scene, my own conception” (28), one may read it as an acknowledgement of the fact that she, the New Woman, is inevitably a product of the very past that she tries to break with. Thus Fevvers’ existence is dependent on an interaction with the past, as well as with a reader who is part of this. In similar terms, Carter’s novel is dependent on other texts and a reader of these, once again rendering the question of where the text begins and where it ends an impossible one to answer.