Chapter 1

Nights at the Circus is a fiction about fiction(ing) and a fiction about reading, as well as a text which problematises a clear-cut separation of these activities from each other. These issues are addressed through the novel’s allegory of the interaction between reader and text, where Walser represents the former and Fevvers the latter.

Fevvers appears to be a text particularly difficult to grasp because of the physical otherness with which her wings equip her. On one occasion the beatings of her wings are described as disturbing the air so much that “Walser’s notebook ruffled over and he temporarily lost his place, had to scramble to find it again, almost displaced his composure but managed to grab tight hold of his scepticism just as it was about to blow over the ledge of the press box”(16). Apart from serving as a foreboding to what will later happen to Walser (losing his place in language, thus also his sense of scepticism), this passage shows how the appearance of Fevvers seems to disturb Walser’s rational mind and serve to threaten his journalistic ideal of himself as a reporter of the truth. Fevvers’ wings disturb the air as well as Walser’s conception of reality. Her taking control of the gaze makes it difficult for Walser to fix her image to paper, as she opens “her great eyes at him, again, with such a swirl that the pages of his notebook rustle[] in the breeze” (48).

The novel starts out with Fevvers addressing the American journalist Walser, who has been admitted to her dressing room to conduct an interview, a session which turns out to be just as much of a show as was Fevvers’ appearance at the Alhambra the same night. “Lor’ love you, sir!” (7), she begins, then she goes on to account for the circumstances around her birth and her upbringing, fantastic stories, as hard to believe in as her wings. Walser is a sceptical audience and rather confused as to what to believe, still he is intent on revealing the winged woman as a hoax. He is there “ostensibly, to ‘puff’ her, and if it is humanly possible, to explode her (...) Though not to think the revelation that she is a hoax will finish her on the halls; far from it. If she isn’t suspect, where is the controversy?” (11) The ambiguity of her appearance is the very essence and prerequisite of Fevvers’ existence, an existence dependent on others questioning its authenticity.

According to Wolfgang Iser’s reception-theory, a literary work has two poles, the artistic and the aesthetic. The artistic text is the text created by the author, while the aesthetic aspect of a text is the realisation of the former by the reader, a realisation which in its turn is informed by the different patterns of the text. “The convergence of text and reader brings a literary work into existence”, Iser claims (“The reading process”: 212). In his argument Iser draws on the hermeneutical insight that acts of interpretation are stimulated by the parts that the reader cannot make fit with her conception of the whole.[6] Just as the ambiguity of Fevvers’ appearance is necessary for her continued existence, “gaps” are necessary in a text to provoke the reader’s interest and involvement. “It is only through inevitable omissions that a story will gain its dynamism. Whenever the flow is interrupted the reader has to establish connections, fill in the gaps” (216). To keep the attention of its readers, an author, according to Iser, will never attempt “to set the whole picture before his reader’s eyes” (218). The reader’s imagination has to be activated in order to involve her and “to realize the intentions of the text” (218).

In the case of Fevvers it is her extra attributes rather than what she lacks that attract attention. Her wings are the parts that Walser cannot make fit into his conception of a coherent whole:

The manner in which Fevvers works upon Walser seems to be a literalisation of how, according to Iser, a text interacts with its reader: “one detail appears to contradict another, and so simultaneously stimulates and frustrates our desire to ‘picture’, thus continually causing our imposed ‘gestalt’ of the text to disintegrate” (220).

Her ambiguity is the essence of Fevvers’ identity because it is that which captures and engages the imagination of her audience. “Believe it or not!” she dares Walser (7). After having told him of her very first flight, she appears to be wanting to give him a demonstration of her acquired ability: “Everything appeared to be about to burst and take off. But the loose curls quivering on top of her high-piled chignon already brushed a stray drifting cobweb from the smoke-discoloured ceiling” (42). But as Lizzie points out, there is not enough room for such a show: “You’ll ’ave to leave it to ’is imagination” (42).

This episode illustrates Fevvers’ conscious play upon her own ambiguity as well as Walser’s scepticism, but it also demonstrates that the limits of narrative representation are exactly what engages the reader’s imagination, thereby enabling the text’s coming into existence. According to Iser, the polysemantic nature of the text and the activity of the reader that attempts to abstract a consistent meaning out of it are opposed factors constituting the dynamics of a text. “The formation of illusions [of coherency], therefore, can never be total, but it is this very incompleteness that in fact gives it its productive value” (20). Fevvers, like the novel she inhabits, is a highly self-conscious text, and she indeed knows how to exploit the ambiguous incoherence of her own image productively, by making it her living.

As the interview sets out, Walser eagerly sits with an open notebook and poised pencil. Wanting to “keep his wits about him” (9) he tries to put away his glass so that Fevvers cannot pour him more champagne. She eventually succeeds in intoxicating him, however, with a combination of champagne and her storytelling. He who set out to puncture the flying hoax with his sharpened pencil and critical journalism, will, as he himself hints, in the end be the prey, effectively trapped by his own quarry (9).

Already after a short while, Walser is carried away by Fevvers’ narratives: “Fevvers lassooed him with her narrative and dragged him along with her” (60). Her impact on him is likened to that of a siren’s upon a sailor:

Apart from illustrating the enchanting and seducing effect Fevvers’ stories have upon Walser because of their “discords”, this paragraph also hints to the power relation the enchantment implies. The above passages also introduce the element of violence in relation to the reading experience, which is an aspect I will return to later.

Fevvers’ words are the ones that start the novel, and here, as most often elsewhere, they do not seem to have been triggered by Walser’s questions. Walser is trapped, feeling “more and more like a kitten tangling up in a ball of wool it had never intended to unravel in the first place” (40). The flow of Fevvers’ narrative seems to be more dependent on food, drink, the presence of Lizzie and her own will, than on the investigating questions of Walser. In “London” Fevvers is clearly the one with the initiative and the one in control. Walser’s questions seem to be generated by Fevvers’ narrative rather than the other way around, consequently the section may be seen as reversing conventional gender roles linking the feminine to passivity and the male to activity. This reversal is sensed also by Walser: “It flickered through his mind: Is she really a man?” (35). The flow of the interview is determined solely by Fevvers’ mood and initiative:

Once Lizzie leaves, Fevvers turns in on herself and engages in a narcissism that leaves Walser, her audience, no interest or attention. The narrative is not resumed until Lizzie has returned and “the food [has] put fresh heart into the aeraliste” (53).

For Walser, the time spent in the dressing room, listening to Fevvers’ stories has a magical touch to it. Not only is he faced with incredible “facts”, also time seems to stand still as Big Ben strikes midnight three times. When the clock eventually strikes six and the interview with Fevvers is about to end, it is as if a spell is broken. Walser feels as if he, and the whole situation are suddenly plunged back into the real world, a description suggestive of the experience of putting down an engaging novel:

Having completed the interview, however, Walser still has not managed to make sense of Fevvers. Throughout the text of the novel’s first section there are multiple references to Fevvers gradually removing her make-up. This act serves, however, more to emphasise her artifice and constructedness than to unmask her true self to Walser. When the interview comes to an end, Walser is left with no answers and even more questions than he set out with. “Curioser and curioser,” he thinks to himself when back at his lodgings (90). His interest is evoked and his conceptions of reality challenged to such an extent that he cannot let Fevvers go. The end of his interview only constitutes the start of his relation to Fevvers, as he decides the same morning to join her and Colonel Kearney’s Circus on their tour east.

The interview discussed above, the first meeting between Walser and Fevvers, constitutes a narrative frame which allows Fevvers to tell the story of her own life and of the lives of the other unfortunate women she has known. In a first reading of the novel this meeting, although belonging to the diegetic level[7], appears to be no more than a narrative frame marginal to the main action. Curiously, however, the frame story provided in “London”, seemingly not belonging to the dominant diegesis of this section, turns out in the course of the succeeding sections of the novel to be part of its main story. The world(s) of Fevvers’ narratives constitute(s) the larger part of the text of “London”, and until read in relation to the rest of the novel these metadiegetic[8] stories seem to function as the novel’s dominant level of action. There are references to the actual interviewing situation as Fevvers’ narration goes along, but the metadiegetic rather than the diegetic level is given primacy, a fact which serves metafictional ends by foregrounding the issue of storytelling. And “London” is indeed a narration about narration.

The objective of the following is to consider the development of Walser and his relationship to his own self as well as to Fevvers, and to link these developments to the allegory of reading that the novel offers. The suggested change in the centrality of the different diegetic levels of “London” to the novel’s action as a whole will be of interest in this discussion, as will the question of the identity of the narratorial voice.

Towards the end of the novel, recapitulating his past adventures when waiting for Fevvers to join him in bed, Walser ponders: “All that seemed to happen to me in the third person as though, most of my life, I watched it but did not live it” (294). Comparing this self-insight of Walser’s to the description of him given on one of the novel’s first pages, to the effect that “Walser had not experienced his experience as experience; sandpaper his outsides as experience might, his inwardness had been left untouched” (10), “London” may actually be taken to be Walser’s own rendering of his first meeting with Fevvers. A rendering of the interview which, true to his experience of it, is presented in the guise of a third-person narration.

Towards the very end of the novel, in an attempt to reconstruct his own self, Walser paraphrases his past adventure as follows:

Then the moment of midnight passes. Along with the birth of a new century, a new Walser emerges, as he takes “himself apart and put[s] himself together again” (294), starting the recounting of his experience to himself once more, but this time presented as a third-person narrative:

As mentioned above, Walser at this point states that his adventures seem to have happened to him in the third person, as if he has been an audience to his own life rather than acted in it. He acknowledges that a new Walser has been born, “hatched out of the shell of unknowing” and that he “shall have to start all over again” (294). Thus Walser seems to share with Fevvers an existential compulsion to narrate as a means of self-definition.

Although the larger part of it is spoken by Fevvers, the narrative perspective of “London” is invariably that of Walser. In this section, as opposed to the rest of the novel, the representation of thought through interior monologue is reserved for Walser alone. The narration closely follows his movements mentally as well as physically. The reader is never given access to other characters’ minds in this section, while Walser’s thoughts are rendered directly and seemingly unmediated, identifying him closely with the narrator, or according to Wayne Booth, even replacing him. Booth considers the third person “centers of consciousness” to be a highly important but generally unacknowledged kind of narrator (The Rhetoric of Fiction: 153), claiming that “[a]ny sustained inside view, of whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator” (164).

Gerald Prince distinguishes between three different types of point of view: unrestricted, internal and external. Using these terms one may conclude that the point of view of “London” is internal in that “everything is represented strictly in terms of the knowledge, feelings and perceptions of one or several characters” (Narratology: 51). Since the information given to the reader in this section never exceeds or differs from what Walser “(could) know or tell”,[9] the point of view is also fixed. This argument may be contested with reference to a few passages in Carter’s text. These, however, as I will argue, have to do with the difference between Walser as narrator and Walser as focaliser.

The transition from a first person to a third person narrative, as illustrated in the two examples above, marks a distance between the old and the new (more humble and less bragging) Walser, and constitutes the point at which Walser as focaliser and Walser as narrator emerge as two separate voices. Although the narrative perspective is Walser’s throughout “London”, as his thoughts seem to merge with the voice of the narrator, the voice that verbalises his vision or perspective is kept separate from this. “London” is mediated in the voice of the new Walser as a third person narrator, through his focaliser, Walser the unhatched.

There is in other words a distance between Walser-the-narrator and Walser–the-narrated, which also accounts for the fact that in some few instances of “London” the narrator displays knowledge (invariably of Fevvers’ greed) that his focaliser does not possess, such as in: “You’d never think that she dreamed, at nights, of bank accounts, or that, to her the music of the spheres was the jingling of cash registers. Even Walser did not guess that” (12). Such an instance displaying the non-identity of Walser as narrator and Walser as focaliser, the former commenting on the latter’s lack of knowledge, is a consequence of the fact that Walser is narrating and sorting impressions in retrospect and thus from a different position. Similarly, when one reads: “Bouquets pelt on the stage. Since there is no second-hand market for flowers, she takes no notice of them” (18), one attributes the comment not to Walser the focaliser, but to Walser as narrator.

A few other paragraphs of “London” may be also said to incorporate other voices than Walser’s. However, I would argue that these voices are nevertheless filtered and represented through Walser’s mind. In the description of how her native city has welcomed Fevvers, several voices resound: “Her name was on the lips of all, from duchess to costermonger: “Have you seen Fevvers? And then “How does she do it?” And then “Do you think she is real? The young reporter wanted to keep his wits about him” (8-9). The voices of the public may be understood as going through Walser’s mind when finally there to meet Fevvers in the flesh, as his re-voicing of other voices. Similarly, when Walser looks back on Fevvers’ show, the Prince’s presence is referred to as follows: “God save the mother of the obese and bearded princeling who has taken his place in the royal box twice nightly since Fevvers’ first night at the Alhambra, stroking his beard and meditating upon the erotic possibilities of her ability to hover and the problematic of his paunch vis-à-vis the missionary position” (18). The sarcastic tone of this passage seems to indicate Walser’s imagining of the prince’s thoughts rather than an omniscient narrator’s referring to them. The narrative perspective seems in other words to be that of Walser, who, when waiting for Fevvers to join him in bed at the end of the novel, is the one recalling “how nature had equipped her for the ‘woman on top’ position” (292).

The point of view, or focalisation[10] seems to be predominantly internal in the rest of the novel as well, but as opposed to focalisation being fixed to Walser in “London”, the perspective in the succeeding sections is variable as the narrator moves in and out of different characters.[11] In some cases the perspective may even be seen as multiple, as in the different representations of the first meeting between Walser and Fevvers after the train crash.

Chapter seven of “Siberia” is narrated by Fevvers in the first person, and ends with her seeing Walser coming out of the woods. As she recognises him she cries out his name: “Jack! Jack! (...) Jack Walser!” (251). The following chapter is narrated by an extradiegetic narrator who takes us back in time to recount what has happened to Walser during the span of Fevvers’ narrative. On page 268 the narrative catches up with the ending of the previous chapter as the voice of Mignon is heard through the woods and the forest dwellers are drawn towards its source. On the middle of page 269 we get Walser’s version, presented through the narrator, of the meeting with Fevvers, which she herself described some pages earlier. “Jack! Jack!” her words sound again, “Jack Walser!” (269). In “London”, as opposed to such shifts, every leap in time or space follow the workings of Walser’s mind or his physical movements.

Free indirect discourse as well as interior monologue are narrative devices frequently used in Nights at the Circus, and, by blending the voices of narrator and various characters, they contribute to creating the sense of polyphony recognised by many readers of the novel. While interior monologue may seem to give the reader direct and unmediated access to the mind and thoughts of a character, the identity of voice in the case of free indirect discourse is subtler. As a means of identifying occurrences of free indirect speech in a text, Lothe compares three discourse variants of the same sentence (47):

As it appears, free indirect discourse occupies a middle position between the other two representations of speech, rendering the question of who is speaking more ambiguous. Although free indirect discourse and interior monologue are devices at work throughout the whole novel, the manner in which they are applied seems to separate the first section of the novel from its succeeding parts.

As mentioned above, in the first part of the novel the narrator limits himself to revealing the thoughts of Walser, while Fevvers and Lizzie are only given voice through direct discourse, referred to in inverted commas. The reader is never given access to other minds than that of Walser. In the succeeding parts of the novel, however, the narrator is not limited to one perspective, but moves in and out of various characters. Even the voice of a rather minor character such as the weary babushka merges with that of the narrator: “She turned the spigot of the samovar onto a glass. How her old bones did ache! How bitterly she regretted having promised the boy a story!” (97). The same effect can be observed in the description of Colonel Kearney: “The old glory itself toppled with a gilt eagle, unfurled with grandiose negligence from a pole propped in the corner – born in Kentucky he might have been, but no Dixie patriot he!” (99). Also Fevvers, whose voice is never confused with that of the narrator in the novel’s first section, is referred to by ways of indirect discourse later (In this particular example sliding over into direct speech): “No she won’t come down. She’s safer up there, isn’t she. What murderous fuckers have been tinkering with the rig? High as she was you could hear every word” (160). Examples abound.

While in the novel’s first section such a sliding between the voice of the narrator and that of a character is only allowed in relation to Walser, it is later used as a device to present the thoughts and utterances of several other characters. The narrative perspective is no longer reserved for Walser alone. Furthermore, while in the first section of the novel Walser’s thoughts almost invariably merge with the voice of the narrator, in the latter parts they are also often referred to through direct discourse, disjoining his voice more clearly from that of the narrator.

In his attempt during “London” to get to the bottom of the mystery of Fevvers’ wings, Walser may be seen as instrumental in transforming Fevvers’ experiences into narratives. Not only because his voice tends to merge with that of the narrator, but also through his mere presence. Without him, her reader, in the dressing room there would be no storytelling, no text. At one level, then, his function in the novel’s first section resembles the one Jakob Lothe assigns to the narrator as “a narrative instrument that the author uses to present and develop the text” (Narrative in Fiction and Film 20), although, as noted earlier, his questions seem to be generated by Fevvers’ narratives rather than the other way around. Recalling Booth’s claim that “[a]ny sustained inside view, of whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator” (164), one may suggest that Walser, through whose mind the narration of “London” is filtered, paradoxically seems to function not only as a reader, but also as a narrator.

Although Walser’s function in “London” may be likened to that of a narrator, one should, as mentioned, still bear in mind that Walser is clearly established as a reader of the stories that make up the larger part of the novel’s first section, being recurrently addressed directly as the audience of these, starting already with the novel’s first line: “Lor’ love you, sir!” (7). Thus Walser is easily established as the actual reader’s representative or locus for identification in the text. This of course contributes - already in the novel’s first section - to establishing Walser’s reading activity as important, but it is only later that the allegory of reading is established as the novel’s central concern.

As the novel progresses it becomes evident that the journalist Walser is very much a participant rather than just an observer of the action, as the activity of his reading of Fevvers turns out to be the novel’s main issue. At first Walser appears (and believes himself) to be there to report actions of which he himself is not an integral part. “I’m here to write a story about the circus. About you and the circus”, he tells Fevvers (114). But as the novel progresses it turns out that Walser himself is one of the protagonists of a story which seems to be just as much about him reading and being written as him writing. In other words, that which seemed to be outside the main story turns out to be the story itself as the metadiegetic and the diegetic levels of the section undergo a shift in centrality in relation to the novel’s action.

Jakob Lothe’s definition of a third-person narrator as “outside or ‘above’ the plot” (21) corresponds closely to the journalistic ideal of objectivity as well as to Walser’s stated experience of his own life. Also, as mentioned, the role the reader assigns Walser when reading “London” for the first time resembles Lothe’s characterisation of the third-person narrator as “outside the action (but within the fiction)” (23). Wallace Martin refers to a narration with a third person limited point of view as evading “the category of grammatical person by suppressing the narratorial use of ‘I’” (133). Since it “assumes access to only one mind and often uses the visual perspective of that character”, he accepts F.K. Stanzel’s term “figural narration” for this kind of narration and opposes it to “authorial narration” where an implied author refers to himself as “I” (134). The narration of “London” is not of the purely figural kind, as there is an “I” surfacing on some occasions, still it shares with the above narrative situation the feature of a reflector-character. [12] As will be argued in the following the narrative situation of the kind we have in “London”, should, rather than the figural narrative situation, be seen to constitute the diametrically opposite of authorial narration in Stanzel’s typological circle (56).

When it comes to differentiating personal from authorial narration, it is, according to Stanzel “not the occurrence of the first person of the personal pronoun (...) outside dialogue, which is decisive, but rather the location of the designated person within or outside the fictional world of the characters of a novel or a story” (A Theory of Narrative: 48). As he points out, in the term “first person narration” the pronoun points to the narrator, while in “third person [figural] narration” it refers to a character in the fiction which is not the narrator (48). The opposite of authorial narration is seen by Stanzel as an unrealised, but theoretically possible narrative situation, with the “identity of the realms of existence to which the narrator and the characters belong” distinguishing it from the authorial as well as the figural position. The diametrically opposite of authorial narrative, then, would not be figural narration (as Martin seems to indicate), but would rather lie in the transitory sector between a first person and a figural narrative situation, with an internal (intradiegetic) perspective as its primary characteristic, filtered through the mind of a reflector-character. The narrator would be homodiegetic in that the realm of his existence is identical to that of the fictional world, being a character in the fiction.

If one takes Walser to be the narrator of “London”, this section must be regarded as displaying all the features characteristic of the transitory narrative situation between personal and figural narration accounted for above; internal perspective, reflector-character and identity of narrator’s world with that of the characters. Although we do have an “I” surfacing on a limited number of occasions, the narration is, as already argued, still internal, filtered through the mind of the reflector-character, Walser. Furthermore this “I” refers to Walser, a character in the story, i.e. Walser as homodiegetic narrator. What appears to be extradiegetic turns out to be (intra)diegetic and the seemingly heterodiegetic turns out to be homodiegetic. The “London” section is, however, easily apprehended as occupying the middle ground between authorial and figural in Stanzel’s typological circle, diametrically in opposition to the first person narrative situation, as the identity of narrator and fictional world is obscured and the section apparently is part of the narrative of an extradiegetic narrator. Thus the close relation between “London” and a first person narrative is almost completely obscured.

According to Stanzel, “[s]ubstituting a teller-character for a reflector-character can result in a decisive change in the narrative statement” (60). In “London”, however, this may not seem the case since the reflector-character (focaliser) and the narrator is the same character. The narration of “London” is so thoroughly filtered through Walser’s consciousness that a transposition of this into a first person narrative would be unproblematic. In some cases, the interior monologues of Walser, there seems already to be almost complete convergence of narrator and character, teller and reflector:

First impression: physical ungainliness. Such a lump it seems! But soon, quite soon, an acquired grace asserts itself, probably the result of strenuous exercise. (Check if she is trained as a dancer) My, how her bodice strains! You’d think her tits were going to pop right out. What sensation that would cause; wonder she hasn’t thought of incorporating it in her act. Physical ungainliness in flight caused, perhaps, by absence of tail, the rudder of the flying bird – I wonder why she doesn’t tack a tail on the back of her cache-sexe; it would add verisimilitude and, perhaps improve the performance. (16-17)

But - and Walser smiled to himself again, as he remembered his flutter of conviction that seeing is believing - what about her belly button? Hasn’t she just this minute told me she was hatched from an egg, not gestated in utero? The oviparous species are not, by definition nourished by the placenta; therefore they feel no need for the umbilical cord...and therefore, don’t bear the scar of its loss! Why isn’t the whole of London asking: does Fevvers have a belly-button? (17-18)

Although easily achieved, the transposition of the third-person narratives surrounding Walser’s monologues into first-person representation, would, however, obscure the point that a new and different Walser is narrating of his old self in retrospect, and render the section a traditional first person narration.

As argued above, there seem to be basically two narratorial devices at work in Nights at the Circus for interweaving the voice of the narrator with that of a character, the dominant in “London” being interior monologue, while the rest of the novel makes more extensive use of free indirect discourse. In addition, the device of letting Fevvers present parts of her own story in first-person narratives throughout “Siberia” contributes to giving her narratorial status. These narratives do, however, not so much represent the merging of as the identity of character and narrator. In relation to the allegory and the possible confusion of diegetic levels discussed earlier, this is an interesting fact, as the reader at this point seems to enter the fiction, stepping into Walser’s role as Fevvers’ audience in his absence.[13]

If one tries to relate free indirect discourse and interior monologue to Stanzel’s typological circle, it appears that the latter, which is associated with “London”, not unexpectedly, is closer to personal narration than the former, which occupies a space between figural and authorial narrative situation (Stanzel: xvi). It is evident that interior monologue, so often used in “London”, is less ambiguous than free indirect discourse, in that it is basically direct discourse, giving an illusion of immediacy.

One might say that the narrator of the novel’s latter parts is more omniscient than the one of its first section. Or, since talking of degrees of omniscience does not seem to make much sense, it should perhaps suffice to conclude that the latter parts of the novel are less restricted when it comes to its perspective. Also the free indirect discourse of these sections paradoxically - keeping in mind the impression of polyphony it produces - may seem to require a more distinct authorial voice than does the interior monologue of “London”, where the narrator as mediator appears to be effaced. Where the “London” narrator restricts himself to reporting direct speech and the thoughts of only one character, the narrative perspective of the latter sections of the novel constantly changes. Also this latter narrator provides information which none of the characters are in possession of or able to communicate, as in the case of Mignon’s story. None of the characters present know her history, and she herself does not know a language in which to make herself understood, consequently her story has to be communicated to the reader through an omniscient narrator. This kind of omniscience is never present in the first section of Nights at the Circus. The only story not revealed through reference to Fevvers’ speech here, is the story of the reporter, which starts in a manner strikingly similar to his own summaries towards the end of the novel (see above: 18): “His name was Jack Walser. Himself, he hailed from California” (9).

The narration of “London”, then, may seem to be of the figural kind with Walser viewing himself from the outside, the section at one level constituting a narrative where the “I” is suppressed, placing it between personal and figural narration in Stanzel’s typological circle. As mentioned, although narration of the figural kind is dominant in the frame of “London”, there are, however, a couple of instances of a narrating “I” surfacing also in this section, as in: “I say he had the propensity for ‘finding himself in the right place at the right time’; yet it was almost as if he himself were an objet trouvé, for subjectively, himself he never found, since it was not his self which he sought” (10). Here the self-reflective narrator is referring back to and modifying what he said on the preceding page: “In the course of his adventuring, he discovered in himself a great talent with words, and an even greater aptitude for finding himself in the right place at the right time” (9, emphasis added). It appears that the narrator develops his view of Walser in the progress of narration. The “I” of this passage should be seen as the narrating Walser, “hatched out from the shell of unknowing” (294), looking back, narrating the story of his former self as a homo- and intradiegetic “I”, rather than a hetero- and extradiegetic one, for which it is easily mistaken.

As mentioned, the distance between the new and the old Walser is evident already as he first starts the narration of his own adventures towards the very end of the novel. Pages 293 and 294 feature two different synopses of Walser’s experience. From first thinking that he “joined the circus of Colonel Kearney in order to delight [his] reading public with accounts of a few nights at the circus” (293), he changes to realise in the second narrative that he “ran away with the circus for the sake of a bottle blonde in whose hands he was putty since the first moment he saw her” (294). Along with this realisation he also goes from introducing Fevvers as “my wife, Mrs Sophie Walser” to acknowledging the fact that he still has no right to name her as an extension of or appendix to himself and ought rather call her by the name she has constructed for herself: “‘Fevvers’, he said, some sixth sense kept him from calling her Sophie” (294). The combined voices of the narrating Walser and Walser-the-focaliser pervade the narrative frame in “London”, the oscillation between these positions - the old and the new Walser – actually being a prerequisite and the motivation for the narrative. As Fevvers realises that Walser has changed, or “hatched” as she puts it, she encourages him to start the interview over again (291).

“London”, then, may be read as Walser’s looking back upon his experiences in the guise of a third person narrator, limited to his own perspective, a response to Fevvers’ “Get out your pencil and we’ll begin!” (291).[14] Such a reading of its first section adds a curious level of circularity to the novel, as well as being of importance to its metafictionality. If viewed in this way, the novel not only starts with “the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century” (11), the narrative also starts when its own story is about to end. Consequently, the novel, apart from ending with the birth of a new century and a love affair, ends with its own start. The last section of the novel concludes with Fevvers rejoicing in the fact that Walser’s change makes their love possible: “That’s the way to start the interview!” she cries (291). Or as Walser himself puts it: “And now, hatched out of the shell of unknowing (...) I shall have to start all over again” (294). My proposition, then, is that the first section of the novel may be viewed as Walser’s starting anew, and thus the beginning of the novel does in fact coincide with its ending, as Walser on the novel’s last pages begins to narrate parts of the novel we have just been reading. This circular structure may be seen as thematising the view that a narrative is always retrospective and motivated by its own end, both as regards its narrative structure and its reading.[15]

“London” is the American journalist Walser’s account of how he experienced his own interview with the winged woman Fevvers, a meeting which is the initiation of a relationship that throughout the novel serves as an allegory of the interaction between a text and its reader. Walser’s function in the novel is thus a very complex one. On the one hand he functions allegorically as a reader in his relationship to Fevvers, and on the other one he seems himself to be the writer of this allegory, just as the novel as a whole seems to write the allegory of itself and its reading, thus existing within a perpetual circularity.

The ambiguous narratorial voice of “London” also links with the change in centrality given to the different levels of “London”’s narrative by the reader. As discussed above, the interview which at the outset seems marginal to the main action or plot of the novel, does in fact constitute the core of it. Jakob Lothe defines the diegetic level as the level “which the third-person narrator (on the extradiegetic level) presents but does not participate in” (32). Just as the novel’s first part deceptively depicts the meeting between Walser and Fevvers as a frame story, its narrator seems at first glance to be situated outside the plot. As one reads on, however, that which at the start presented itself as a frame turns out to be the picture itself, and the narrator that seemed to be situated outside the action turns out to be one of its protagonists. In this respect my experience of reading Nights at the Circus may seem to be mirrored in Walser’s attitude towards his own experiences.

A reading which establishes Walser as the narrator of “London” does also result in a change of the diegetic status of the whole of this section in relation to the rest of the novel. The apparent structure of “London” may be schematised as follows:

Narrator providing the frame story/the interview (same level as the rest of the novel)

within which Fevvers’ stories are told

within which other people tell their stories

Having established Walser as the narrator of “London” the structure not only of the narrative hierarchy of “London” but also of the novel as a whole is altered. The interviewing situation of “London” becomes a metadiegetic narrative within the novel as a whole and consequently all narrative levels of the first section change hierarchical positions, the result being a structure of the following kind:

Narrator provides a narration (the text of Nights at the Circus)

within which Walser narrates a story (the interview/frame)

within which Fevvers tells her stories

within which other people tell their stories

As appears from this model, Walser-the-narrator intrudes into the narrative structure offered in the first model and as a consequence alters the diegetic status of all its constituents, rendering metadiegetic that which appeared to be diegetic, meta-metadiegetic that which appeared to be metadiegetic and so on. What first appears to be told by an extradiegetic narrator is in fact narrated by Walser at the novel’s diegetic level, rendering the whole section of “London” a metadiegetic narration. The novel does in other words start out with a narration that belongs to its metadiegetic level, but which cannot be recognised as such before one is able to establish Walser as its narrator. “London” does in fact consist of a narrative embedded in the novel as a whole but it is not recognisable as such until the novel’s very last pages. Because Walser is the teller of a story within a story that is not yet told, and because, for reasons accounted for above, his narrative is presented in the third person, his words pass for those of the narrator. Walser’s narrative is in other words a pseudo-diegetic one, taken control of by the first narrator, and turning out in the end to be a hidden metadiegetic analepsis.[16]

Walser, the character that first appeared to be minor, proves in the course of the novel not only to be one of its protagonists, he also appears to be the narrator of part of its central diegesis. He develops from first being considered a minor character, then a protagonist, and finally to be established as a narrator-character. Marginal turns out to be central and extradiegetic turns out to be diegetic.

The extradiegetic is traditionally the narrative level of the third-person narrator as well as that of the implied reader, “outside the action (but within the fiction)” (Lothe: 23). Consequently the shifts accounted for above, where the reader’s locus for identification changes from being apparently outside or marginal to the plot into constituting its centre in addition to being its narrator (rendering the narrator of the section diegetic rather than extradiegetic), may serve to confuse the reader’s experience of her own status in relation to the narrative. As mentioned above, also the reader’s apparent taking over of Walser’s role as Fevvers audience in “Siberia” may seem to unsettle the traditional role of the implied reader as extradiegetic.

Gerard Genette defines metalepsis as “taking hold of (telling) by changing levels” (Narrative Discourse 237n). The most general kind of metalepsis consists in “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (...) or the inverse” (234-35). As an example one my take the instance in E.M. Forster’s Howards End when Helen has just had an agitated talk with Tibby, wanting him to tell Margaret about the past affair of her newly wedded husband and Jacky, the narrator draws itself into the fiction by stating that “It is convenient to follow him in the discharge of his duties” (252). [17]

Another figure which Genette connects to metalepsis is the telling of something as though it were diegetic although it has “been presented as (or can easily be guessed to be) metadiegetic in its principle or, if one prefers, in its origin” (236), bringing a second narrative to the first level.[18] The metalepsis of deceptively presenting Walser’s narrative as the narration of the novel’s third person narrator, in addition to drawing the apparently marginal Walser into the centre of the plot, are both devices of metafictionality creating in the reader a sense of diffuse borders between the different narrative levels, thus also a questioning of her own status in relation to the text. “The most troubling thing about metalepsis”, Genette writes, “indeed lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his narratees - you and I - perhaps belong to some narrative” (236). The metalepsis in effect links closely with a question which pervades the whole novel, the question of what is fact and what is fiction.

In Narrative Discourse Revisited, Genette writes that “one narrative can scarcely ‘embed’ another without indicating the operation and, therefore, without designating itself as the first narrative”. “Can the designating be done silently or fallaciously?” he asks (87-88). Perhaps one could see the positioning of “London” in front of what actually precedes it chronologically as the extradiegetic narrator jealously and silently trying to incorporate Walser’s narrative into its own? By putting Walser’s narrative in the beginning of the novel, the novel’s narration almost erases its own metalepsis. Does this metalepsis constitute the ultimate disempowerment of Walser as a writer, rendering him nothing but a written subject as a reader of Fevvers’ (subversive) narratives? Is narrative egocentrism what causes Walser’s recollections to be put first in the text, and, given the fact that he presents them in the third person, to effectively disguise his narrative as the words of the extradiegetic narrator? The narrative presentation of “London”, which at first seems to privilege the perspective of Walser and thereby to endow him with a certain amount of power as the narrator that reports the history of Fevvers, may in fact be seen as the narrator depriving Walser of voice.

Fevvers, by contrast, is given a narrative privilege not only through her stories quoted, thus given credit as being her own words in “London”, but also in the many instances of her first person narration in the third section of the novel, “Siberia”. Significantly, also, these latter ones occur at a time when Walser has lost both memory and language. It may seem that Fevvers’ ability of self-definition through narration is made possible at the cost of Walser’s.

It is quite evident towards the end of the novel, however, that Fevvers is not able to construct her own self through narration alone, she also needs a reader of her story. Walser becomes the one to fill this role in Fevvers project and this reduces his own quest for identity to a matter of reading and writing Fevvers,[19] rather than writing his own self: “The young American it was who kept the whole story of old Fevvers in his notebooks; she longed for him to tell her she was true. She longed to see her reflected in all her remembered splendour in his grey eyes” (273). Walser seems to be no more than a mirror in which Fevvers can affirm her difference, which in essence constitutes her identity as such.

When her reader is not present, Fevvers is unable to exist; she needs constant confirmation of her difference in order to exist as other than just Sophie. When separated from her reader, Fevvers looks “more and more like the London sparrow as which [she] had started out in life, as if a spell were unravelling” (271). Although Fevvers has a compulsion to name her self rather than being named by others, she needs someone, a reader to accept and affirm this constructed identity for it to take effect. She exists for her reader on her own terms. The reader, rather than the text, seems to be the one that needs to be modified in order for the intended meaning to be established.

As it appears, then, Walser’s power in relation to Fevvers (by allegorical extension, the reader’s power in relation to the text) turns out to be of an illusory kind. “London”, which first seems to privilege Walser’s point of view, is instead his being deprived of a proper voice by narrative structuring. This deceptive empowering or freedom is present also in the next two sections of the novel, in “Petersburg” where as a clown Walser illusorily experiences “the freedom to juggle with being”(103), and in “Siberia” where he apparently rescues Fevvers from her crisis of identity.