Introduction

After Angela Carter’s death in 1992, critical attention to her fiction increased considerably. Elaine Jordan reports that “in 1993-94 the British Academy were saying that for every three people who wanted to do a thesis on eighteenth-century writing, there were forty who wanted to write on Angela Carter” (“Her Brilliant Career”: 82). Trying to orient myself in this jungle of criticism in relation to my work on Nights at the Circus, however, I soon found that it was not such a wilderness after all. Considering the complexity and seemingly polyphonic nature of this novel, the critical work it has generated seems to be surprisingly uniform.

Carter’s fiction in general is seen to be theoretically oriented. As Elaine Jordan points out, “there is hardly a theoretical debate of the past twenty years that she does not subject to imaginative exploration.” (“Enthralment: Angela Carter’s Speculative Fiction”: 34). Blurring genre boundaries, Carter’s narratives may be read as theories, offered through fiction, of the mechanisms of patriarchal society that govern human thought, feeling and interaction. In Come Unto these Yellow Sands, Carter equates the exploration of ideas with the activity of telling stories. To her “narrative is an argument stated in fictional terms” (Lorna Sage. Angela Carter: 50). Although, as Sage points out, this statement refers to Carter’s radio plays, it is a description applicable also to Nights at the Circus.

Along these lines, Angela Carter is generally seen to be (and has, indeed, designated herself) a demythologiser.[1] “I’m basically trying to find out what certain configurations of imagery in our society, in our culture, really stand for, what they mean, underneath the kind of semireligious coating that makes people not particularly want to interfere with them”, she tells Anna Katsavos in an interview (The Review of Contemporary Fiction: 12). Demythologising of the structures of patriarchal society, of which literary structures are an important part, is achieved in her work mainly through self-conscious parody and inversion. A concern with this project serves as a backdrop to most critical discussions of Nights at the Circus. In the bibliography of Alison Easton’s Angela Carter, criticism of Carter’s oeuvre is systematised into different categories, which I find may also apply specifically to the work done on Nights at the Circus. Slightly revised, these headings may read: feminist strategies of (re)writing and reading, intertextualities, formal/generic questions, Freudian psychoanalysis, French feminisms, questions on deconstruction, postmodernism and post-structuralism, gender as performance, carnival, spectacle and power (217-221). At first glance this list hardly seems to indicate uniformity. However, at a closer reading of the critical work done on Nights at the Circus, one finds, as indicated above, that these categories are merely different starting points which interconnect at a basic level in being motivated by and geared towards a treatment of Carter’s demythologising project.

There is hardly a critical reading of Nights at the Circus which does not take into account its demythologising aspirations or its rewriting of and dialogue with other texts. [2] Carter states herself in “Notes from the front line” that:

This passage has become a standard one in criticism, serving to illustrate succinctly, and in her own words, what Carter is up to in her fiction. It has, indeed, been so often used that when I reluctantly include it here, it is only for the purpose of illustrating that the very frequency of its occurrence may seem to indicate that there has become established a particular consensus for the reading of Carter’s texts. Still, I would maintain that the strategies of this community are strategies which are highly encouraged by the text itself, and not purely coincidental or subjective approaches taken as precedent, or strategies arrived at by reference to Carter’s non-fictional writings. The relative homogeneity in the critical writing on Nights at the Circus is linked to the novel’s metafictional character. One may wonder, with Linda Hutcheon, whether “metafiction, in its selfanalytic overtness, [might] be perceived as pre-empting the critic’s role as commentator?” (Narcissistic Narrative: xii).

The project of demythologising consists, as mentioned, in the unmasking of literary as well as social structures that are seen to govern human relations. These structures are closely linked according to Carter, in that the former contributes to the construction of the latter, and as they are both fictions designed to uphold patriarchy. Carter’s work is consequently metafictional in an extended sense of the term, her main project being the exploration of both literary strategies and social fictions designed to keep people (especially women) in their place. As the unmasking of these fictions is achieved through inversion and parody, the project is inevitably a vulnerable one, demanding a reader who is able to recognise this play for demythologising to take effect. As Linda Hutcheon states in The Politics of Postmodernism, the political project of postmodernism will always have to engage in a struggle with its own inherent ambiguity (4). Nights at the Circus, itself an attempt at subversion, may also be read as a text that problematises the conditions of such a practice.

The attention to Carter’s activity of demythologising, which is present as an underlying concern in all critical discourse on Nights at the Circus, is what produces the uniformity of reception referred to above. Paradoxically, it appears that the novel, which seeks to undermine authoritarian structures, does itself firmly direct the reader’s response within a certain framework of reading. Consequently, the metafictional aspect of Nights at the Circus seems not only to diffuse its boundaries and leave the text open, but also to close it, by guiding and restricting responses to the text in a particular direction. This, it may be argued, is, to a lesser or greater extent the case in the reading of any text. What renders the fact of particular interest in connection with Carter’s novel, however, is the apparent tension between this kind of closedness and the insistence on the opposite in the post-modern aesthetic of plurality and open-endedness into which, as will be discussed later, Nights at the Circus seems to inscribe itself. Also the emphasis in much criticism put on Fevvers’ dependency on Walser, her reader in the allegory, who is referred to as the one who keeps “the whole story of the old Fevvers in his notebooks” (Nights: 273), forms a contrast to the manner in which the novel itself seems to work on its reader.

As part of the demythologising project, the metafictional aspect of Carter’s novel is important on two levels. Nights at the Circus is on the one hand a fiction about cultural fictions (myths, consolatory nonsenses[3]), which through a rewriting of other narratives, theoretical as well as non-theoretical ones, emphasises its own intertextuality. On the other hand, it is also a fiction about how fiction and reader interact, that is an allegory of reading. [4] Nights at the Circus is in other words a fiction about fiction(ing) as well as a fiction about reading.

The metafictional aspect of Nights at the Circus in the former sense - rewriting of cultural constructs and other narratives - has, as indicated above, come to be adopted as the standard approach to Carter's fiction. The main emphasis in my reading of Carter’s novel, however, will lie on the second kind of metafiction involved in Carter’s demythologising project, that is on the novel as an allegory of reading. However, in relation to a work so preoccupied with the effect fictions have upon our lives - the way we construct meanings and identities in interaction with each other - such a discussion will to a certain extent necessarily also be one of the novel as a fiction about fiction(ing). Indeed, as will emerge later, in Carter’s allegory the border between reading and writing is not always presented as clear-cut.

In her article on Nights at the Circus, Beth A. Boehm raises some interesting issues in relation to the paradoxes of the project of Carter’s novel. Through emphasis on the importance of the metafictional aspect (in both its forms) for the way Carter's text reads, she attributes what she calls two “misreadings”[5] of Nights at the Circus to the fact that they fail to recognise its metafictional intent and thereby are unable to free themselves from the androcentric reading strategies that are the very ones subject to Carter’s subversion. First Boehm performs an analysis of Carolyn See’s (mis)reading of Carter’s novel, a reading which apparently pays no attention to the metafictional aspects of the text. According to Boehm, See reads the relationship between Walser and Fevvers according to the conventions of the romance novel rather than metafictionally, thus finding that it has little new to offer.

As Boehm points out, such a reading, ignoring the metafictional quality of the novel, fails to see that Carter is parodying romance conventions of happy endings, and that what Fevvers needs is “Walser as an authorial reader more than as a romantic lover” (Boehm: 197). Fevvers herself puts it this way: “Think of him, not as a lover, but as a scribe, as an amanuensis (...) and not only of my trajectory, alone, but of yours too, Lizzie” (285).

Adam Mars-Jones, on the other hand, finds the novel difficult to read and make sense of because of its fragmented point of view and its anachronistic literary allusions (“are they Fevvers’ or Angela Carter’s?”). According to Boehm these problems arise because Mars-Jones does not see that Carter often refers to the canon irreverently or ironically, thus questioning the value and legitimacy of such a construction in the first place. Consequently he attempts to read the novel “in such a way that Carter's metafiction will legitimise rather than subvert dominant ideological and literary structures” (198). According to Boehm, a reading of Carter demands recognition of both the feminist and the metafictional aspirations of her novel, which, as argued above, jointly constitute its demythologising project. On the one hand, the readings referred to in the above display the ambiguity of Carter’s undertaking, its inherent danger of being mistaken for affirming what it seeks to subvert. Despite this doubleness, though, there is no doubt a textual intention in the novel. This intention is closely tied to the novel’s metafictional quality, which, also through its allegory, paradoxically seems to empower the reader. The latter, however, is not free to do whatever she likes with the text of Carter’s novel, as its metafictional aspect seems to guide the reader’s response in a certain direction. According to Linda Hutcheon metafiction contests the repression of the role of the textual producer of the last decades. “The romantic ‘author’, as originating and original source of meaning may well be dead (...) but his position – one of discursive authority – remains” (Narcissistic Narrative: xv). It may seem, as will be explored in this thesis, that the metafictionality of Nights at the Circus, its demythologising project, closes the text by demanding, or at least encouraging, a certain kind of reading. The text seems to be unable to exist (as meaningful) outside (attention to) its preoccupation with its own process of signification.

Attempting to substantiate this proposition, my discussion will revolve around the relationship between Walser and Fevvers, which, as suggested, may be viewed as an allegory of the one between reader and text. The intention is to trace Walser's development and his relation to Fevvers throughout the text and to see whether Carter's allegory of reading may correspond to the way her own novel reads. Fevvers’ relation to Walser and her endeavour to plot her own subjectivity independently of pre-set structures seem to parallel the novel’s search for identity/meaning, both in the end being dependent on the interaction with other texts and the reader (of these). Carter’s novel is vitally dependent on other texts to achieve an identity and shows a considerable awareness of this fact through its self-conscious metafictionality. Similarly, the subversive Fevvers is dependent on (male) cultural constructs of femininity, and she actively uses these in order to construct herself as the New Woman. Just as the novel as a whole does not work if one disregards its self-consciousness, so is the identity of Fevvers built upon a play on its constructedness. While in “Siberia”, she ceases this play, and Lizzie complains to her that, “Since he made himself known to us in Petersburg, you’ve been acting more and more like yourself” (197). “What I mean is that you grow more and more like your publicity” (198). Fevvers starts to fall apart when she disregards her identity as a construction. “Well who am I supposed to be like, then, if not meself” (198). Her situation when separated from Walser may be regarded as analogous to the one of the novel itself, which seeks to subvert through irony or parody and consequently is dependent on a reader to recognise it as such, so as not to lose its essential doubleness.

Still, the allegory presents Fevvers as a text that has to be understood on its own terms, a text that aims at “hatching” and forming its reader. Similarly, the novel itself is heavily dependent on its metafictionality to achieve its meaning, this trait of the text serving to position its reader, thus directing her response. Just like Fevvers is seen to fall apart in the absence of such a reader, Carter’s novel starts to falter when encountering readers that fail to read within the intended framework, as exemplified in the readings of See and Mars-Jones. Paradoxically, it may seem that Nights at the Circus - a text which aims at deconstructing patriarchal authority - appears itself, because of its metafictionality, to be a rather authoritarian discourse. This is mirrored in Fevvers’ attitude towards Walser, which in the end seems to show close affinities to the way men, from a feminist point of view, is seen to define women, their attempt at fixing female identity and constructing it as other, in order to secure a ground for the constitution of their own identity. As the novel sets out, Walser, the journalist, is intent on fixing and writing Fevvers’ identity in a manner that suits his own conceptions of reality. As the novel ends, however, Fevvers has turned the tables, as Walser is re-positioned to a place in language from which she is allowed to shape him.

Being a metafictional text, Nights at the Circus has two major foci: the first is on linguistic and narrative constructions, and the second is on the role of the reader in relation to the text. My discussion revolves around these issues, focusing on the role of the reader in the allegory through a reading of the novel in the combined light of narrative theory and theories of reading. In every instance it is Carter’s novel and its emphasis on the above themes, that invites the choice of texts from the point of view of which to (re)read the allegory. The first chapter of this thesis establishes the relationship between Fevvers and Walser as an allegory of reading by reference to Wolfgang Iser’s theory of the reading process. The argument proceeds to discuss whether the particular narrative status of “London” in relation to the rest of the novel renders the relationship between reader and text one in which the voice of the reader is disfavoured. Chapters 2 and 3 both carry on the exploration of the power relations between reader and text in the allegory. The second chapter does so by considering the activity of reading in relation to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of play, linking it to Peter Rabinowitz’ concept of the different role(s) a reader has to take on in the interaction with a text. In the last chapter I discuss the relationship between reader and text as one of love, relating it to Roland Barthes’ simulation of amorous speech in A Lover’s Discourse.

Reading the allegory of Nights at the Circus in the light of narrative theory and theories about reading and readership, opens up for a discussion of the relationship between reader and text also on the material level, still safely grounded in the structures of the novel itself. My reading, ultimately, attempts not only to explore the relationship between reader and text in the allegory, but also to relate this to the way Carter’s novel itself reads. Her demythologising project is an attempt to unmask how fictions (are employed to) assume control over us. It may seem, however, that this is achieved only by letting her own self-conscious fiction take control of the reader. The uniformity in criticism accounted for above may hence be regarded as mirrored in the way Fevvers as text “imposes her vision of herself on Walser, revising, rather than dissolving, existing power structures” (Clare Hanson. “‘The red dawn (...)”: 67).

Although each chapter of this thesis takes one section of Carter’s novel as its point of departure, the reader will note that the argument constantly reverts to the same issues, those relating to the disempowerment of the reader in her relationship to the text. This is due to the fact that, in my reading, the novel repeats itself through its three sections. In the course of the novel Fevvers is seen to withstand the attempts of different men to objectify her, while Walser, her reader, seems to lose himself on different levels and occasions.

In the novel’s first section, “London”, Walser’s attempt at fixing Fevvers to paper fails, as she immediately assumes control of her own narrative and consequently the power over her image. During the interview Fevvers tells Walser about her encounter with Rosencreutz, who wanted to defy mortality at the cost of her life, and how she narrowly escaped him. This embedded story serves to echo Walser’s present and failing attempt to capture Fevvers and, by disclosing her as a hoax, to secure the immortality of professional acknowledgement. Similarly, in “Petersburg” Fevvers only in the last second manages to escape the Grand Duke who symbolically devours her, by drinking glasses of vodka arranged to spell her christened name, Sophia (187). Fevvers does, however, manage to withstand his attempt to objectify her literally by transforming her into a precious miniature to keep in his collection of toys.

Parallel to Fevvers’ triumphs, Walser, by contrast, seems to lose his subjectivity. As mentioned, his attempt to fix Fevvers during the interview in “London” is no success. On the contrary, she puts a spell on him with her narratives, and he is caught, it seems, in a time-warp as Big Ben strikes midnight three times. Already quite early in the session he realises that “his quarry [has] him effectively trapped” (9), an image which is echoed in “Petersburg”, when, in his new role as clown, he is trapped in the circus ring with a hungry tigress. Walser survives this encounter but injures his right arm, consequently losing his journalistic abilities, and thus a vital part of himself. In “Siberia” Walser’s loss of self is made even more explicit, as he loses language altogether. In the train crash he is rendered unconscious by a blow on the head and buried alive in “stored away tablecloths and napkins, some clean, some soiled” (209). This accident echoes, and repeats at a more literal level, the one in “London” when Walser, in an attempt to avoid a knock on the head “dislodg[es] 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). The novel, then, seems to move forward by intensifying repetitions, circling around the same axis.

This spiralling movement is also reflected in the temporal structure of the novel. While the narratives of the novels’ first two sections are organised fairly straightforwardly in linear terms, with a narrator in one chapter picking up the story roughly where it was left in the preceding one, “Siberia”, in contrast, moves back and forth in both time, space and person. As the two protagonists, Walser and Fevvers are separated after the crash, the narrative itself also splits, moving forward from two different positions, alternately recounting the stories of Walser and Fevvers, which unfold parallel in time. The narrative moves back and forth between these, oscillating between a first person narration and a third person one. One unit of the story begins where the other started, but from a different perspective, thus telling a different, but still the same, story.

While, as argued, critical readings of Carter’s novel tend to repeat each other, the present reading is a repetition of itself, exploring different ways of approaching what I find to be the central issues of the novel. My reading, then, is characterised by progression through regression, in a spiralling movement, always in the end reverting to the same point but from slightly different perspectives. Each turn attempts to add to the total understanding of Carter’s novel by telling a story that is different, but still the same. This is the paradoxical story of the reader who willingly lets himself be forcibly repositioned, the reader who is (re)written by the text. I see my own reading as renewing itself in potentially endless repetitions, and as such its structure may be read as mirroring that of the novel itself, whose different sections repeat or echo each other, all depicting a reader who, in the face of the text, loses himself to be re-established in the end, i.e. his progression through regression. This is evident at end of the novel as it clearly invokes its own beginning, inviting a rereading of this. When reunited with Fevvers, Walser starts to recapitulate his adventures, starting with his interview in “London”, which is where I begin, too.