Nights at the Circus

role - one of entertainment. An American reporter, he cultivates "the professional necessity to see all and believe nothing" (10).

A "connoisseur of the tall tale," he is questioning Fevvers "for a series of interviews tentatively entitled 'Great Humbugs of the

World'" (11).

Fevvers, however, proves more than his match. For all his professional detachment, he quickly becomes "a prisoner of her

voice . . . Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren's" (43). Half mythical, she shares with Homer's

fabulous female creatures their hypnotic attraction - and their potential destructiveness. Indeed, Walser feels half stifled by

Fevvers' overpowering presence: "If he got out of her room for just one moment . . . then he might recover his sense of

proportion" (52). What he fears for is the loss of his fragile sense of self, which is also described in terms of the narrative pact

between writer and reader: "there were scarcely any of those little, what you might call personal touches to his personality, as if

his habit of suspending belief extended even unto his own being" (10). Notice that Walser suspends belief, not disbelief. He

adopts an atheistic attitude towards the power of the artistic imagination. He stands opposed to Coleridge's (and most

imaginative writers') desire to create "a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing

suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith" (Coleridge). Walser doesn't believe in either Fevvers'

(narrative) act or himself. As the representative of the sceptical materialistic world, he is shown from the start to be flawed by

his failure to admit into his life the world of fantasy, dreams and invention--at least until he meets Fevvers. It is his consequent

lack of belief in himself that makes him vulnerable to her superior linguistic skills.

Fevvers has to overcome his scepticism by the sheer power of her rhetoric. Or rather, Fevvers and Lizzie between them

(because the number of narrators in this novel multiply) "unfolded the convolutions of their joint stories together" (40). (Lizzie is

an interesting counterpart to Fevvers, a more realist - and Marxist - narrator compared to Fevvers with her risky flights of

fantasy.) Walser feels like "a sultan faced with not one but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories into

the single night" (40). Nights at the Circus aspires to be a miniature condensed version of A Thousand and One Nights, that

classic quintessence of the act and art of narration. Fevvers knows as well as Scheherezade that to come to the end of her story

is to face her own form of death - the death of the heroic persona she has constructed within her narrative. So she has to cast a

spell over Walser with her voice. "Fevvers lassooed him with her narrative and dragged him along with her" (60). "The voice,"

Carter has asserted, "is the first instrument of literature; narrative precedes text" (Shaking a Leg 476). A defiant phonocentrist,

for Carter "the really important thing is narrative" (Expletives Deleted 2). Where does she find the magic for her spell-binding

use of narrative? Ostensibly she inherits it from Ma Nelson, the keeper of the brothel which was home to her as a child. She

bequeaths Fevvers her ceremonial sword that she would "sometimes use as a staff with which to conduct the revels - her wand,

like Prospero's" (37). Where Ma Nelson conjures up the sexual revels that take place in her house of ill fame, Fevvers

becomes a different kind of "Mistress of the Revels" (49), conjuring up with her seemingly magical eloquence the spirits and

baseless fabric of her vision, her story. Her greatest gift is not her ability to fly off the solid ground, but to retell the story of her

flights of fancy that leave the ground of fact to which Walser is bound by his scepticism.

However Walser undergoes his own seachange under the spell of Fevvers' narrative wand or sword. The relationship between

Fevvers and Walser develops into something similar to that between an oral narrator and a writer of narrative. Walser becomes

at once Fevvers' amanuensis and a narrator in his own right. As Part One draws to a conclusion he finds himeself turning more

and more a recording instrument for Fevvers and Lizzie. His desire to shape her narrative to conform to his own ideas of

narrative reliability gradually succumbs to the force of her torrential narration. Fact or fiction? The distinction soon loses its

clarity as it becomes clear that Fevvers needs to blur the two concepts in order to capture the interest of her audience in her

performance - theatrical and narrative. "The hand that followed their dictations across the page obediently as a little dog no

longer felt as if it belonged to him" (78). As "a passionate amateur of the tall tale," he can only admire Fevvers' narrative power:

"What a performance! Such style! Such vigour" (90)!

But once he has decided to follow the circus to Russia, his role changes. Fevvers and Lizzie are no longer the principal

narrators of the story. The anonymous third person narrator who is present in Part One takes over the main burden of the

narration in Part Two. Meantime Walser has himself become a convert to the world of art - both a performer (an apprentice

clown) and a narrator of events as they unfold. His first attempts at imaginative writing are clumsy and stereotyped.His typed

despatch back to his editor smacks heavily of the overladen style of the travel writer:

Russia is a sphinx; St Petersburg, the beautiful smile of her face. Petersburg, loveliest of all hallucinations, the shimmering

mirage in the Northern wilderness glimpsed for a breathless second between black forest and the frozen sea. (96)

His narrrative style is no match for Fevvers. But even his use of language stresses the illusionistic element that characterizes all

forms of imaginative narration, with its references to the solid presence of the city as the "loveliest of all hallucinations" and a

"mirage." Walser, the hard-boiled reporter, finds himself indulging in "the sugar syrup of nostalgia," which in turn is responsible

for his "elaboration of artifice" (97).

No matter who assumes control of the narrative, the story teller of the moment is immediately overwhelmed by the narrative's

need to extend itself beyond the factual and the verifiable. In Part One the mouthless Toussaint is forced to tell in written form

the last part of the story of Madame Schreck which only he witnessed. The whole episode involving Madame Schreck, like that

concerning Mr Rosencreutz, invokes and simultaneously parodies the genre of Gothic horror tales. Toussaint tells how he found

the clothes of Madame Schreck but nothing in them, like "the shed carapace of an insect" (85). He is the first witness "to find

her - not dead, for who can say, now, when she died, or if she had ever lived, but . . . passed away" (85). No sooner are we

caught within the fabric of this Gothic fantasy than Lizzie detaches us with her metafictional appraisal of his performance: "That

Toussaint! . . .He's a lovely way with words" (85). Carter may well have acquired this narrative oscillation from her admiration

for Poe's Gothic horror stories. "His theatricality," she has written of him, "ensures we know all the time that the scenery is

cardboard, the blade of the axe is silver paint on papier maché, the men and women in the stories unreal, two-dimensional

stock characters, yet still we shiver" (Shaking a Leg 482). Like Poe, she inviters her readers to exercize both their sense of

fantasy (and fear) and their objective critical faculties simultaneously.

This alternation between immersion in the narrative and detachment from it is typical of the way Carter balances the claims of

fact and fiction throughout the novel. The factual is invariably exposed as a flawed account of the totality of human experience.

Yet once we, like Walser, have been trapped in the dark interior of a fictional world such as Ma Nelson's or Madame

Schreck's, Carter lets in the light of day to reveal the cheap and sordid props that have been used to create the illusion that had

us in its grip. Just before the prostitutes abandon Ma Nelson's house they open the curtains for the first time since they've been

there. "The luxury of that place had been nothing but illusion, created by the candles of midnight, and, in the dawn, all was sere,

worn-out decay. We saw the stains of damp and mould on ceilings and the damask walls; the gilding on the mirrors was all

tarnished and a bloom of dust obscured the glass . . ." (49). The passage from which this comes is not simply a symbolic

representation of the passing of the Victorian age. It is also one instance of the many occasions when Carter demonstrates to

her readers the power of narrative. Look, she seems to be saying, like Fevvers, I've fooled you again.

Then, before we know it, she is plunging us back into another strand of fictive narrative, transforming what has just been

exposed to the light of day into a newly convincing fictive illusion: "... the parlour itself began to waver and dissolve before our

very eyes. Even the solidity of the sofas seemed called into question for they and the heavy leather armchairs now had the

dubious air of furniture carved out of smoke" (49). An alert reader will note that the narrator's (Fevvers') use of "smoke" neatly

anticipates the action of the prostitutes that follows, which is to burn the house to the ground. Fevvers concludes: "And so the

first chapter of my life went up in flames, sir" (50). This is metafictional with a vengeance. As narrator, Fevvers naturally shapes

her life into digestible fictional chapters. She is simultaneously referring to the end of her life in the brothel now that it is burnt

down, the end of her existing means of living, and to the end of the first segment of her narrative, the veracity of which can only

be vouchsafed by the two objects saved from the fire - Lizzie's clock and Fevvers' sword (or wand), both items that appear to

defy the normal laws of physics. The fictive illusion lasts for as long as it is being narrated, after which it doesn't simply end; it is

consumed and turns to smoke. Yet, like the phoenix, it is destined to rise from its own ashes. Well-told narrative is powerful

enough to expose its own procedures to the light of day and yet be confident in its ability to plunge the reader back nito the

nighttime world of fictionality. Carter seesm to be implying that neither the world of fact or fiction is sufficient unto itself.

Epitemologically opposed to one another, they nevertheless require the other for completion, that is, for an adequate

explanation of life as we know it.

It has been observed that the movement of the novel "toward increasingly foreign and remote places is accompanied by a

movement away from any stable ground of reality and toward the ever more fantastic" (Michael 495). Carter has described

Part Two: St Petersburg as "very elaborately plotted, like a huge circus with the ring in the middle." She adds, "A circus is

always a microcosm" (Haffenden 89). Inevitably many critics, like Paulina Palmer, have seen the circus ring "with its hierarchy

of male performers" as "an effective symbol of the patriarchal social order" at the turn of the century (198). But it is more than

just that. It offers an image of the world at large. Its ring is described as "the wheel whose end is its beginning, the wheel of

fortune, the potter's wheel on which our clay is formed, the wheel of life on which we are all broken" (107). The world in its

totality can only be comprehended by the use of such literary tropes. Like any other artistic performance the circus offers

creation ("the potter's wheel") and destruction (the wheel of the torturer). It can "absorb madness and slaughter into itself"

(180), as the clowns can, as the Princess and her tigers can, as the world of art and the imagination can.

In this section Walser, no longer just a reporter, finds himself drawn into Fevvers' ongoing story by a desire for her that has

been generated by her spellbinding narration of her extravagant past life. Even love can owe its origins to the power of

narration. When the tiger's attack blows Walser's cover the excuse he offers to Fevvers - "I'm here to write a story. . . About

you and the circus" (114) - represents the appeal of one narrator to another. Walser has become simultaneously a performer in

word and deed - "your correspondent, incognito" (91), and young Jack, the apprentice-clown. And his new occupation as a

performer affects his performance as a narrator. Looking over his copy for his paper, he realizes the extent to which he has

been precipitated into the language of hyberbole by his new occupation. "Walser-the-clown, it seemed, could juggle with the

dictionary with a zest that would have abashed Walser-the-foreign-correspondent" (98). Clowning with words is now his dual

occupation. In effect Walser now recognizes the inescapable ambiguity of the langauge he sought to tame and confine to the

factual. Language juggles with its users as readily as its expert users juggle with language. Walser has become caught up in the

poststructuralist world of signification disseminating without end. Nor can his developing sophistication in the use of language be

separated from his developing maturity as a human being. Dressed in his clown's outfir Walser "experienced the freedom that

lies behind the mask, within dissimulation, the freedom to juggle with being, and indeed, with the language which is vital to our

being" (103). Narration, then, is no mere escapist fantasy for Carter. We remake ourselves by retelling our stories about

ourselves better.

Walser, however, is a mere amateur in a community of professional circus performers. Not only do they outperform him in their

acts; they also prove superior narrators. Buffo, the chief clown, tells a story about a multiple tragedy in his family in which all

those he loved were wiped out in one fell swoop. When he is forced to perform the same afternoon, his grief-stricken cry "The

sky is full of blood" only produces more gusts of laughter from the audience. In introducing it he says that this story is not just

told about himself but "has been told of every Clown since the invention of the desolating profession" (120). He goes on to

explain to his naive apprentice-clown, Walser, "This story is not precisely true but has the poetic truth of myth and so attaches

itself to each and every laughter-maker" (121). Stories have their own form of truth and operate independently of their tellers,

attaching themselves willy-nilly to protagonists of their choice, protagonists who fulfil a similar function in different times and

places. Buffo here displays a sophisticated knowledge of the nature of the narrative act, possibly even an acquaintance with the

theories of Propp or Greimas, both of whom recognized that a particular role or actant in a story can be filled by any number

of successive characters or acteurs. It is also significant that the clowns' function is described in such a way that it exactly

parallels that of the tellers of stories:

...even if the clowns detonated the entire city . . . nothing would really change. Nothing. The exploded buildings would float up

into the air insubstantial as bubbles, and gently waft to earth again on exactly the same places where they had stood before.

(151)

As comic performers they parallel Carter's own role as narrator of this book which she has said "was intended as a comic

novel" (Katsavos 15). The clown and comic writer are each offered the same mixed blessing: "you can do anything you like, as

long as nobody takes you seriously" (152). They play at life, creating the illusion that life is nothing but play. And yet Carter

clearly believes that fiction has more to offer than sheer play.*

The circus is filled with performers each of whom has a different way of narrating his or her story. There is the Colonel, the

comic representative of American capitalisman, unceasing player at the Ludic Game: "'Bamboozlem.' Play the game to win"

(147)! There is the Princess who never speaks yet whose story nevertheless gets mysteriously told, as the omniscient narrator is

quick to point out. There is Mignon, a waif of a woman, whose fictional ancestry derives from Goethe via Alban Berg

(Haffenden 82), and whose past profession consisted of posing as a dead woman returned to visit her grieving relations, yet

another variation on the art of artistic illusion. She and the Princess end up overcoming their language differences by

communicating through their music. Once again art proves the channnel for the discovery of love. Art may be nothing but

illusion; but the illusion can be powerful enough to transform the lives of those caught up in it. Above all there are Lamarck's

Educated Apes. They teach themselves writing in order to be able to write out their own contract which gives them an escape

clause and a bonus. Carter hilariously juxtaposes humans and apes in the scene where the Professor (an ape) gets Walser to

strip (apart from a dunce's hat) and declaim Hamlet's well known soliloquy, "What a piece of work is man!" Meanwhile the

class of apes solemnly take notes on his method of voice production to the background accompaniment of the Strong Man's

accelerating grunts as he reaches orgasm with Mignon. The tragic is transformed into the comic as that piece of work, man,

makes a fool of himself in Walser's case, and proves more animalistic than the apes in the Strong Man's case. Walser's

borrowed Shakespearean eloquence only serves to place him on a lower rung of the chain of being than the self-educated apes.

Narrative can not only stimulate love in those caught in its spell: it can also lead to death. Even before much of the circus

menage is blown up by rebels in Part Three: Siberia, its final performance in St Petersburg is marred by the Princess's enforced

shooting of the jealous tigress, and Walser's narrow escape from being slaughtered as a chicken by the drink-crazed Buffo.

Part Two ends with Fevvers' near death as a free woman at the hands of the Grand Duke intent on turning her literally into a

bird in a gilded cage. Carter brilliantly juxtaposes the exit from the circus of the dead tigress and of Fevvers on her way to the

Grand Duke: "At the courtyard gate, a glamorous droshky stood ready to receive her, behind the melancholy van from the

knacker's yard. As a befurred footman handed Fevvers into one, the Strong Man pitched the carcass into the other" (182). The

narrational meaning is clear: Fevvers is in danger of meeting a similar fate to that of the tigress, despite the glamorous trappings

of her carriage. Critics such as Magali Michael see the Grand Duke's plan as a typical male attempt at "objectification," one

more example of "the daily victimization of women" (502). But it is equally an attempt to freeze Fevvers in her role as freak

performer, another object in his collection of exquisite miniatures. From the start of the novel Fevvers' appeal has been that of a

spectacle: "Look! Hands off" (15)! She owes her independence to others' desire to look at her. "All you can do to earn your

living," Lizzie tells her, "is to make a show of yourself" (185). Fevvers comes closest to extinction when the Grand Duke almost

succeeds in fixing her for ever as an artistic object to be gazed at. In effect he would have robbed her of her ability to narrate

her own story and so determine her own destiny. The act of narration is both employed and shown to be a self-liberating act.

We can invent stories for ourselves that free us - socially, psychologically and politically - from those inherited stories of the

past that serve to inhibit and constrain us. I narrate; therefore I become.

The gaze occupies an important place in this book. In his essay on "The Uncanny" Freud first theorized the operation of the

gaze as a phallic activity linked to a desire for sadistic mastery of the object which is cast as the passive, masochistic, feminine

victim of the gaze .Carter shows at least some acquaintance with the theory, perhaps via Laura Mulvey's appropriation of it in

her celebrated essay on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." She employs it not just to exemplify the way the masculine

gaze subordinates the woman to his voyeuristic needs, but also to demonstrate how the gaze operates in the sado-masochistic

relationship between writer and reader. In attracting the gaze of others, Fevvers is also reflecting the narrator's need to

command the attention of listeners or readers. What she is inviting them to gaze at is the enigma of her status as a performer and

narrator of her performance. "'Is she fact or is she fiction'" (7)? But the narrative act is filled with dangers. Fevvers' invitation to

enjoy her as spectacle invites more aggressive responses than those of the non-touching curious public. Even Walser is seized

by a desire to master this riddle and journalistically cut her down to size. More threatening are the attempts of Mr Rosencreutz

and the Grand Duke to appropriate her otherness to themselves, to force her into becoming a subordinate part of their story, an

exclusive object of their gaze.

The gaze involves a degree of reciprocity. The writer gazes at the world and then offers the world a narrative version of itself to

gaze at. This interactive relationship is given fictional embodiment in this novel in Section Three where Carter describes the

establishment by the Countess P--, an undiscovered murderess, of a panopticon, a prison for condemned murderesses built

according to a design first outlined by Jeremy Bentham. The interaction between the Countess and her prisoners parallels that

between a writer and her readers:

It was a panopticon she forced them to build, a hollow circle of cells shaped like a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which

was composed of grids of steel and, in the middle of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by

windows. In that room she'd sit all day and stare and stare and stare at her murderesses and they, in turn, sat all day and stared

at her. (210)

Like the novelist, the Countess makes herself mistress of all she gazes at. Yet she is trapped by her own construction. She

needs her gaze to be returned to reassure her of her power which involves deceiving her captive audience into thinking she is

looking at them day and night (just as the omniscient narrator deceives her readers into thinking that she is omnipotent and

present everywhere in her fictional world). In the end the prisoners find a way of planning their escape which appropriately

enough involves their writing secret notes using their own bodily fluids. Isn't this a metaphor for readers' freedom to impose their

own interpretation (based on their own bodily experiences) on the narrative, especially when it is what Barthes calls a "writerly"

text? "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author," Barthes wrote (Image - Music - Text 148), and

death is exactly what awaits the Countess when her prisoners are born into their new life in which they are free to construct

their own narrative of their lives.

However much Carter claims, both within the text and in her comments about the ending, to be inviting the reader to become a

producer rather than a consumer of the text, the fact remains that she continues to exercize tight if inconspicuous control of the

narrative throughout its duration. This raises interesting questions about how Barthes' advocacy of the writerly text is to be

interpreted. Accoring to Barthes, "the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as

function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticize by some singular system (Ideoogy, Genius, Criicim) which reduces the

plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (S/Z 5). Barthes is offering an eloquent and partisan

defense of the essentially polysemantic nature of all fictional texts. Like most writers living in a poststructuralist age, Carter

accepts the basic reality of such texts. But that does ot stop her from attempting to exclude specific interpetations of her text on

which he launches preemptive strikes. When the female ex-convict determine to found their own utopia which will exclude any

members of the male sex, they are forced to ask the male Escapee for a pint or two of sperm so that they can "ensure the

survival of this little republic of women" (240). Carter allows Lizzie to deliver a blistering Marxist critiqe of this particular fantasy

of forming an all-female socety: "'What'll they do with the boy babies? Feed them to the polar bears? To the female polar

bears?" she asks (240-1). It is ironic that one feminst critic still manages to insist that in the novel "the perspective becomes

increasingly woman-centered . . . and the emergence of a female counter-culture is celebrated" (Palmer 180). This only goes to

show that, while on the one hand no author is prepared to accept their death at the hands of the newly born text, on the other

hand an author's attempts to place limits however minimal on the galaxy of signifiers that constitute the writerly text (according

to Barthes) is doomed to be thwarted by its readers. The difference between readerly and writerly texts is a matter of degree,

not of kind. In laying bare this novel's narrative strategies and incorporating both writer and reader within the fiction, Carter is

merely edging the text in the direction of the ultimately unattainable writerly extreme of the specrum.

Fevvers barely eludes the Grand Duke's carefully plotted scheme (he would make a good thriller writer) to reify her as an art

object. How she contrives to escape is by a double act that constitutes one of Carter's most brazen instances of narrative

manipulation in the book. While she puts on a sexual performance for the Grand Duke (masturbating him), she puts on a purely

fictional performance for the reader. While bringing the Duke to a sexual climax she brings her fictional life in St Petersburg to

its own climax by escaping in the Grand Duke's miniature replica of the Trans-Siberian Express:

In those few seconds of his lapse of consciousness, Fevvers ran helter-skelter down the platform, opened the door of the

first-class compartment and clambered aboard.

"Look what a mess he's made of your dress, the pig," said Lizzie.

The weeping girl threw herself into the woman's arms... (192)

Before we readers have time to protest over the impossibility of such an escape (it defies all the laws of space-time), the new

strand of narrative has caught us up and hurried us on into a new self-contained world of fiction that is of course just as reliant

on illusion as was the last one.

In fact this new fictional world is the most extravagant of the three settings in the novel, a Siberia of the mind, a land given life

purely by the narrator's brilliant use of language: "Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness

where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem,

half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it

the entire sky" (197). Vivid images like that of the wolves sweep us along with the narrative flood, and Carter has such

confidence in its power that she can afford to leave hints of the wholly invented ("unimaginable") nature of a landscape that only

"seem[s]" to be how it is described as being. Within another page Carter feels able to puncture our suspension of disbelief with

impunity: "we were progressing through the vastness of nothing to the extremities of nowhere" (198). A little later the

linguistically fabricated nature of this landscape is made even clearer by the use of a telling metaphor: "The white world around

them looked newly made, a blank sheet of fresh paper on which they could inscribe whatever future they wished" (218). The

Siberian landscape is nothing but an inscription on paper, and no sooner has she persuaded us of its presence than she destroys

the illusion in typical postmodern fashion. Why? Because she believes that fiction constitutes not "a timeless, placeless dream

world," but a form of "heightened reality" (Shaking a Leg 459). As such it needs to combine the tricks of the illusionist with the

exposés of the sceptic.

When the train carrying the circus is blown up by outlaws Carter offers an equally brilliant instance of how words can be

conjured with to make us believe anything, however improbable. The tigers had been housed in the "wagon salon" with its

mirrors. After the crash "the tigers were all gone into the mirrors" (205). Carter's explanation of this surrealistic phenomenon is

as intellectually convincing as it is mimetically impossible:

And, as for the tigers, as if Nature disapproved of them for their unnatural dancing, they had frozen into their own reflections

and been shattered, too, when the mirrors broke. As if that burning energy you glimpsed between the bars of their pelts had

convulsed in a great response to the energy released in fire around us and, in exploding, they scattered their appearances upon

that glass in which they had been breeding sterile reduplications. (206)

The repetition of "as if" and the stress on "reflections" and "reduplications" clearly invites us to reflect ourselves on the nature of

fictive reflection. The way the tigers survive as fragments of relected images is very reminiscent of René Magritte's paintings

such as Le Faux Miroir (The False Mirror) where the reflection of sky and clouds has become the color of an eye's iris.

Carter explains, "if dreams are real as dreams, then there is a materiality to symbols; there's a materiality to imaginative life and

imaginative experience which should be taken quite seriously" (Haffenden 85).

Part Three continues Carter's exploration of the nature, the power and the limits of the narrative act. Where Part One

borrowed heavily from the genre of autobiography, with two digressions into Gothic horror, and where Part Two with its

intricate plotting parodies the well-made novel, Part Three pushes the limits of the picaresque mode to an extreme. Carter

defines the picaresque as "a certain eighteenth-century fictional device . . . where people have adventures in order to find

themselves in places where they can discuss philosophical concepts without distractions" (Haffenden 87). The concepts that are

discussed in this final section are not confined to those of gender, as many of Carter's critics appear to assume. An equally

dominant concept is the place of illusion in human life and consciousness, or rather the illusionistic nature of human experience.

Where Fevvers was Carter's main vehicle in Part One for the exploration of this concept, it is Walser who enables her to

pursue it into a surrealist world of dreams and visions in Part Three.

Suffering from amnesia, Walser accepts without question the value systems of the Shaman whose task "was the interpretation of

the visible world about him via the information he acquired through dreaming. When he slept, which he did much of the time, he

would, could he have written it, have put a sign on his door: 'Man at work'" (253). The Shaman, then, exists almost entirely in a

world of dreams and fantasy. And it is fitting that Walser, previously the representative of a materialist civilization obsessed by

facts should fall under the influence of this comic representative of the irrational and the surreal. Even the bear he lives with is

"both a real, furry and beloved bear and, at the same time, a transcendentasl kind of meta-bear, a minor deity..." (257). Carter

has great fun exposing Walser to the upside down values of the Shaman's shadowy world. But she is also clearly not interested

in a narrative world that is nothing but illusion. Fact or fiction? As she has said, "Part of the point of the novel is that you are

kept uncertain" (Katsavos 13). So Fevvers is reintroduced to counter the Shaman with her distrust of "mages, wizards,

impresarios" who "came to take away her singularity as though it were their own invention" (289). In the god hut she turns the

tables on him and restores Walser, not to the material world, but to the ambiguous world of narrative, where she needs him to

restore her confidence in herself as enigmatic bird-woman: "'That's the way to start the interview!' she cried. 'Get out your

pencil and we'll begin" (291). The novel ends where it begins, with the act of oral and written narration.

Both Fevvers and Walser, like the other characters in the novel, are repeatedly exposed to the reader as fictional constructs,

illusionistic materializations of language. According to Carter, "Fevvers starts off as a metaphor come to life - a winged spirit"

(Haffenden 93). In subscribing to the postmodern consensus that we as subjects are constructed by the symbolic order of

language, Carter is simultaneously celebrating the power of language, especially narrative language, to shape human destiny.

Fevvers' personality is produced by the employment of literary tropes, especially paradox and oxymoron. Both the descriptions

of her and her actions rely on a conjunction of seeming opposites: "Cockney Venus," "Helen of the High Wire" (&), "winged

barmaid" (16), "the Virgin Whore" (55), "the Madonna of the Arena" (126). In each case her mythological/religious status is

undercut by an attribute that is thoroughly earthy. If wings make one think of angels and goddesses, the rest of her physique has

been "thrown on a common wheel out of coarse clay" (12). She has "the shoulders of a voluptuous stevedore" (15), writes

Carter, hilariously transferring the epithet "voluptuous" from Fevvers' shoulders to the stevedore. Fevvers is a combination of

the mythic and the mundane. The champagne Fevvers drinks is kept in the toilet jug that is packed with fishmonger's ice to

which still cling some fish scales. She has the "voice of a celestial fishwife" - another instance of oxymoron (43). In fact

everything about is her and her story is distinctly fishy. Fevvers also displays a highly unlikely range of learning that, when

brought into juxtaposition with her use of Cockney English, provides a preeminantly verbal source of humor throughout the

novel. Abducted to Mr Rosencreutz's paradoxically newly built Gothic mansion, Fevvers has only to listen to his mumbo-jumbo

for a short paragraph's length to be able to accurately place him in an esoteric world of pseudo theology-cum-metaphysics:

"This is some kind of heretical possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Rosicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully,

girlie! I exort myself" (77). The "thinks I" and "girlie!" belong verbally to a totally different social and intellectual discourse from

what immediately precedes them or from her use of "exort" after them. Similarly her conduct veers from the god-like to the

avaricious. "She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to eat diamonds" (182). What imbues Fevvers with her vibrant

sense of fictional life is just this conjunction of opposing qualities. At once venus and Scrooge her subjectivity is intertextually

constructed out of paradox and enigma.

Walser adopts a different trajectory. Starting out as a sceptic who puts all his faith in facts, he has to lose his protective shell

and acquire an inner life, "a realm of speculation and surmise within himself that was entirely his own" (260-1). Like the reader,

he has to learn to accept illusion as playing as valid a role in human life as fact. Already in Part Two when he first makes his

face up as a clown "he experienced the . . . freedom to juggle with being ..." (103) Walser here is given the same godlike

powers as the novelist to reconstruct himself as a different subject. Yet he secretly continues his life as a reporter and exposer

of the illusions he has become a part of. So in Part Three Carter has him undergo a form of death (memory loss after the train

crash) and rebirth into a world far more illusionistic than that found in realist fiction. When in the last section of the book he

becomes the Shaman's assistant, he enters a realm in which "there existed no difference between fact and fiction; instead, a sort

of magic realism" (260). Walser is literally made to enter Carter's magic realist world of fiction where the miraculous forms an

accepted part of the normal. Carter herself uses magic in her fiction because for her fiction is magic, with its "ability to create an

absolutely convincing illusion" - which instantly exposes itself (Goldsworthy 6). She has called this book "a sort of Dickensian

novel about people who absolutely could not exist" (Smith 75). It is no coincidence that at the end of the book Walser, like

Fevvers, is "hatched out of the shell of unknowing" (294). Both arrive ab ovo, hatched from the fertile brain of their narrative

inventor.

Once again Carter wishes to foreground the fictional means by which her characters are constructed at the same as she is

convincing her readers of their credibility. Think back to Madame Schreck, for instance, whom Carter builds up as a

money-grasping, exploitative old witch, only to expose the course Gothic accoutrements out of which she has been constructed

after Fevvers has flown with her to the ceiling and left her hanging on the curtain rail. Here is Toussaint's account of her end:

It came to me that there was nothing left inside the clothes and, perhaps, there never had been anything inside her clothes but

a set of dry bones agitated only by the power of an infernal will and a voice that had been no more than the artificial exhalation

of air from a bladder or a sac, that she was, or had become, a sort of scarecrow of desire. (84)

Carter is going to considerable trouble to focus our attention on the artificiality of this character, clothed like a scarecrow (to

frighten us) and given seemingly human qualities by a voice produced, like an organ's, by means of bellows, and by emotions

(will and desire) that mechanistically animate her from within. In a similar vein Walser in his sceptical days wonders who had

made Fevvers into "a marvellous machine and equipped her with her story" (29). But in many ways we all make ourselves up.

Fictional subjects, like "real" subjects, can seem mere puppets manipulated and given a semblance of life by their narrator.

Watching Fevvers and Lizzie walking home over Westminster Bridge Walser notes how they appear "the size of one big doll,

one small doll" (90). In the same way the clowns are eclipsed by the faces they choose for themselves; they become what they

choose, although once they have made their choice they are stuck with it for the rest of their professional life. Sitting down to

dinner their white faces "possessed the formal lifelessness of death masks, as if, in some essential sense, they were themselves

absent from the repast and left untenanted replicas behind" (116). Here we are at a double remove from the original subject,

first painted to look other than himself, then revealed to be a fictional replica of that painted subject. Yet does not the double

replication of fiction, which Carter makes sure to draw to our attention, serve to bring the artificiality of our own construction as

subjects equally to our notice? Her metafictional commentary reminds us of our own discontinuity as subjects.

In this novel in particular Carter constantly draws our attention to the mechanics necessarily used by any narrator and always

visible to any reader who cares to look for them. As we have seen she frequently resorts to metafictional interventions to ensure

that we are not mistaking her narrative construct for the real world, however much it might parallel it. When Lizzie tells how

they gave Sophie her nickname, she explains: "'Fevvers" we named her, and so she will be to the end of the chapter" (13).

Fevvers' existence coincides with the duration of the narration. Yet no sooner has she drawn attention to the fictional status of

her creature than Carter tempts us back into her fictive world: "'Let's get your make-up off, love" (13). One sentence will do

the trick. Carter is not above having a little fun at the expense of literary critics and theorists who tend to resemble Walser at the

start of the novel. When he reaches the climax of his act in the ring, Buffo "starts to deconstruct himself" (117), being nothing

but a textual construct in the first place. And when the Escapee asks Fevvers to explain the significance of the mystic

disappearance of the clowns who had been blown off the face of the earth, Fevvers responds: "'Look, love,' I says to him

eventually, because I'm not in the right mood for literary criticism. 'If I hadn't bust a wing in the train-wreck, I could fly us all to

Vladivostok in two shakes, so I'm not the right one to ask questions of when it comes to what is real and what is not..." (244).

Yet this extra-textual reference to the likely reception of the text is simultaneously a defence of fiction's right to validate the

irrational and the magical. That "significance" is thought to be the main concern of literary criticism is seen to be an

impoverishment within the text itself.

The fictional text, then, celebrates its own fictionality, its capacity to dazzle and deceive. Fevvers' spreading laughter at the end

of the novel is that of the comic narrator enjoying her narrative triumph in bringing off this book-length sleight of hand. In

deceiving Walser she has also deceived the reader into believing in her, wings and all. Walser asks Fevvers, "why did you go to

such lengths, once upon a time, to convince me you were the 'only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world'" (294)?

Fevvers, as she begins to laugh, responds, "'I fooled you, then!" After her laugh has spread to infect the entire globe "as if a

spontaneous response to the giant comedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it," she concludes: "It just goes to show there's

nothing like confidence" (295). An alert reader will pick up on "once upon a time," "the giant comedy," and "confidence." e The

entire fictional narrative is a gigantic confidence trick, meant to fool us as convincingly as Fevvers fooled Walser, the fact-laden

and skeptical auditor of her narrative. As Carter has explained, ending with Fevvers' "I really fooled you" (295) "doesn't make

you realize the fictionality of what has gone before, it makes you start inventing other fictions..." (Haffenden 90). In fooling

Walser, Fevvers has transformed his life. Dreams, fantasies and imaginings have now become a legitimate part of his

consciousness. At the same time the absurdity of the Shaman's total immersion in this world alone has forced Walser and the

reader to return to the outer world, although trailing clouds of glory with them . The end of this novel refuses closure in typical

postmodern fashion. How can narrative die, especially in a world of unending signification? Less typical is Carter's resistance to

endorsing either fact or fiction in isolation. Each world is dependent on and incorporates the other. So in returning the control of

the narrative to the reader Carter ends by not ending her narration. Instead she returns it to the extra-narrational world of her

readers who will have learnt from the book to recognize the necessary place in their lives for the ageless act of narration.