How Does The Narrator In Exhalation Most Clearly Change From The Beginning To The End Of The Story

Tall Tales and Brief Lives: Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus

Nights at the Circus (1984), Angela Carter's penultimate novel, epitomizes her wildly

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inventive, highly idiosyncratic way of fiction, centered every bit it is on Fevvers, a Cockney artiste who claims to have grown wings. Near critics and reviewers have seen the principal thrust of the novel to reside in the portrayal of Fevvers equally a prototype of the New Woman whose wings help her to escape from the nets of a patriarchal nineteenth century culture into a twentieth century feminist oasis of liberty. The novel ends with Fevvers astride her American lover, Walser (she now playing the missionary office), enjoying plainly two triumphs - sexual and psychological - in one: "'To recollect I really fooled you!' she marveled. 'It just goes to show there's nil similar conviction'" (295). Yet when Carter was asked past John Haffenden what Fevvers means past this, she replied, "It'south actually a statement about the nature of fiction, well-nigh the nature of her narrative" (90). The more you look closely at this novel, the more you realize just how literal Carter was being in that reply. More any other of her works of fiction, Nights at the Circus takes every bit its subject the hypnotic power of narrative, the ways in which we construct ourselves and our world past narrative means, the materiality of fiction and the fictionality of the textile world, and the contract between writer and reader that, according to Carter, invites the reader at the end of this book "to take one farther pace into the fictionality of the narrative, instead of coming out of information technology and looking at it equally though information technology were an artefact" (Haffenden 91). Information technology is not just Fevvers who triumphs at having fooled Walser. It is Carter gloating over having fooled the reader into post-obit her ain narrative to this end signal - and across.

What this suggests is that this unabridged novel operates in an important fashion as a form of metanarrative: one of its principal concerns is with the potentialities and limits of the act of narration. On reflection ane remembers that many of Carter's other works of fiction begin by making the narrative act their subject. The "Introduction" to The Infernal Want Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) opens with "I remember everything" (11). Four pages later Affiliate one opens: "I cannot remember exactly how it began" (15). Retention is function of the bewilderingly contradictory nature of the art of narration. "Flesh and the Mirror," a story nerveless in Fireworks (1974) immediately implicates the protagonist in the narrative act by starting: "It was MIDNIGHT--I chose my times and prepare my scenes with the precision of the built-in artiste" (67). "Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost," a story collected posthumously in American Ghosts and Sometime Earth Wonders (1993) is subtitled "Iii Versions of I Story." The outset version begins:

But although you lot could easily take the story away from Ashputtle and center it on the mutilated sisters - indeed, it would be easy to recall of it as a story virtually cutting bits off women, so that they will fit in, . . . nevertheless, the story ever begins not with Ashputtle or her stepsisters only with Ashputtle'due south female parent fifty-fifty if, at the showtime of the story, the female parent herself is just about to exit the narrative considering she'south at death's door: "A rich human being'due south wife roughshod sick, and, feeling that her stop was about, she called her just daughter to her bedside." (110)

Correct from the opening sentence of this story we are invited to meditate on what follows as an exercise in narrative options. The bodily opening of the story inside the narrative framework is relegated to a quotation, drawing our attending to the fact that all narratives originate with the human voice telling a story and that all of them are retellings of an earlier telling. The emphasis is not on the what just the how, not on the fabula or story but on the syuzhet or way in which it is narrated.

Nights at the Circus opens with a similar focusing on the extraordinary nature of the deed of narration:

"Lor' love you lot, sir!" Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. "As to my place of nascence, why, I first saw the lite of twenty-four hours right here in smoky onetime London, didn't I! Not billed the 'Cockney Venus', for nada, sir, though they could just likewise 'ave chosen me 'Helen of the High Wire', due to the unusual circumstances in which I come ashore - for I never docked via what you might telephone call the normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no; but, simply like Helen of Troy, was hatched. (7)

We are plunged direct into the narration of a very unusual narrator whose peculiar combination of Cockney English and classical erudition suggests her status as one-half human and one-half mythical - precisely the condition of narrative itself. Her vocalisation and her origins establish an anomaly. Like narrative, she hasn't come from nowhere, but the method of her inflow in the world removes her from the realm of the normal. Even her choice of linguistic communication veers from the clich�d ("commencement saw the calorie-free of solar day") to the witty use of an extended metaphor with double entendre ("come ashore . . .docked . . . the normal channels") Fevvers disembarks from what Salman Rushdie has called "the Ocean of Stories." She is at in one case an original and an already established narrative type or actant. As Carter explained, Fevvers "is, fundamentally, the archetypal busty blonde: prototypes include Mae West, Diana Dors..." (Kemp 7). She originates in the vast narrative storehouse of performing heroines, but Carter then grafts onto this model additional characteristics (her wings) that vest to a quite different stock effigy - goddess or (fallen) affections or bird-(wo)human being. Both as narrator and narrative bailiwick of her own narration, Fevvers is an oxymoron, characterizing in the manner she tells her story the utterly contradictory nature of the narrative human action she is embarking on (to proceed the metaphor).

Like a author, she is a performer whose stage (and narrative) deed gives off "the greasy, inescapable whiff of phase magic" (16). Like any skillful creative person she is a bit of a confidence trickster whose very appeal depends on her existence doubtable. The possibility that she may exist a hoax is what draws her audiences, and Walser, and the reader. In this sense, as Michael Bell suggests, "her very authenticity is a faux" (30). Fifty-fifty the flying of this bird-adult female, which has commonly been interpreted as "predominantly an image of liberation" (Palmer 199), is just equally much an epitome of the precarious balancing human action in the performance of narration. It is non a coincidence that in the introduction to Expletives Deleted (1992), a collection of her essays, Carter uses the image of the trapeze creative person to narrate narrative: "We travel forth the thread of narrative like high-wire artistes" (2). Consider Fevvers' start attempt at flight from the mantelpiece in the drawing room of Ma Nelson's brothel when for the shortest moment she hovers before falling flat on her face up: "and however, sir, for however curt a while, the air had risen up beneath my adolescent wings and denied to me the downwards pull of the keen, circular earth, to which, hitherto, all human being things had necessarily clung" (31). That feeling of suspense, of being momentarily exempted from the laws of material being, is the narrative effect Carter herself is attempting to achieve in this novel.

Narrative temporality unremarkably involves a duality or opposition between story time and narrative fourth dimension. Narrators utilize one time scheme in order to evoke another. What is the true significance of the sound of Large Ben striking midnight over again and again while Fevvers and Lizzie are telling their story? In the Envoi to the novel Fevvers admits that she and Lizzie, her cockney step-mother, played a fox on Walser that night with the aid of Ma Nelson's clock (292). But how could they interfere with the mechanism of Big Ben, at that time the time-keeper for the entire civilized world? What she must hateful is that they bandage a narrative spell on him, made him remember that the passage of time was put on agree when it really wasn't. For the duration of their story they maintain the illusion that time is suspended. Every bit Carter says elsewhere nearly the art of narration, "a good writer can brand y'all believe time stands still" (Expletives Deleted two). Big Ben and the external world of normality that it regulates is made temporarily to conform to the perpetual midnight recorded on Ma Nelson's clock, which itself acts equally "the sign, or signifier of Ma Nelson'southward fiddling private realm," where the only permitted hr was "the dead center of the mean solar day or nighttime, the shadowless hr, the hour of vision and revelation, the yet hour in the centre of the storm of time" (29). Ma Nelson'southward realm is not just conjured upward by an act of narration, only acts as a representation of the timeless fictive globe created by narration. But the spell is by its nature temporary. And Carter positively revels in such temporal disruptions, considering, as she writes elsewhere, in this way the reader is "beingness rendered equally discontinuous every bit the text" (Shaking a Leg 465). She embraces the postmodern to the extent that it forces the reader into an active relationship with the text. In the third section of the novel Carter even manages to construct an internal double fourth dimension scheme whereby Fevvers and Lizzie observe that in less than a week of their time Walser has managed to grow a long beard. Carter might well be parodying the near famous instance of a double fourth dimension scheme in Othello, especially every bit she twice quotes from this play (228, 264). Most critics concord that the contradictions between short and long time in the play are meant to escape the notice of the audience. Carter, by comparison, has Lizzie describe attention to the discrepancy in club to demonstrate the power narrative has over our normal sense of measurable time in the external world. For a limited elapsing the imginative world of narrative can supplant the dictates of cloth reality. Imagined time coexists in our consciousness with measured time. Neither is more existent and each has its plough at preeminence.

Narration, specially oral narration, needs an audience, just equally a spectacle or performance does. And the audience needs to exist kept in suspense until the stop of the act. Will she reach the other terminate of the rope? Or, if she falls, will she really be able to use her wings to salvage herself? "[I]f she isn't suspect, where'due south the controversy? What'southward the news" (11)? Who amend to represent the audition than the sceptic, Walser? Just as the larger audition gets its kicks from suspecting that Fevvers the performer may be a hoax, so Walser reflects this mental attitude by suspecting that Fevvers the narrator may exist a hoax. Like all readers of fiction, Walser has to be lured out of his sceptical frame of mind and induced to accept the improbabilities of a world of invention. In fact Walser is the preeminent representative in the novel of the textile world that relegates the stuff of fiction to a subordinate function - i of entertainment. An American reporter, he cultivates "the professional person necessity to come across all and believe nothing" (10). A "connoisseur of the alpine tale," he is questioning Fevvers "for a series of interviews tentatively entitled 'Groovy Humbugs of the Earth'" (eleven).

Fevvers, however, proves more than his match. For all his professional detachment, he apace becomes "a prisoner of her voice . . . Her night, rusty, dipping, swooping vox, imperious equally a siren'southward" (43). One-half mythical, she shares with Homer's fabulous female creatures their hypnotic allure - and their potential destructiveness. Indeed, Walser feels half stifled past Fevvers' overpowering presence: "If he got out of her room for only ane moment . . . and so he might recover his sense of proportion" (52). What he fears for is the loss of his fragile sense of cocky, which is besides described in terms of the narrative pact betwixt author and reader: "there were scarcely any of those trivial, what you might call personal touches to his personality, every bit if his addiction of suspending conventionalities extended even unto his own being" (10). Discover that Walser suspends conventionalities, not disbelief. He adopts an atheistic mental 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 interruption 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 earth, he is shown from the start to be flawed by his failure to admit into his life the globe 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 ability of her rhetoric. Or rather, Fevvers and Lizzie betwixt 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 1 but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a k stories into the single night" (40). Nights at the Circus aspires to exist a miniature condensed version of A M and One Nights, that classic quintessence of the human action 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 expiry - the death of the heroic persona she has synthetic inside her narrative. And so she has to bandage 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 commencement musical instrument of literature; narrative precedes text" (Shaking a Leg 476). A defiant phonocentrist, for Carter "the actually of import matter 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 dwelling to her as a child. She bequeaths Fevvers her ceremonial sword that she would "sometimes utilise every bit a staff with which to conduct the revels - her wand, similar Prospero'due south" (37). Where Ma Nelson conjures upward the sexual revels that take place in her house of sick fame, Fevvers becomes a different kind of "Mistress of the Revels" (49), conjuring up with her seemingly magical eloquence the spirits and baseless textile of her vision, her story. Her greatest souvenir is non her power to wing off the solid ground, but to retell the story of her flights of fancy that go out the footing of fact to which Walser is bound past his scepticism.

Withal Walser undergoes his own seachange nether the spell of Fevvers' narrative wand or sword. The relationship between Fevvers and Walser develops into something like to that between an oral narrator and a writer of narrative. Walser becomes at once Fevvers' agent and a narrator in his own correct. As Part One draws to a conclusion he finds himeself turning more and more a recording instrument for Fevvers and Lizzie. His want to shape her narrative to conform to his own ideas of narrative reliability gradually succumbs to the strength of her torrential narration. Fact or fiction? The distinction soon loses its clarity as it becomes clear that Fevvers needs to mistiness the two concepts in order to capture the interest of her audience in her performance - theatrical and narrative. "The paw that followed their dictations beyond the page obediently as a picayune dog no longer felt as if it belonged to him" (78). As "a passionate amateur of the tall tale," he tin can only adore Fevvers' narrative ability: "What a performance! Such style! Such vigour" (90)!

But once he has decided to follow the circus to Russian federation, his office changes. Fevvers and Lizzie are no longer the principal narrators of the story. The anonymous tertiary person narrator who is present in Role I takes over the principal burden of the narration in Function 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 beginning attempts at imaginative writing are impuissant 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 incoherent 2nd between blackness wood and the frozen sea. (96)

His narrrative style is no match for Fevvers. Merely even his use of linguistic communication stresses the illusionistic chemical 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 simply 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 dress of Madame Schreck but null in them, like "the shed carapace of an insect" (85). He is the start witness "to find her - not dead, for who tin can say, now, when she died, or if she had ever lived, but . . . passed abroad" (85). No sooner are we defenseless within the fabric of this Gothic fantasy than Lizzie detaches us with her metafictional appraisement of his operation: "That Toussaint! . . .He's a lovely way with words" (85). Carter may well accept acquired this narrative oscillation from her admiration for Poe'southward 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 silverish paint on papier mach�, the men and women in the stories unreal, two-dimensional stock characters, nevertheless still nosotros 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 equally a flawed business relationship of the totality of human experience. Yet once we, like Walser, have been trapped in the dark interior of a fictional earth such every bit Ma Nelson'south or Madame Schreck'due south, Carter lets in the light of day to reveal the inexpensive and sordid props that have been used to create the illusion that had us in its grip. Merely before the prostitutes abandon Ma Nelson'southward house they open the curtains for the start time since they've been there. "The luxury of that place had been nothing but illusion, created past 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. Information technology is likewise one instance of the many occasions when Carter demonstrates to her readers the power of narrative. Expect, she seems to exist saying, like Fevvers, I've fooled y'all again.

Then, earlier nosotros know it, she is plunging us back into another strand of fictive narrative, transforming what has just been exposed to the light of twenty-four hour period 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 at present had the dubious air of article 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 down the house to the ground. Fevvers concludes: "And so the first chapter of my life went upwardly 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 information technology is burnt downwardly, the end of her existing means of living, and to the stop of the offset segment of her narrative, the veracity of which can only be vouchsafed past the two objects saved from the burn - 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 equally it is being narrated, after which it doesn't simply end; it is consumed and turns to fume. However, similar the phoenix, information technology is destined to rise from its own ashes. Well-told narrative is powerful enough to expose its ain procedures to the light of day and however 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 crave the other for completion, that is, for an adequate explanation of life equally we know information technology.

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 footing of reality and toward the ever more fantastic" (Michael 495). Carter has described Part Two: St Petersburg equally "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). Just it is more than merely that. It offers an prototype of the world at big. Its band is described as "the wheel whose end is its beginning, the wheel of fortune, the potter's wheel on which our dirt is formed, the wheel of life on which we are all broken" (107). The world in its totality can but be comprehended by the use of such literary tropes. Like whatsoever other creative performance the circus offers cosmos ("the potter'southward wheel") and devastation (the wheel of the torturer). It can "absorb madness and slaughter into itself" (180), as the clowns can, as the Princess and her tigers tin, as the globe of fine art and the imagination can.

In this section Walser, no longer only a reporter, finds himself fatigued into Fevvers' ongoing story by a desire for her that has been generated by her spellbinding narration of her extravagant past life. Even love tin owe its origins to the power of narration. When the tiger'due south assault blows Walser'due south embrace the excuse he offers to Fevvers - "I'm here to write a story. . . Most you and the circus" (114) - represents the appeal of 1 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 equally a performer affects his performance every bit a narrator. Looking over his copy for his paper, he realizes the extent to which he has been precipitated into the linguistic communication of hyberbole past his new occupation. "Walser-the-clown, it seemed, could juggle with the dictionary with a zest that would have abashed Walser-the-foreign-contributor" (98). Clowning with words is at present his dual occupation. In upshot 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 adept users juggle with linguistic communication. Walser has become defenseless up in the poststructuralist world of signification disseminating without end. Nor tin his developing composure in the utilise of linguistic communication be separated from his developing maturity every bit a human being. Dressed in his clown's outfir Walser "experienced the liberty that lies backside the mask, within dissimulation, the liberty to juggle with being, and indeed, with the linguistic communication which is vital to our beingness" (103). Narration, then, is no mere escapist fantasy for Carter. We remake ourselves by retelling our stories almost ourselves meliorate.

Walser, however, is a mere apprentice in a community of professional circus performers. Not only practice they outperform him in their acts; they also show superior narrators. Buffo, the chief clown, tells a story most a multiple tragedy in his family in which all those he loved were wiped out in one brutal swoop. When he is forced to perform the same afternoon, his grief-stricken weep "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 most himself but "has been told of every Clown since the invention of the desolating profession" (120). He goes on to explain to his naive amateur-clown, Walser, "This story is non precisely true but has the poetic truth of myth and then 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 hither displays a sophisticated knowledge of the nature of the narrative act, perhaps even an acquaintance with the theories of Propp or Greimas, both of whom recognized that a particular function or actant in a story can exist filled by any number of successive characters or acteurs. Information technology is also significant that the clowns' part is described in such a fashion that it exactly parallels that of the tellers of stories:

...even if the clowns detonated the entire city . . . goose egg would really change. Nada. The exploded buildings would float up into the air insubstantial as bubbles, and gently waft to earth once more on exactly the same places where they had stood before. (151)

Equally 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 aforementioned mixed blessing: "you can do anything you like, equally 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 than 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 histrion 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. At that place is Mignon, a waif of a adult female, whose fictional ancestry derives from Goethe via Alban Berg (Haffenden 82), and whose past profession consisted of posing as a expressionless woman returned to visit her grieving relations, notwithstanding another variation on the art of artistic illusion. She and the Princess end up overcoming their language differences past communicating through their music. Once again art proves the channnel for the discovery of dear. Art may be naught but illusion; but the illusion can be powerful enough to transform the lives of those defenseless up in it. Above all there are Lamarck'due south Educated Apes. They teach themselves writing in order to be able to write out their ain 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'southward chapeau) 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 vocalism production to the groundwork accessory of the Strong Homo's accelerating grunts as he reaches orgasm with Mignon. The tragic is transformed into the comic every bit that piece of work, man, makes a fool of himself in Walser'southward case, and proves more animalistic than the apes in the Strong Man's case. Walser'south 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: information technology can too atomic number 82 to death. Even earlier much of the circus menage is diddled up by rebels in Role Iii: 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 existence slaughtered as a chicken by the drink-crazed Buffo. Role Two ends with Fevvers' about expiry every bit 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 leave from the circus of the dead tigress and of Fevvers on her fashion to the Grand Duke: "At the courtyard gate, a glamorous droshky stood ready to receive her, backside the melancholy van from the knacker's chiliad. As a befurred footman handed Fevvers into one, the Potent Man pitched the carcass into the other" (182). The narrational meaning is clear: Fevvers is in danger of meeting a like fate to that of the tigress, despite the glamorous trappings of her carriage. Critics such as Magali Michael run into the Grand Duke's plan every bit a typical male person attempt at "objectification," one more example of "the daily victimization of women" (502). But it is equally an try 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! Easily off" (fifteen)! She owes her independence to others' desire to look at her. "All you can do to earn your living," Lizzie tells her, "is to brand a show of yourself" (185). Fevvers comes closest to extinction when the Grand Knuckles almost succeeds in fixing her for ever as an artistic object to be gazed at. In effect he would accept 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 exist a self-liberating human activity. Nosotros can invent stories for ourselves that gratuitous united states - 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 functioning of the gaze every bit a phallic activity linked to a desire for sadistic mastery of the object which is cast every bit the passive, masochistic, feminine victim of the gaze .Carter shows at to the lowest degree some acquaintance with the theory, perhaps via Laura Mulvey'due south appropriation of it in her celebrated essay on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." She employs information technology not just to exemplify the mode the masculine gaze subordinates the woman to his voyeuristic needs, merely also to demonstrate how the gaze operates in the sado-masochistic human relationship between author and reader. In attracting the gaze of others, Fevvers is likewise reflecting the narrator's need to command the attending 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'" (vii)? But the narrative act is filled with dangers. Fevvers' invitation to bask her as spectacle invites more aggressive responses than those of the not-touching curious public. Fifty-fifty Walser is seized by a want to principal this riddle and journalistically cut her downwards to size. More threatening are the attempts of Mr Rosencreutz and the Grand Duke to appropriate her otherness to themselves, to strength her into condign a subordinate role of their story, an sectional object of their gaze.

The gaze involves a degree of reciprocity. The writer gazes at the globe and then offers the world a narrative version of itself to gaze at. This interactive relationship is given fictional apotheosis 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 congenital according to a blueprint get-go 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 similar a doughnut, the inward-facing wall of which was composed of grids of steel and, in the eye of the roofed, central courtyard, there was a round room surrounded by windows. In that room she'd sit down all mean solar 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 exist returned to reassure her of her power which involves deceiving her captive audition into thinking she is looking at them twenty-four hour period and night (just equally the all-seeing narrator deceives her readers into thinking that she is omnipotent and present everywhere in her fictional earth). In the cease the prisoners notice a way of planning their escape which appropriately enough involves their writing hush-hush notes using their own bodily fluids. Isn't this a metaphor for readers' freedom to impose their own estimation (based on their own bodily experiences) on the narrative, peculiarly when information technology 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 expiry is exactly what awaits the Countess when her prisoners are born into their new life in which they are costless to construct their own narrative of their lives.

However much Carter claims, both within the text and in her comments most 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 nearly 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 earth (the earth every bit part) 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. Simply that does ot finish her from attempting to exclude specific interpetations of her text on which he launches preemptive strikes. When the female ex-captive determine to found their own utopia which will exclude whatever members of the male person sexual practice, they are forced to ask the male person Escapee for a pint or 2 of sperm and then that they tin "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 person polar bears?" she asks (240-1). Information technology is ironic that one feminst critic however manages to insist that in the novel "the perspective becomes increasingly woman-centered . . . and the emergence of a female counter-culture is historic" (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 paw 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 exist thwarted past its readers. The departure betwixt readerly and writerly texts is a affair of degree, not of kind. In laying bare this novel's narrative strategies and incorporating both writer and reader inside 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'due south carefully plotted scheme (he would make a skilful thriller writer) to reify her every bit an art object. How she contrives to escape is by a double human action that constitutes one of Carter's almost brazen instances of narrative manipulation in the book. While she puts on a sexual performance for the Thousand Duke (masturbating him), she puts on a purely fictional operation for the reader. While bringing the Knuckles to a sexual climax she brings her fictional life in St Petersburg to its own climax by escaping in the Grand Duke'south 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 showtime-class compartment and clambered aboard.
"Look what a mess he's made of your clothes, the pig," said Lizzie.
The weeping daughter threw herself into the adult female'due south arms... (192)

Before nosotros readers take fourth dimension to protestation over the impossibility of such an escape (information technology defies all the laws of space-time), the new strand of narrative has caught us upwardly and hurried us on into a new cocky-contained earth of fiction that is of grade only equally reliant on illusion equally was the final 1.

In fact this new fictional globe is the almost extravagant of the three settings in the novel, a Siberia of the mind, a country given life purely by the narrator's brilliant utilize of language: "Exterior the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun failing 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 information technology the entire sky" (197). Brilliant images like that of the wolves sweep usa along with the narrative inundation, and Carter has such conviction in its power that she can afford to leave hints of the wholly invented ("unimaginable") nature of a landscape that merely "seem[s]" to be how it is described as being. Inside another folio Carter feels able to puncture our suspension of disbelief with impunity: "nosotros were progressing through the vastness of zippo to the extremities of nowhere" (198). A little later the linguistically fabricated nature of this mural is fabricated even clearer by the utilize of a telling metaphor: "The white world around them looked newly made, a bare canvas of fresh paper on which they could inscribe whatever future they wished" (218). The Siberian landscape is zippo 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). Every bit such it needs to combine the tricks of the illusionist with the expos�s of the sceptic.

When the train conveying the circus is blown up by outlaws Carter offers an equally brilliant instance of how words tin can be conjured with to make the states 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 caption of this surrealistic miracle is every bit 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 free energy you lot glimpsed betwixt the bars of their pelts had convulsed in a dandy 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 "equally if" and the stress on "reflections" and "reduplications" clearly invites us to reflect ourselves on the nature of fictive reflection. The mode the tigers survive as fragments of relected images is very reminiscent of Ren� Magritte's paintings such as Le Faux Miroir (The Imitation Mirror) where the reflection of sky and clouds has go the colour of an heart's iris. Carter explains, "if dreams are existent as dreams, then at that place is a materiality to symbols; in that location's a materiality to imaginative life and imaginative feel which should be taken quite seriously" (Haffenden 85).

Office Three continues Carter'south exploration of the nature, the power and the limits of the narrative human action. 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 Iii pushes the limits of the picaresque mode to an farthermost. Carter defines the picaresque as "a certain eighteenth-century fictional device . . . where people have adventures in society to find themselves in places where they can discuss philosophical concepts without distractions" (Haffenden 87). The concepts that are discussed in this last section are not confined to those of gender, equally many of Carter's critics announced to assume. An equally dominant concept is the place of illusion in human life and consciousness, or rather the illusionistic nature of human being experience. Where Fevvers was Carter's main vehicle in Role One for the exploration of this concept, it is Walser who enables her to pursue it into a surrealist globe of dreams and visions in Part Three.

Suffering from amnesia, Walser accepts without question the value systems of the Shaman whose task "was the estimation of the visible globe about him via the information he acquired through dreaming. When he slept, which he did much of the time, he would, could he take written it, have put a sign on his door: 'Human being at work'" (253). The Shaman, then, exists almost entirely in a world of dreams and fantasy. And it is plumbing equipment that Walser, previously the representative of a materialist civilization obsessed past facts should fall under the influence of this comic representative of the irrational and the surreal. Even the behave he lives with is "both a existent, furry and beloved conduct and, at the same time, a transcendentasl kind of meta-comport, a minor deity..." (257). Carter has neat fun exposing Walser to the upside down values of the Shaman's shadowy world. But she is as well 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 yous 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 globe, merely to the ambiguous world of narrative, where she needs him to restore her confidence in herself as enigmatic bird-woman: "'That's the mode to first the interview!' she cried. 'Get out your pencil and we'll begin" (291). The novel ends where it begins, with the human activity 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 linguistic communication. According to Carter, "Fevvers starts off as a metaphor come to life - a winged spirit" (Haffenden 93). In subscribing to the postmodern consensus that nosotros as subjects are constructed by the symbolic order of language, Carter is simultaneously celebrating the power of language, peculiarly 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 Loonshit" (126). In each example her mythological/religious status is undercut by an attribute that is thoroughly earthy. If wings make 1 think of angels and goddesses, the balance of her physique has been "thrown on a common bike out of coarse clay" (12). She has "the shoulders of a voluptuous stevedore" (xv), 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'southward ice to which notwithstanding cling some fish scales. She has the "voice of a angelic fishwife" - another case 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 heed to his mumbo-colossal for a curt paragraph'due south length to be able to accurately place him in an esoteric earth of pseudo theology-cum-metaphysics: "This is some kind of heretical perhaps 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" later on them. Similarly her behave 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 simply this conjunction of opposing qualities. At once venus and Scrooge her subjectivity is intertextually synthetic 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 have illusion as playing equally valid a role in man life equally fact. Already in Part Two when he first makes his face up equally a clown "he experienced the . . . freedom to juggle with beingness ..." (103) Walser hither is given the aforementioned godlike powers as the novelist to reconstruct himself as a different field of study. Yet he secretly continues his life every bit a reporter and exposer of the illusions he has become a part of. So in Role Three Carter has him undergo a form of expiry (memory loss afterwards the train crash) and rebirth into a world far more illusionistic than that constitute in realist fiction. When in the last department 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 fabricated to enter Carter'southward magic realist world of fiction where the miraculous forms an accustomed part of the normal. Carter herself uses magic in her fiction because for her fiction is magic, with its "ability to create an admittedly convincing illusion" - which instantly exposes itself (Goldsworthy 6). She has called this book "a sort of Dickensian novel about people who absolutely could non 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 once again Carter wishes to foreground the fictional means by which her characters are constructed at the aforementioned as she is convincing her readers of their credibility. Think back to Madame Schreck, for instance, whom Carter builds upwards every bit a money-grasping, exploitative quondam witch, only to expose the course Gothic accoutrements out of which she has been synthetic after Fevvers has flown with her to the ceiling and left her hanging on the drapery rails. Hither is Toussaint's account of her end:

Information technology came to me that in that location was nothing left within the wearing apparel and, perhaps, at that place never had been anything inside her wearing apparel simply a set of dry basic agitated only by the ability of an infernal will and a voice that had been no more than the artificial exhalation of air from a float 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, similar an organ'south, by means of bellows, and by emotions (will and desire) that mechanistically animate her from within. In a like vein Walser in his sceptical days wonders who had made Fevvers into "a marvellous machine and equipped her with her story" (29). Merely in many ways we all make ourselves up. Fictional subjects, similar "existent" subjects, can seem mere puppets manipulated and given a semblance of life by their narrator. Watching Fevvers and Lizzie walking domicile over Westminster Bridge Walser notes how they appear "the size of ane 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 downwardly to dinner their white faces "possessed the formal lifelessness of death masks, every bit 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 bailiwick, start painted to await other than himself, then revealed to exist a fictional replica of that painted subject. Notwithstanding does not the double replication of fiction, which Carter makes sure to draw to our attending, 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 existent world, however much it might parallel it. When Lizzie tells how they gave Sophie her nickname, she explains: "'Fevvers" we named her, and and so she will exist to the stop of the chapter" (13). Fevvers' existence coincides with the duration of the narration. All the same no sooner has she drawn attending to the fictional condition of her creature than Carter tempts us back into her fictive world: "'Let'south go your make-up off, love" (13). One sentence will do the trick. Carter is not above having a trivial fun at the expense of literary critics and theorists who tend to resemble Walser at the offset of the novel. When he reaches the climax of his act in the ring, Buffo "starts to deconstruct himself" (117), existence zip simply 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 world, Fevvers responds: "'Look, honey,' I says to him eventually, because I'1000 not in the right mood for literary criticism. 'If I hadn't bust a wing in the railroad train-wreck, I could wing us all to Vladivostok in two shakes, so I'm not the right i to ask questions of when information technology comes to what is real and what is not..." (244). All the same this actress-textual reference to the likely reception of the text is simultaneously a defense 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 exist 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 terminate 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 as well deceived the reader into believing in her, wings and all. Walser asks Fevvers, "why did yous go to such lengths, once upon a fourth dimension, to convince me you were the 'only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world'" (294)? Fevvers, as she begins to express mirth, responds, "'I fooled y'all, then!" After her express joy has spread to infect the entire globe "as if a spontaneous response to the behemothic comedy that incessantly unfolded beneath it," she concludes: "Information technology but goes to show in that location's nothing like confidence" (295). An alarm reader will pick up on "once upon a time," "the giant comedy," and "confidence." e The unabridged fictional narrative is a gigantic confidence flim-flam, meant to fool u.s.a. equally convincingly as Fevvers fooled Walser, the fact-laden and skeptical auditor of her narrative. Equally Carter has explained, ending with Fevvers' "I actually fooled you" (295) "doesn't make y'all realize the fictionality of what has gone before, it makes you lot start inventing other fictions..." (Haffenden 90). In fooling Walser, Fevvers has transformed his life. Dreams, fantasies and imaginings have now become a legitimate function of his consciousness. At the same time the applesauce of the Shaman's full 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 finish of this novel refuses closure in typical postmodern fashion. How can narrative die, particularly in a earth of unending signification? Less typical is Carter'south 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 actress-narrational world of her readers who volition have learnt from the book to recognize the necessary place in their lives for the ageless human activity of narration.

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