In terms of literary practices postmodernism was characterized by narrative discontinuity and fragmentation;

highly subjective, self-reflexive and playful styles of narration; a rejection of resolutions, truths and endings;
an emphasis on surface, image and commodification rather than depth, privacy or singularity; a lack of
seriousness expressed through modes of pastiche, parody and irony; the blurring of critical boundaries
between high and low art, historical and present time, different genres, and also between individual texts
because postmodernist literature often plays host to multiple intertextual references to literary and other –
for example, visual – media.

One of the ways in which Carter’s fiction as a whole operates is to deconstruct culture and ‘cultural codes’
through her ‘depiction of characters as intertextual ciphers, who are quite literally put together out of bits
and pieces of other writing’

Two related ideas about Carter’s writing – intertextuality and bricolage (to ‘put together out of bits and
pieces’) – that require some explanation and clarification here.

The concept of intertextuality is one that emerged from semiotics (the study of linguistic and other signs)
through the post-structuralist theorist, Julia Kristeva (1941–). She conceived of texts existing along two
overlapping axes: a horizontal axis which connects an author and reader and a vertical axis connecting the
text to other texts. Shared codes connect the communications that take place along these distinct axes since
all acts of communication take place in the context of a vast network of pre-existing codes. In this way, all
texts can be understood as intertextual because all are, to some extent, a ‘transformation’ of existing
language terms, references, myths and so on. Thus, in the context of literary analysis, intertextuality does not
just refer to the way a reader may identify the influence of one writer on another, or a writer’s explicit
reference to the work of another through quotation, pastiche and so on, but also to a broader sense that
writers and their readers are themselves ‘written’ by the networks of culture, language, history and
representation that have produced them.

By implication, therefore, reading and interpretation is itself an intertextual process in that, as this book will
demonstrate, the reading of a novel such as Nights at the Circus always and increasingly falls under the
shadow of previous ways of understanding it as well as new contexts of interpretation. Thus, no text can
ever be regarded as truly ‘original’ because to some extent all are a product of the literary (and other)
cultures that have gone before. Also, when the energy of the text is understood to lie in the dynamic
interchange between a text and its context, the boundaries of what lies ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the text become
difficult to draw. In this sense, therefore, all literature is intertextual, but postmodern literature is somewhat
distinctive in that it demonstrates a self- consciousness about its intertextual debts. It does this by
signposting them through dramatic or complex types of textual reference such as pastiche or bricolage and
by reflecting overtly on the role of both the writer and the reader of fiction through explicit forms of self-
reference or direct address. Nights at the Circus, therefore, is intertextual not just because it contains so
many references to other literary and visual intertexts but also because, with its deliberate meshing of the
contemporary and historical, fact and fiction, it actively promotes critical detachment and reflection on the
shifting and perpetually renewable processes through which texts produce meaning, rather than emotional
engagement. Intertextuality, therefore, is a term that refers both to an understanding that literature – and
other arts – creates spaces where multiple and contested meanings are generated and to the textual strategies
within postmodernism that allude to this process.

Whereas the concept of intertextuality highlights the co-dependency and potential reversibility of critical
and fictional texts – old and new, writing and interpretation – bricolage highlights the energy and agency of
assembly (the bricoleur) that brings diverse cultural materials together with specific and concrete results.
The terms bricolage and bricoleur (the agent of bricolage) come from the French and refer to the process of
doing odd jobs and of making or fixing objects from the bits and pieces that have been left over from other
jobs. Their post- modern emphasis is derived from their use by the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-
Strauss (1908–) who conceives of the work of myth within culture as a form of bricolage that turns social
discourse into ideology.
The bricoleur, therefore, works with existing (and therefore limited) materials or fragments and
communicates through these – though of course ‘materials’ in this context may also be taken to refer to
existing linguistic signs and signifiers. It is this process of bricolage through its dynamics of contrast,
addition, subtraction and transposition that creates new objects from the old. As Jeannette Baxter points out,
it is the concept of bricolage, with its emphasis on the concrete and the material and its potentially explosive
and transformative results, therefore, which greatly appealed to Carter as a writer. Jago Morrison refers to
Carter’s construction of history in the novel as being ‘no longer [in] the domain of facts’ but, instead, ‘a self-
contradictory, problematic, conglomerated inheritance of meanings’. In doing so he draws our attention to
the troublesome but generative potential of a bricolage or ‘inheritance of meanings’ that might produce new
ways of thinking about historical ideas, texts and figures, and Baxter explores this potential extensively
within her essay.

Intertextuality and bricolage are both important features of metafiction, a genre of writing which is
associated with postmodernism, coming into focus from the 1970s onwards.
The term ‘metafiction’, was probably used first by the American writer and critic William Gass in 1970, and
its emergence during this period reflects a growing Western self-consciousness from the 1960s onwards
about the forms and structures (visual, literary, musical) that mediate our experience of the world.

In metafiction, this anxiety about mediation is expressed in a number of ways, though principally it takes the
form of a self-conscious presentation of the novel, not (as in realism) as a represented world which seems to
us to be ‘true’, but rather as a piece of writing.

Metafiction employs devices that constantly remind us that what we are reading is fictional; it does not
allow us to enter a believable or familiar world in which we would lose sight of the novel’s textuality.
Among the devices that create this effect of textual self-consciousness are techniques of characterization,
references to the act of writing, the use of different language registers, exaggerated style and distinctions
explicitly drawn between fact and fiction. Thus, metafiction: self-consciously and systematically draws
attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and
reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the
fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the
literary text’.77
By continually reflecting on its own assumptions and construction, metafiction works to collapse the
separation between writer and reader and between the fictional work and the ‘reality’ of political, cultural
and historical discourse to which it belongs. As Robert Scholes observes, metafiction is ‘a border-line
territory between fiction and criticism’.78 Since metafiction constitutes an attitude to fiction rather than an
identifiable set of concerns or themes, it is not so much a genre of fiction but a ‘tendency within the
novel’.79 Although, as Patricia Waugh points out, this tendency began as an anxiety in the 1960s and 1970s
about fiction’s inability to escape itself, this dominating paranoia began to give way in the 1980s ‘to
celebration’ and ‘to the discovery of new forms of the fantastic, fabulatory extravaganzas, magic realism’.
Fiction’s ‘moment of crisis’, she argues, ‘can also be seen as a moment of recognition’.80 It is important to
recognize, therefore, that Nights at the Circus certainly belongs to the latter phase of metafictional writing.
The novel’s ‘recognition’ of its own status as fiction becomes a rich source for wit, while the proximity of
critical and fictional discourse in the novel appears to extend rather than limit its fictional and critical scope.

Finally, it is also important to remember that, although Nights at the Circus clearly has many postmodern
tendencies, it is by no means straightforwardly postmodern in all respects. As should be obvious from the
account of Carter’s life and political engagements, with feminism in particular, her firm political beliefs and
commitment to the idea of social change cannot easily be reconciled with postmodernism. Her political
concern to draw previously silenced or marginal voices into the foreground of representation appears to
stand in tension with the kind of political and moral relativity and abandonment of progress that otherwise
typifies postmodern literature. Far from rejecting the concepts of commitment and change, however, critics
such as Aidan Day (see Critical history, pp. 58–9) argues that Nights at the Circus nurtures elements of the
fantastic only to direct them from an identifiable and in some ways quite traditional feminist position – both
thematically and formally.81 Carter, therefore, deploys identifiably post- modern strategies, especially in her
opening up of our understanding of what history is and her introduction of previously missing events, ideas
or figures from the past that have not yet been defined as history or historical. Yet she is not typically or
comprehensively postmodernist in Nights at the Circus, since her literary strategies, as Day suggests, are
rooted in a set of discernible and politically ‘material’ bases.

Magical realism
While some critics argue that magical realism (or magic realism) is a key element of postmodernist
literature, others regard magical realism as a distinct literary
and artistic genre with its own distinct cultural history and aesthetic definition.
The term ‘magical realism’ denotes a combination of the fantastic and the realistic, specifically informed by
a narrative tone of banal response to the fantastic elements, treating them as equally real to those that are
apparently more realistic.
Not only has Carter’s work frequently been read in terms of magical realism, but John Haffenden goes so far
as to suggest that ‘[t]he term “magical realist” might well have been invented to describe Angela Carter’.
It does, however, have a more long-standing history which it is important to trace in order to situate the
place of Nights at the Circus within it.
It is generally agreed that it was the German art critic Franz Roh (1890–1965) who made claim to the term
‘magic realism’ in his 1925 thesis characterizing a new trend in German painting of the Weimar Republic.
He found these paintings to contain a peculiar mixture of ‘attention to accurate detail, a smooth photograph-
like clarity of picture and the representation of the mystical, non-material aspects of reality’.83 When
describing narrative manifestations of this genre, the term ‘magical realism’ is commonly used. In the
context of the literary genre of magical realism, therefore, Roh’s characterization of painterly magic realism
is translated through works that deal with figures and events which are often familiar and recognizable from
daily or historical reality.
Crucially, however, there is a double action at work in magical realism: ordinary events are treated as if they
were fantastic (in a revision of what is ‘normal’ or ‘real’) and extraordinary events are treated as if they are
entirely ‘ordinary’.
In its challenge to fixed assumptions about ‘real reality’ (Pt. III, Ch. 8, p. 253), Nights at the Circus engages
with the question of ‘what is real and what is not’ (Pt. III, Ch. 7, p. 244).

Bowers distinguishes this work from European appropriations of the genre wherein, she argues: ‘Magic
realism remains a narrative mode that is chosen for the purposes of literary experimentation and does not
have its source in the writer’s mythological and cultural context.’84 Certainly, this is debatable in Carter’s
case since the novel is indeed packed with references to European myths and all aspects of literary, visual
and popular culture, though these could not be described as being ethnically distinct or even exclusively
British. Bowers, however, does go on to make the important point that ‘in postcolonial and cross-cultural
contexts, and particularly those in the English-speaking world’, writers such as Salman Rushdie and Ben
Okri have ‘adopted magical realism’ precisely to ‘express their own non-Western mythological and cultural
traditions’.85

Carter’s own particular debt to Latin American fiction of the twentieth century, however, is well known.
Carter’s personal as well as literary affinity with this genre of the fantastic is related to her feminism.
Rosemary Jackson explicitly identifies the effect of Carter’s use of magical realism, arguing that she
‘employed the fantastic to subvert patriarchal society’.
Even in the 1980s there were critics who dismissed fantastic or magical realist novels as self-indulgent and
decadent in their extravagance, but in Carter’s case, this ignored her political and intellectual drive.
Indeed, towards the end of the novel, she reflects on the subject jokily. When Fevvers wonders how Lizzie,
‘from a family of anarchist bomb-makers’, can ‘reconcile her politics with her hanky-panky’ (Pt. III, Ch. 5,
p. 225), Carter puts in place a metafictional jest about her own brand of magical realism, a combination of
incredulous, time-stretching narrative ‘hanky-panky’ and political engagement.
Use of magical realism, then, enables Carter to make observations about society, gender and the power of
myth, and she is particularly sceptical about any construct that has been naturalized and accepted without
question.
A good example of the way in which Carter uses magical realism to undermine the ideologically naturalized
is her manipulation of time throughout the novel.
In the third chapter, the young, male journalist Walser, having been taken back to Lizzie and Fevvers’ house
in Battersea, is forced to urinate the ‘brown arc of the excess of her champagne’ in the same room as them,
while ‘earthiness reasserted itself all around him’.
His privacy is only precariously secured by a screen, though a hand appears around the side of it to empty
the cold contents of a teapot into the ‘dirty bathwater’ in front of him, ‘on the scummed, grey surface of
which the last deposit of tealeaves already floated’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 52). The narrative scene- setting in this
chapter is full of such ‘earthy’ attention to vivid, everyday, physical and almost vulgar realist detail. Yet
Walser is then immediately thrown further off his guard when Big Ben strikes midnight for a second time
that evening, a time that is echoed indoors by Fevvers’ prized but broken clock from Ma Nelson’s brothel:
‘Inside and outside matched exactly, but both were badly wrong. H’m’ (Pt. I, Ch. 3, p. 53).
Such magical but disorientating manipulation of time is typical of Carter’s stretching and convergence of
time elsewhere in the novel – St. Petersburg is already framed as a city that ‘does not exist anymore’ (Pt. II,
Ch. 1, p. 96). Yet it also reinforces the idea that time is a relative concept which can be used and refigured,
both in the service of patriarchy and to undermine it; Walser, whose confidence partly rests on his certainty
in obtaining proof and establishing objective reality is certainly unnerved. It reminds us again that we are
reading a story and that one of the facilities of fiction is to stretch, compress and converge time. Time plays
a further trick on all of them much later in the novel when Walser is discovered by Fevvers and Lizzie living
with the Shaman, wearing a beard whose length indicates that, during his absence from them, much more
time has passed for him than for them. When Lizzie observes from this that ‘Father Time has many children’
(Pt. III, Ch. 9, p. 272), she underlines the fact that even time, which seems so tied up with