Características del extractivismo

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, in contrast to Rushdie’s novel, is written fi rmly from the ‘centre’ rather than the ‘margins’ of the postcolonial world.

However, there has not been a shortage of comparisons between the postcolo-nial and the feminist struggles, and indeed Carter makes this point herself.

Seeing language as ‘power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation’,³⁹ Carter considers her writing as a ‘decolonising of language and our basic habits of thought’.⁴⁰ Reminiscent of many descriptions of magical realism in the postcolonial context, and readings of both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children, Carter feels the need for the

‘creation of the means of expression for an infi nitely greater variety of experi-ence than has been possible heretofore, to say things for which no language previously existed’.⁴¹ Mentioning García Márquez, she claims to feel affi nity with Third World writers ‘who are transforming actual fi ctional forms to both refl ect and precipitate changes in the way people feel about themselves’.⁴²

While the magic in Nights at the Circus cannot be categorized as belonging to a specifi c non-Western culture, à la William Spindler’s anthropological magical realism,⁴³ the novel displays signifi cant similarities to One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children in terms of the treatment of both the real and the magic. It is fi rmly set at the very end of the nineteenth century in London, St Petersburg and Siberia, evoking vivid images of the fi rst two settings in particular: Victorian London through descriptions of the main character Fevvers’s childhood home, the brothel, and St Petersburg through glimpses of both the extreme poverty and extreme opulence given in between events at the circus. As Day has pointed out, the novel is ‘formally and generically quite traditional’ and follows the linear progression of the adventures of the protagonists. Day also notes the rich historical contexts that often remain unno-ticed: references to historical fi gures like the entertainer Dan Leno, to Alfred Jarry, Toulouse-Lautrec, Freud and Marx, as well as a subtext of the women’s rights movement and leftwing political activism of the time.⁴⁴ The novel lacks the explicit family structure and domestic settings of the aforementioned nov-els, although Fevvers’s upbringing in a brothel provides a kind of substitute.

However, in Nights at the Circus the rigid segmentarity of the State is not so much located in the family, as, perhaps surprisingly, in the circus. The particular ter-ritorialization performed by the State that Carter is interested in is, of course, male domination. In fact, the way Carter creates a local representative of the State in the circus with its capitalist exploitation, its hierarchy and its segmen-tarity, makes it clear that she is aware of the pitfalls of some of the characteris-tics attributed to magical realism. Similarly to both García Márquez’s and Rushdie’s novels, Nights at the Circus has been described as carnivalesque in style. As discussed in the Introduction, the carnivalesque is one of the features

that cannot be seen as essential to magical realism. However, the perceived subversion of boundaries in magical realism, as well as the hyperbolic tenden-cies of many magical realist novels, have made critics link the carnivalesque and magical realism. In fact, it is precisely the misreading of magical realism as per-forming merely a carnivalesque operation by introducing magic into reality that contributes to the perception of the genre as a failure. As Ga˛siorek points out, Carter is well aware that the carnivalesque inversion of categories, such as magic and real, oppressor and oppressed, male and female, has only a limited subversive power: it does not question these dichotomies as such, and after the laughter of the carnival has died down, the old order easily returns.⁴⁵ The magic in Nights at the Circus, however, is an element that is divergent both from the ordi-nary rules of society and their temporary carnivalesque inversion in the circus.

In fact, the organization of Carter’s circus is segmented according to a strict hierarchy: circus manager, audience, performers, with the latter in turn divided into men, women, animals. Its space is striated to refl ect these divisions in a sort of inverted cone of concentric circles (the structure of the circular stage) where the further away from the centre you are, the higher up in the hierarchy you fi nd yourself. Importantly, therefore, the circus (which can include any of the theatre stages Fevvers has performed on) is the arena in which Fevvers – the woman – is objectifi ed, where she has her identity constructed for her. We can recall Hallward’s concept of the specifi ed here. A specifi ed identity is passive and objectifi ed, based on a relation imposed from outside. It is here, on stage, in the centre of the cone, that Fevvers’s identity is specifi ed by those who come to see her: as angel, as freak, as impostor, as sex-object and so on, all predicated on the order of the circus-State where the specifying gaze always belongs to those further up the hierarchy: the audience and the man. Indeed, Fevvers seems entirely dependent on her performance and her audience for an iden-tity: even her interview with Walser is very much a performance of the persona she has made for herself, and later, lost in Siberia, she seems to crumble and fade without the gaze of an audience.

However, Fevvers is also the central element of magic in the novel: a woman with wings, not born but hatched, and with no navel to show for it. She is a becoming in the Deleuzian sense, recalling that for Deleuze, becoming is never an imitation, but two things entering a zone of imperceptibility (TP 274).

Fevvers is both woman and bird. What Mary Russo interprets as a grotesque, redundant body,⁴⁶ Paulina Palmer correctly sees as a sign of Carter’s ‘interest in exploring a “completely new order of things” ’.⁴⁷ Fevvers has both arms and wings, and as Walser muses, ‘she, by all the laws of evolution and human reason, ought to possess no arms at all, for it’s her arms that ought to be her wings!’⁴⁸ She doesn’t imitate the bird in fl ight either, meandering through the air, somersaulting as no bird, nor human trapeze artist could conceivably do. She is an element divergent from the laws of nature, a line of fl ight traversing the series of both the human and the avian.

She is the object = x of the text, something she, in fact, ‘performs’ by being anything to anyone that sees her: the identities she is given are like the ‘statistical

Models of Magical Realism 65

effects’ of her presence in the system of reality around her. Although she is constantly, and sometimes violently, reterritorialized, she is at core entirely deterritorialized. Nights at the Circus is not explicitly metafi ctional like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children, but it foregrounds narration in its fi rst section by making Fevvers tell her own story. In fact, the novel dem-onstrates that textual self-refl exivity is not a necessary element of magical real-ism. The magical element, Fevvers, is both the subject and the object of her own narration; it is clear from the outset of the novel that she is making her own reality. At the same time, however, the omniscient narrator guarantees the dominant reality of her setting, and her inclusion in it. Indeed, Fevvers illus-trates quite succinctly the contradiction between the singular position and the wish for a relational identity. That is, as an object = x, she is not bound by any convergent system such as the State or the laws of nature, and is, as it were, auto-productive. However, she is also therefore entirely non-relational. The only way to attain relationality is by reterritorialization, that is, entering into a confi gura-tion of relagura-tions that is by essence territorial. In order to fi nd a place in the world, a defi nition of herself, Fevvers has to perform, she has to insert herself into the order of the State through the circus and reterritorialize herself in the gaze of her spectators.

Fevvers thus allows us to see the central dilemma of magical realism with greater clarity: magic occupies a position where the binary divisions of any domination scenario are erased and where any rigid organization is destroyed, thus implying a liberation from such specifying structures. However, it also implies the impossibility of the kind of relations necessary for individual iden-tity. In Nights at the Circus Carter dramatizes this dilemma further through the group of Clowns. The identities of the clowns are ostensibly and unashamedly constructs, but underneath there is no true self, no original. Nevertheless, the clowns feel that their awareness of the specifi ed nature of their identity, their choice of the construct, as it were, is a form of freedom: ‘I have become this face which is not mine, and yet I choose it freely’ (NC 122). However, they also demonstrate the dangers of absolute deterritorialization, similar to those encountered by Saleem in Midnight’s Children. First Buffo, their leader, in his madness and in a fl urry of numerous performed identities, ‘deconstructs’ him-self to his death. Later, the clowns as a group perform themselves to oblivion.

Carter seems to imply here, as Day observes, the danger of a non-material, ahis-torical and transcendental principle (that is, a singular principle) that is pre-supposed by identity: enacting or embodying this principle ends in chaos and destruction.⁴⁹

What Carter seems to advocate is the necessity of constructing a territorial identity. While both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children ended in total annihilation, Nights at the Circus includes a kind of personal apocalypse, but ends with a reconstruction of identity. This apocalypse, or rather extreme deterritorialization, takes place in the smooth space of a wintry Siberia. The train that Fevvers and Walser are travelling on, a mini-State dividing people and animals in ordered segments, is literally shattered into pieces. This precipitates

Walser’s total loss of identity through trauma, like Saleem’s amnesia, as well as Fevvers’s loss of a performative space and thus her main way of creating iden-tity. In the end, however, they both fi nd new identities through their love, that is, by establishing a relation to each other. Walser starts off comfortable in his role as an adventurous, independent man who possesses a specifying gaze both in his role as a man and as a journalist: he writes down and thus determines the identities of the objects he investigates. Carter has him go through a complete becoming-other in his madness, in order to allow him to emerge a ‘new man’; an identity he receives by subjecting himself to Fevvers’s gaze. In the last pages of the novel he offers an alternative narrative of himself, in her unique style. Fevvers, in turn, having been lost and bedraggled, fi nds ‘herself’ again in his eyes. As they meet, he, still in a precarious mental state, looks at her uncomprehending and she suffers ‘the worst crisis of her life: “Am I fact? Or am I fi ction? Am I what I know I am? Or am I what he thinks I am?” ’She only regains her confi dence and identity when she spreads her wings and sees ‘the eyes fi xed upon her with aston-ishment, with awe, the eyes that told her who she was’ (NC 290).

Clare Hanson reads this conclusion of Nights at the Circus as a pessimistic message: one can redraw one’s own identity but always at expense of someone else’s. Fevvers fi nds herself again, but only through remoulding Walser’s image of her, and to Hanson the end of the novel is thus only a reversal rather than a deconstruction of the power relations that make up identity.⁵⁰ In a sense this is true, since we are certainly not given an alternative to the construction of identity through a system predicated on delineation and boundaries, on territo-rialization. However, Carter offers a rather upbeat ending from the point of view of Fevvers, as she has chosen her performance and her spectator. She has thus been able to escape her specifi ed identity through what Hallward would call a specifi c position. Yet Carter does not allow this to be an entirely unproblematic solution for Fevvers. Walser’s question whether she really is the ‘only fully-feathered intacta in the history of the world’ is met with the enigmatic ‘Gawd, I fooled you!’ (NC 294) and the resounding laugh that closes the novel. This laugh seems yet again to set in motion Fevvers’s endless circulation as the object

= x, making her resonate with all the identities she has ever been given, as we have to re-open the question ‘what is she?’ In fact, the magic does not necessar-ily lead to destruction or dissolution, but the mechanisms that keep things together, that allow the characters to return from the brink of apocalypse, from total deterritorialization, are those of reterritorialization and of the State.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987): The Imperative