Nights at the Circus

Simply put, I loved Nights at the Circus. I don't understand how it's a short read, as it took me a very long time to read and cover the vocabulary, and I still think it will take me another couple times through to be able to actually grasp the enormity of the things Angela Carter reveals in this novel. I love to read for the 'details', and this novel was written intentionally down to every word (and even punctuation at times). I'd find myself looking up a word such as crepe, only to realize that one of the connotations is as a token of mourning, yet repeating the theme of death, significant throughout the novel.

For the sake of the blog, I will limit my discussion to a few of my thoughts - I am strongly considering writing my paper in relation to Nights at the Circus and do not want to 'steal' my own ideas (creativity) ahead of time without proper consideration and sufficient reflection.

We discussed the idea of magic realism, the Carnivalesque, and the grotesque last week. I was captivated by the use of these throughout the text, as the novel subverted truth with doubt, the real with the unreal, the fact with fiction, belief with disbelief, and how we question what we do not understand. As Carter puts it, "They knew the space they saw. They believed in a space they apprehended. Between knowledge and belief, there was no room for surmise or doubt.... Outside, under a sky the colour and texture of an army blanket, wild beasts, hunters, midwives, merchants, fur-traders and birds of prey went about their business in ignorance...Had they heard it, they would not have understood it; had they understood it, they would have mocked" (301,324). The entire novel is about being trapped and being liberated, about being caged for infinite and just as much about freedom.

I respectfully disagree that the novel is about reading for the political or philosophical 'big picture' purpose; I think the novel is as much about believing and living each of the stories within the novel, whether it be the tale of Maestro, the day Walser was used as an anatomy lesson for the Chimps, or finding the remains (or lack thereof) of Madame Schreck. I chose to partake in the magic realism as much as look at its purpose. To me, the novel was like the realization that a child has the day he/she realizes that the imaginative is not real, yet the child chooses to believe anyways. As a child I had an incredible imagination that did not just portray a reality, but created and believed that world. However, there is a point in time when one continues to create, but fully realizes it is but an illusion. Taken as a whole, Nights at the Circus represents the awareness of reality while yet questioning what is and is not. Alternatively, the novel had a very dreamlike state, where everything seems to make sense despite the fact that in reality it doesn't make sense at all. It can even be considered to have a likeness to Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, with its plot, characters and dream state. There is a complete freedom (from time, reality, suspension/subversion of the norm), yet everything is trapped in the dream (including the narrator's voice). Anyways, I digress...

In relation to the Grotesque, I found the novel to be like standing in awe while at the same time expressing that feeling of shock or realization of the strange unpleasantness of a situation. The closest thing that comes to mind is like standing over the eternally enclosed remains of the town of Frank, Alberta where a rockslide buried the town within seconds as a mountain literally fell down. Why do people travel to visit such a place? It is the feeling of standing over the lives that were trapped eternally there, the mystery of the few survivors, the feeling of timelessness as one stands over the town's grave. And at the same time, the feeling of wonderment and awe of the power of nature and mystery of death.

Other ideas of interest:
-Disguise -- the clowns (particularly Buffo and how without his face there is just an absence or abyss), Fevver's makeup and colouring, disguising the smell of rotting animal (303); this leads to questioning what is actually real (the "inner self" or the one that "is", the one the you make yourself to be, or the one that you actually are)
-Comparison of Fevvers at the start of her story and Walser at the end -- hatching from an egg, being taken in as a helpless being to be raised a (spiritual) character of the same gender, him being given feathers to 'fly' between lower and upper worlds, he's twice the size of the wild people (as Fevvers grows to become a huge woman)
-The "perpetually recurring cycle of return" -- the theme of being trapped in death and life that is repeated over and over throughout the text, and also the repetition of 'past, present, future' (from the machine built by the fellow that keeps Mignon as a fake apparition of the dead to the idea presented relating to the Shaman and their view of time, as well as the idea that time is going faster for them as they are "running out of time"
-How everything connects together -- eg Little Ivan as the grandson of the baboushka who becomes a clown, but later we find his mother in the prison, or Jenny from the whorehouse and later the connection with Albert/Albertina (Jenny's "treasure")