Realism, Postmodernism, and Authenticity in the Contemporary Circus Novel

ABSTRACT

In the late 20th and early 21st century, European circus has become embroiled in public debates about the inclusion of live animal acts, some of which have recently been replaced with hologram alternatives. I ask what such replacements of live bodies with technically mediated one's does to the sense of risk and sensation which has always defined live circus acts and their claim to authenticity through the threat of live danger. I investigate recent revaluations (Schulze, Funk, and Vermeulen) in Theatre Studies of the concept of authenticity after postmodernism to reflect on how the complex mix of loss, assertion, and compensation in these debates can be deployed in analyzing two distinct narrative representations of the circus (Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus); the first exemplifies classic realism, the second a version of postmodernism. I ask how the texts negotiate and interrogate the ongoing problem of circus’s relationship to authenticity, where authenticity is at once an impossible imperative against which circus strives to measure itself, a condition and guarantee of its danger and immediacy, and a performative promise which disappears in the moment of its delivery.

Introduction

In the past two decades, there has been considerable critical interest in the suggestion that postmodernism’s enthusiasm for irony, cynicism, and simulation has left in its wake a renewed engagement with the overlapping concepts of the real and the authentic, though neither of these concepts emerges untouched by postmodernism’s epistemological and ontological critiques. One constant in these discussions is the identification of the paradox on which authenticity rests: that the very existence of the desire to define and present it, diminishes, or even demolishes it. As Daniel Schulze argues, “as soon as one tries to give any verbal account of authenticity, the concept collapses like a soap bubble” (Schulze 39). This impasse is troubling because authenticity has always been an important reference point for the circus and associated entertainments such as carnival; it is variously at stake in the genealogies of circus families, the provenance, technology, and performative techniques of its performers (human and animal), especially those acts which involve high risks such as aerial performances, wild animals, and knives. In this article I include analysis of wild animals as specific figures which come to symbolize what is at stake in the broader interconnections between three issues: authenticity, risk of death, and liveness. But my argument is less interested in the way these interact in live shows than in their shaping of representations of the circus in the context of modern literary fiction. Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, are analyzed for their exemplification of the ways in which postmodernism and contemporary realism (respectively) grapple with a range of manifestations of cultural and aesthetic authenticity. Both texts feature narratives that, in distinct ways, negotiate the boundaries between authenticity and sincerity on the one hand, and theatricality and performance on the other, to extend a longstanding circus.

An important and revealing context for this analysis of authenticity is the recent media publicity surrounding the German Circus Roncalli (YouTube), the French L’Ecocirque Bouglione (Igney), and the Polish Cyrk Wictoria (Konopka), each of which has addressed widespread distaste for and protests against the use of live animals in circus performances by incorporating holographic 3D shows featuring wild animals in place of real ones. The shows still produce images that involve the animals performing traditional circus tricks (a tiger leaping through fire, a bear standing on its hind legs), although L’Ecocirque and Cyrk Wictoria also feature endangered animals not usually associated with circus, such as polar bears and sting rays, to highlight their support for animal survival as well as wellbeing. These innovations, however, give rise to questions regarding the animals’ relationship to the authenticity of the circus. For example, is the deficit to authenticity caused by the absence of live animals (so long a part of circus history, right back to the very calculation of the optimal measurement of the standard circus ring) fully compensated by their virtual inclusion in such an obviously aestheticized and spectacular mode? Is the ecological sincerity of the substitution not then unbalanced by the potential discomfort of seeing the animals still engaged in traditional and/or authentic circus acts which perpetuate the presumption human domination of the natural world in all its forms?

These questions provoked by contemporary circus holographic shows, in their strategic bypassing of the ethical and material challenges involved in contemporary live animal exhibition, are partially addressed in Sherry Turkle’s account of her family visit to the Darwin exhibition at the New York Natural History Museum in 2005. The museum had imported live turtles from the Galápagos Islands, presumably at considerable ongoing expense, to provide publicity that “put authenticity front and center” of its event. Yet her teenage daughter’s response, “unmoved by its authenticity,” is to suggest that they would have been better simply to commission robot versions of the animals because these could be programmed to be more dynamic and, as another visitor suggests, without the “aesthetic inconvenience” of dirty water (Turkle 3/4). For her and other child visitors “the original had no place” and indeed was a less exciting and more inconvenient manifestation, leading Turkle to conclude that “in our culture of simulation, the notion of authenticity is for us what sex was for the Victorians – threat and obsession, taboo and fascination” (Turkle 4). It is important to note, however, that there is a big difference between the expectations of spectators attending a Natural History Museum exhibition and those who attend a circus; they are defined respectively by an expectation of deadness and liveness in their exhibits. Indeed, the threats, taboos, and fascination to which she refers have always been at the heart of the circus and are frequently allied to associations with sexualized performance allied with the threat of death. But the incident is instructive here for the way it flags up a powerful tension between the circus and a “culture of simulation” which, with its aesthetic sterility, banishes the messy, odorous, unethical, and dangerous aspects of live performance in the circus, all of which constitute a large part of its audience appeal as well as a sense of historical continuity and authenticity.

These questions about authenticity, historical continuity, and animal performance are central to my central analysis of the ways in which the concept of authenticity has shaped the circus in terms of its development as a distinct art form and has defined its relationship to other forms of representation – primarily, for the purposes of this argument, narrative forms in cinema and literature. I want to ask if there is a distinctive aesthetics of circus authenticity and, if there is, what the relationship might be between that articulation of authenticity in live performance and related genres of circus representational narrative. I have discussed elsewhere the defining connection in circus between liveness and the threat of death, the special intensity of a live performance over which hangs the immediate and real risk of injury or death, something which is unique to the circus and which leaves its mark in narrative representations of it in the form of gaps, absences, or withdrawals (Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation). Precisely because circus in its live form is so intensely and dangerously defined by its live risks, it effects a hyper-intensification of the “now” of its present in which each moment is defined by a highly charged balance of exceptionalism and catastrophe, situated between an apparent ability to defy the gravitational laws of time and a risk of being utterly defeated by them. The question of circus authenticity and its existence as a threatening live encounter are therefore mutually dependent. The defining twist, however, is that inauthenticity, manufacture, simulation, and fakery, are also everywhere in its history and a compelling dimension of its fascination to spectators (which P.T. Barnum discovered and which Carter delights in throughout Nights at the Circus), even while this inauthenticity is also corrosive to the immersive immediacy of circus performance. At stake is a human confrontation with the material and physical dangers of nature in all the forms that this can take: wild animals, fire, water, gravity, weapons, machinery. Yet artfulness as well as strength and skill combine to tackle these dangers. As part of this investigation, I ask whether circus-trained wild animals have any special symbolic role in such representations by virtue of their status as embodiments of an immediately recognizable threat to human life, and whether this inevitably more closely ties them into the representational aesthetics of death, loss, and withdrawal outlined above.

Authenticity and Loss

Before attending to the mapping of these questions to Gruen and Carter’s novels, I want briefly to identify how debates about the concept of authenticity in the wake of postmodernism complicate and potentially jeopardize the possibility of the sort of authenticity derived from endangered presence outlined above. As Charles Taylor has pointed out, “authenticity is something relatively new and peculiar to modern culture” which, like the circus, has its roots “at the end of the eighteenth century” and builds on earlier forms of individualism’ (Taylor 25). In nineteenth-century art, Trilling identifies that the role of art is to restore an authenticity which is otherwise being lost in daily life. Art, which has “the right to embody painful, ignoble, or socially unacceptable subject matters” is thus able to confront us with “our inauthenticity and adjures us to overcome it” (Trilling 100). The sense that authenticity is always involved in the work of restoration or compensation is underlined by Wolfgang Funk who observes that “feelings of loss turn(s) out to be a recurring theme through all discourses on authenticity” (Funk 24). The cause is the fundamental misalignment in the modern subject between the inner (or private and individual) and outer (or public) world in which, from the eighteenth century onwards, Western civilization is no longer bound by the same universal values. In wake of the combined after effects of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, Daniel Schulze argues that authenticity constitutes an “almost desperate struggle and search for human connection and for something that is felt to be genuine and lasting” (Schulze xiii), an anchoring in a “real” or original self in which art trains us to strive.

Yet Schulze and Funk have both noted that not only does the sense of loss which attends to this perpetual striving toward an ideal of authenticity become more obvious in twentieth century art and culture, in the late-twentieth century “the de-centered self of Postmodernism” no longer holds that “there is no one true instance of the self,” indeed “there is no longer any sort of core to be true to” (Schulze 25). Thus, for Schulz, “the concept of authenticity instead becomes a sort of fetish in a society without reference points. It is marketed and advertised and … . becomes a commodity” (Schulze 28), a self-defining exemplification of authenticity without any expectation of origins. But he also points out that this permits the postmodern subject to keep manufacturing art and identities based on nostalgic stylizations, a concept familiar from both Jameson’s thesis on postmodern nostalgia (Jameson) and Baudrillard’s simulacra or hyperreal (Baudrillard) for which there is no original point of reference. Authenticity in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, therefore, underwritten by an ever-deferred original, takes on a purely performative function which resonates beyond the individual to become solidified in various recognizable forms of art, culture, theory, and social practice. Even while accepting this necessarily performative dimension to authenticity in the twenty-first century, Schulze observes a kind of backlash to postmodernism’s conception of empty performativity, shallowness, and simulation, one that results in an “almost desperate struggle and search for human connection and for something that is felt to be genuine and lasting” (Schulze xiii). The result is an appetite for “genuine experience, or some sort of reality that is not perceived as not fake – in a word: authentic” (Schulze 8), even if, as Glenn and Gross equally acknowledge, in the wake of postmodernism the resulting authenticity must be created in highly curated, performative forms (Glenn) (Gross). As such, this work in theater studies directly speaks of the influence of the “new sincerity” turn in literature, film, and music in the 1990s and specifically David Foster Wallace’s now famous essay, “E Unibus Pluram” (Foster Wallace). For Wallace, mass culture such as television and advertising have increasingly absorbed and exhausted the “hip irony” and self-reflexiveness that were the hallmarks of high postmodernism. In its wake, he predicts, literary fiction’s “next real rebels” may look “(t)oo sincere” as “they eschew self-consciousness and fatigue” (Foster Wallace 181, 193). More recently, the politicization of the concept of “fake” in political and popular culture in the wake of Trump’s election as President in 2016 has further intensified the reexamination and desire to recuperate a concept of authenticity which can withstand the apparent ubiquity of the fake identified by populist conspiracists.

For Schulze, however, it is only the situation of live theatrical performance that provides the grounds for a possible exception to the culture of empty performativity and to the perpetual need to acknowledge the loss of the real. The live conditions of the theater allow for connections between performer and audience that may be experienced as “authentic and true” (Schulze 5), if only in the form of a “fleeting” moment. Crucially, however, what he describes is the opposite of postmodernism’s perpetually deferred real; instead, it is one fated to be immediately lost in the moment of its encounter, passing in the instant of the experience like a popping bubble. The transience of this experience contributes significantly to its intensification precisely because the pleasure of feeling of the connection to life is a “fleeting pleasure that is only available and alive in the moment” (Schulze 5). Elsewhere, Hendrikx and Cueto also assert that authenticity can be “performed and requires an audience” and in the post-digital age becomes a “process that can be purchased and enacted” (Hendrikx 12), while Vermeulen argues that subjective narration of the world is all we have after the death of the “school of realism” and “objective or universal access to reality” or any transcendental truths on the world (Vermeulen). Like Schulz, Vermeulen links authenticity to a kind of physical, emotional experience which is both emotional and connected to performance: ‘the performance of emotional resonances transduces discourse from global relationscapes to the most intimate networks to a point, a position that only your distinct corporeality can inhabit at that very moment (Vermeulen 23). These various contemporary interventions into the conceptualization of authenticity point to a reevaluation which, as Vermeulen concludes, may not reverse the postmodern and poststructuralist critique of language and representation as a grounding of “life as it’s really lived,” but nonetheless champion the potential for performance to become “an act of grounding” in which the direct, local, and intimate physical transmission of feeling comes to stand for authenticity, however fleeting.

These recent debates highlight a contemporary shift away from postmodernism’s shunning of the concept and possibility of authenticity and point directly to the twin theatrical assets of the circus. Firstly; it less frequently purports to offer any secondary level representation of life through drama, character, and narrative; secondly, and most importantly, the liveness of the “moment” in circus, as noted above is often significantly more freighted with the intensity of the real because life itself is frequently at stake, or at least appears to be at stake, in its acrobatic, high wire, wild animal, knife-throwing, and other acts. The terms of the stakes of authenticity, therefore, continue to be high both for live circus shows and their representation and perception more broadly. The consistent bond between circus and live, life-threatening performance helps it navigate the turmoil of postmodernism’s cynicism and sense of perpetual loss even while it is simultaneously confronted with an insurmountable ethical crisis which has led to the removal of most of the wild animal performances which had previously acted as one of the guarantors of its uniquely intense form of live authenticity.

As Peta Tait has pointed out, wild animals and the threat they pose to human life, both in the process of training and in circus acts themselves, have been a key component in defining and heightening the danger and authenticity of liveness in the circus. For her, it is in the scene of training itself where the “sensory responses of humans and animals converged … where each species was being conditioned by the other” (Tait 186), thus in some ways extracting the human out of their cerebral and civilized nature into a more instinctive kind of existence of the sort identified above by Trilling in his examination of the role of nineteenth century art. But Tait also identifies the key role of advertising and journalism in the twentieth century in promoting “the ideas of danger that led to the anticipation of risks taken by a human in close proximity to animals” (Tait 187). In the reporting of serious attacks such “promotion downplayed actual risks and at the same time delivered a heightened idea of danger, which could be thrilling because the spectators were not physically implicated” (Tait 187). Such careful marketing of the availability of immediate but vicarious danger allow circus acts to “induce sensations and viscerality – this experience of liveness achieved through visible action becomes equated with feelings of aliveness – and that these sensations explain in part the appeal of bodily-based performances” (Tait 192). In the circus, therefore, although many different acts involve visceral danger, wild animal acts have historically occupied a unique role in their capacity to engender a specific theatrical experience of performative and embodied liveness, the liveness of the theatrical moment simultaneously amplified by its proximity to imperilment and death and validated by the authenticity lent by the apparent immediacy and immersion of the spectator in that moment.

It is this complex mixture of loss, assertion, and compensation which attends and indeed is sometimes actively explored in narrative representations of the circus where there is the additional complication of the loss of liveness which, as I indicate above, acts as such a crucial intensifying and authenticating dimension of circus aesthetics. In the next section, I explore two very different modern literary texts – one which exemplifies classic realism, the second a version of postmodernism – to ask how the texts negotiate and interrogate the ongoing problem of circus’s relationship to authenticity, where authenticity is at once an impossible imperative against which circus strives to measure itself, a condition and guarantee of its danger and immediacy, and a performative promise which disappears in the moment of its delivery. If, as Vermeulen claims, the immediate conditions of presence in performance make it “an act of grounding” even, paradoxically, when the act involves aerialists, then what revisions to the terms of this understanding of authenticity are required in the context of literary representations which are devoid of any embodied presence?

Authenticity in the Contemporary Novel

As I have argued elsewhere (Stoddart, 370–86), many recent examples of realist novels which depict the circus are marked both by a historical perspective and, connected to this, conspicuous evidence of authenticating archival research, even occasionally emersion in circus practice. Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants (2009) is consistent with this genre; it not only presents a range of photographs throughout her text from personal (Ken Harck, Fred D. Pfening Jr., Timothy Tegge) and public archives (Ringling Circus Museum), but also describes in an Author’s Note at the end of the book the extensive process of research “over four and a half months” needed to acquire the “knowledge necessary to do justice to this subject,” which included several trips to the Circus Museum in Baraboo and to the Kansas City Zoo to learn about “Elephant body language and behavior” (Gruen 333). She goes on to acknowledge that she “plucked many of this story’s most outrageous details from fact or anecdote (in circus history the line between the two is famously blurred)” taken from her various sources including … funeral parade, most of the details of Rosie’s narrative and the Jamaica ginger paralysis through which Camel meets his fate (Gruen 333–334). Gruen’s, and other adventure novels about the circus, include close attention to historical detail to lend representational credibility and authenticity to fictional accounts of a lived social reality which are replete with often specialist or esoteric detail and vernacular. Yet, as Gruen indicates, in the context of the circus, such legitimacy is always peculiarly reliant on exaggerated or bogus narratives and contrived identities because the latter are the very stuff – the social and historical reality – of the documents and photographs held by the archives in which the circus is both recorded and, in these recordings, performs itself. The particular dimensions of the realism of these novels, therefore, is heavily circumscribed by the realities of circus history which are not so much contested as swallowed up by the endemic and historic desire among many circus practitioners from Astley onwards to fictionalize, exaggerate, and “flim flam” in a way that perpetually frustrates the earnest historian’s desire to anchor their narratives in “those public sources that are the most reliable” (Wilmeth 355), and which confirms the paradox of realist novels engaging in the depiction an entertainment so heavily invested in the concept of illusion. As August, one of the novel’s central characters says, ’It’s what the people want from us. It’s what they expect’ (Gruen 104).

Authenticity is an essentially retrospective concept in structure which attributes value according to degrees of connection back to an act, practice, or artifact claimed as original. Nathaniel Lewis elaborates on this by pointing out that it “is often freighted with the burden of the golden past, a nostalgia for an earlier age that seems, in retrospect, more real” (Lewis 5); its by-product may often be an overinvestment in a past to contrast it to an apparently more selfish or less exciting contemporary. Both characterizations of authenticity (of proof of validity and of overinvestment as the past as more “real”) inform Gruen’s novel which takes its title from Jacob’s feud with McGuinty, a fellow inhabitant of the old peoples’ home he inhabits. For Jacob’s co-occupants of the home, the circus is a place which gives rise to nostalgia about both a form of circus and childhood that no longer exist, but which nonetheless induces in them a level of excitement and vivacity which is missing from their current lives, dominated as they are by “the monotony of bingo and singalongs and ancient dusty people parked in the hallway in wheelchairs” (Gruen 13). When they catch sight of the circus “old ladies chatter like schoolgirls;” one asks if the others “remember when the circus traveled by train,” a question that gives rise to the following exchange:

My father used to take us down to the tracks to watch them unload. Gosh, that was something to see. And then the parade! And the smell of peanuts roasting! –

And Cracker Jack!

And candy apples, and ice cream, and lemonade!

And the sawdust! It would get in your nose!

I used to carry water for elephants. Says McGuinty.

Jacob is infuriated by this claim, angrily telling McGuinty that he “did not” and despite McGuinty’s further insistence that he did, continues:

Listen pal,’ I say. ‘For decades I’ve heard old coots like you talking about carrying water for elephants and I’m telling you now, it never happened … … . Carried water for the elephants indeed. Have you any idea how much an elephant drinks?. (Gruen 10)

Over the years, the claim about water for elephants has become a failsafe proof which has allowed Jacob to call out men who are faking their connection to the circus. It is one that the novel returns to several times with Jacob later becoming outraged that McGuinty “told someone who worked for the circus that he used to carry water for the elephants, and they upgraded his ticket to a ringside seat. Incredible!” (Gruen 176) while Jacob has been refused entry. Within the flashback narrative of Jacob’s life in the circus, one of the circus crew ridicules Jacob as he tries to get work with the circus with the question: “You want to carry water for elephants I suppose?” (Gruen 67). Thus, for Jacob, and anyone who has genuinely spent time inside the circus, a person who either expresses a desire to carry water for the elephants or claims to have a memory of doing so immediately betrays their inauthenticity and their status as an outsider in relation to a world which is bound up in practices, understanding, and a linguistic idiom which are thereby marked as exclusive and hard to access. Lewis (in the context of a study of American Western narratives) picks up on this characteristically “elusive” quality of authenticity which, he argues, is most frequently imagined or located somewhere, or in someone, as a quality or set of qualities now missing from mainstream American contemporary culture (Lewis 5). He also points out that, as noted above, postmodernism has thoroughly undermined such terms as authenticity when used to describe people or ways of life, arguing that they “are themselves self-validating cultural markers, promoting not the true, the self, the real or the natural, but, rather, ideologically infused discourses and delusions” (Lewis 6). In this light Jacob, in attempting to subject McGuinty to the exclusion he experienced, is merely perpetuating the circus’s own myths and delusions about the special access to authenticity granted to its insider/participants a mythology. McGuinty and the “old ladies” recall a sweet (literally) version of the circus which it sells to outsiders along with its candy apples. The promise of Jacob’s narrative is that it will open up a rare access to a world beyond these clichés which is the product of “real” experience and knowledge.

Judith Shklar identifies connections between authenticity and circus in the way that the latter makes explicit the Romantic association between childhood and an “original,” now lost, self (Shklar 75). Circus has always had a special connection to childhood and family life; it is an entertainment whose core identity has been linked historically with the indulgence of unmediated and elementary responses (laughter, fear, and awe) and with family attendance. As Lindholm asserts, this “association of authenticity with familial intimacy, spontaneous emotional expressivity, and the overturning of all forms of pretense” (Lindholm 6) is itself a product of industrial modernity wherein alienation from self in the workplace became a given. Thus, as a mode of entertainment born of this period of industrialization, the circus presents as a strange outlet for desires otherwise suppressed or censored within modern civilization, a sign of which is the fascination within circus acts for practices, animals, or people from “primitive” societies. For Orvell, this “tension between imitation and authenticity is a primary category in American culture” (Orvell xv) and explains why the circus as a trope in much American art and culture has become such a complex marker of authenticity, grappling as it does with a perpetually elusive self and culture, lost to modernity, adulthood, reproduction, and commodification, even while the reality of the circus industry is simultaneously enthralled to all of these.

Yet Water for Elephants also pulls at the safeguards placed around Jacob’s authenticity and that of the circus as a whole. There is always a sense, for example, that, despite being the novel’s guarantor of authenticity, Jacob is perpetually struggling to be accepted by a generally hostile and defensive workforce, a situation accentuated by the context of depression era America in which all resources are scarce, especially jobs. Jacob’s legitimacy as a vet is questioned when he leaves Cornell on the eve of his final examinations after the sudden death of his parents in a car crash. But at the circus, August merely dismisses Jacob’s missing certificate of qualification as “just a piece of paper, and nobody here gives a damn about that,” because circus workers distinguish positively between authenticity and legitimacy, strongly in favor of the former. In a more complex example, Joseph further exemplifies the importance of a flexible rather than an essentialising approach to authenticity in his contrast to Uncle Al, the circus owner. Al fetishes authenticity in his acts, searching out “Not made freaks: not men covered from head to toe in tattoos” but “real freaks … Born freaks” (Gruen 78). He travels to Joliet to buy these “freaks,” but instead buys Rosie the elephant, in the belief that all “real” circuses must have one. In fact, she proves to be the catalyst for the final demise of both Al and his circus and is thus an important symbol of the way the pursuit authenticity is impossible, indeed can be fatal. The twist in the narrative, however, is that having purchased this defining act, no one, especially not August the animal trainer, can make themselves understood to her sufficiently to train her to perform in the circus. Only Jacob, initially the circus outsider but a native Polish speaker, discovers accidentally that Rosie has been trained exclusively in Polish and thus is able to unlock her potential as a performer.

Jacob’s narrative is structured in a way that begs many questions about the desires which underlie it; some of these questions emerge from an examination of the use of tense in the novel. One of the novel’s oddities is that, although it is overtly framed as the backwards orientated circus reminiscences of “one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless tchotchke” (Gruen 13), it is overwhelmingly narrated in the present tense, with the only episode in the past tense being its brief prologue. It narrates a vivid, violent, and transformative episode in both Jacob’s life and the history of the Benzini Brother Circus in which all the animals escape from the menagerie and Rosie the elephant drives a stake through the head of her violent trainer, August. The implications of the episode remain enigmatic until the scene is replayed toward the end of the novel, this time in the present tense and with the benefit of the preceding contextualizing narrative. Again, this structural twist illustrates the point that no one who merely attends a circus can fully understand what they see – can anticipate the risks, detect the hidden desires, or appreciate the sacrifices involved in putting on a circus show. As the Disaster March starts up (a clear signal within the circus that “something’s gone bad”) the “poor rubes” sit in their seats unaware (Gruen 2). It is not until the scene is replayed at the end of the novel (with significant overlaps – even direct quotations – but also differences) that that the dangerous and abusive dynamic between Marlena and her husband August, and between him and the elephant Rosie, is understood. Only then is it revealed that the female and male pronouns in the sentence “She lifted the stake high in the air and brought it down, splitting his head like a watermelon” refer to Rosie (not Marlena) and August, thus providing the central narrative enigma of the novel (Gruen 4). But the relationship between the prologue and its later replay in the present tense also opens out questions about the terms of the novel’s realism, specifically the plausibility and authenticity its depiction of the past. If, as a first-person narrator, Jacob is the source of all the memories, it is strikingly odd that his narration is not able to explain the difference between the first account of the stampede and the second. In the first account he claims that he “nearly called out in relief” when he saw Marlena, or “maybe I did. I don’t remember” (Gruen 3). Why is this memory marked by an acknowledged failure of memory, but the rest of the narrative isn’t? When Jacob gets to the end of his story and is engaged in conversation with Charlie, the present day circus manager, he declares, “Hell, I remember it better than yesterday” and declares him a “piece of living history” (Gruen 324/5). Why are both his present and his past life so insistently narrated in the same present tense as though they were equal? Why does he reveal at the very end of the narrative (instead of the beginning) that he tells Charlie the whole story in a process of “absolution”? (Gruen 327). How can the past be summoned to vividly in the present tense when, as Jacob says, it’s not so much that he has forgotten “It’s more like I’ve stopped keeping track” in the uninterrupted tedium of a present where there’s no difference between “three weeks or there years or even three decades of mushy peas, tapioca and Depends undergarments” (Gruen 5). It is fundamentally inauthentic within the terms of realism to be able to present the narrative in such painstaking realist detail. Are the drugs he is forced to take to adjust his aggressive behavior following the McGuinty outburst the implied source of his renewed ability to trawl the memories of his deep past in such vivid, present tense detail? No such realist explanations are offered by the text which means that the narrative supports an imperfect conceit: on the one hand there is the faulty memory of an old man and his dreams/nightmares in a nursing home, and on the other is the present reality of the circus which the novel is magically accessing. Thus, these fissures in the plausibility of the present tense narration of the novel are markers of the labor involved in the novel’s determination to depict an authentic past for the American circus. But it is this very labor and the questions that it gives rise to that confirm and reveal the work of desire in the novel: a desire for an elusive past through a narrator who possesses only temporary and highly contestable access.

Angela Carter’s novel also interrogates the concept of authenticity and origins but, whereas literary realism is at stake in Water for Elephants, Nights at the Circus asks questions about authenticity that are more, though not entirely, consistent with the postmodernism of the 1980s fiction. Several central figures in the novel, the heroine Fevvers, her companion and eventual husband Walser, a troupe of “white-face clowns” (Carter 99) and a group of tigers, serve as the focal points for an investigation of a set of overlapping ontological questions about identity, origins, and authenticity: was Fevvers hatched or born? Are her wings real? Do identities have origins in an original “self,” or are they only ever the product of performative acts, masks which are either consciously adorned or discursively constituted? Can fact and fiction be truly distinguished? How can we distinguish between illusion, image, performance, and reality? My focus here will be the tigers, the “great cats” (Carter 106) of Colonel Kearney’s Imperial Circus because, although all the figures above perform a kind of dance within different sections of the narrative with the threat of their own disintegration, it is the tigers above all who are figures for the threat of disintegration, annihilation, and death. In this respect, the tigers telescope into one act so many aspects of the defining aesthetics of live circus discussed above; their act combines both mesmerizing beauty with the threat, indeed the real possibility of death, thus intensifying the experience of the live moment in a way which is rarely available in other forms of art and entertainment.

The tigers first appear in section two of the novel, one in which the loose adherence to realism of the first section has begun to teeter (“that authentic history to which this narrative – as must now be obvious! – does not belong” (Carter 97), before its wholesale implosion in section three. The tiger’s role in this section, therefore, is as one of the actors in a caricature of nineteenth-century melodrama which revolves around the operatically named and correspondingly vulnerable Mignon, the Strong Man (her violent abuser), Walser a naïve American journalist who has just entered an apprenticeship to be a clown, and a tigress. As various circus performers rehearse their acts during the day, accompanied by the distant “vague roaring of the great cats” (Carter 109), the sound rises to a sudden and “immense fugue of roaring,” followed by “a fearful shout:/TIGER OUT! TIGER OUT!” (Carter 111) as an escaped tigress runs into the ring in pursuit of Sybil, the circus owner’s pig, but picks up Mignon’s more appetizing scent and diverts his carnivorous chase in her direction. Absurdly, Walser, instinctively compelled by valor, but dressed as a clown, “let(s) rip a tremendous, wordless war cry: here comes the Clown to kill the Tiger!” (Carter 112) and would certainly have been ripped to shreds along with Mignon had the tigress’s trainer, the Princess of Abyssinia, not intervened with the water jet from a powerful hosepipe. Here the melodramatic logic of Walser’s bid to save the innocent Mignon from the twin evils of her abuser and her death by carnivore is diverted by Carter’s characteristic remodeling of fairy tale tropes wherein the agency of the Princess saves Mignon rather than her would-be male protector. Even within the realist terms of this scene, however, the terms of the description of the tigress hint at something unnaturally powerful in her embodiment as she emerges from a corridor “like orange quicksilver, or a rarer liquid metal, a quickgold” and powers forward with a “flow” like “a questing sluice of brown and yellow, a hot and molten death” (Carter 111). The tigress’s body is already a magical melding of flesh and molten metal, at once dangerous, beautiful, and impossible (“orange quicksilver”), paradoxically communicating both an overwhelmingly intense and threatening presence as well as a poetic and deeply aestheticized otherworldliness.

Nights at the Circus is above all a novel about the role of performance in the habitation of female identity, so it is appropriate not only that the tiger in this drama is female (“Female of the species. Deadlier than the male and all that” (Carter 113/4), but also that, in performance, the tigers have their most revealing interactions through ocular confrontations with Mignon and the Princess, as well as Walser. Like Fevvers (the novel’s central character), the Princess is surrounded and constructed by the Colonel’s fake mythology about her; her mysterious Abyssinian heritage only remains so because she chooses not to speak; her true, less Romantic history, is only revealed by the narrative voice. She is likewise trapped by the double inheritance of her Bechstein piano (from her mother) and the tigers (her father), which together constitute both her living and her cage. The Princess’s tigers contemplate that “they did not obey in freedom but had exchanged one cage for a larger cage” (Carter 148) and exact a “price” from the Princess in the form of a skin “scarred with clawmarks, as if tattooed” (Carter 149). In this sense they both symbolize something of all the females in this section of the novel who willingly consent to perpetuate the bodily performances that entrap them. Mignon is teamed up with the Princess to learn how to perform The Tiger’s Bride, a circus version of Beauty and the Beast that is also an intertextual reference to Carter’s short story of the same name (Carter). To Mignon, the tigers symbolize only the living death which is her own empty existence: “for it was all in a day’s work to her, pretending to be dead or dancing with the fearful living” (Carter 163). But for the Princess, the tigers offer something almost exactly the opposite as she turns her “speaking eyes away from them” (Carter 149); no longer held by the tiger’s gaze she is at once at her most vulnerable and, although “scared,” also “more fully human than she was used to feeling” (Carter 149). Precisely at the point where she feels their threat the most intensely and mentally reassures herself of the presence of her loaded gun on the piano top, she is provoked by the encounter to a comprehension, albeit fleetingly, of a previously absent sense of her own being. The phrase “fully human,” followed by an accompanying desire for “an accomplice,” “somebody she trusted” (Carter, 1986, p.149), is important for the way it underlines not an exclusively individual being, but a broader affirmation of her connectedness to a humanity which the threat of the tigers crystallizes: not an authentic self so much as a distinctive humanity.

The complexity of the human/wild animal relationship is confirmed shortly afterward when the jealous tigress sheds “a huge amber tear” after Mignon kisses her partner “on his plush forehead” (Carter 163). Although this tear appears to anthropomorphize the tigress, Walser remembers “that’s the cat that tried to eat me” (Carter 164), and when he looks “into the tiger’s depthless, jeweled eyes, he saw reflected there the entire alien essence of a world of fur, sinew and grace in which he was the clumsy interloper” (Carter 164). The romance is interrupted, therefore, by an abrupt reminder of the profound physical and spiritual disconnection between a human identity seeking self-affirmation and an “alien essence” driven by physical appetite. Yet despite this apparent antipathy between physical existence and appetite, the tigers’ physical performance takes on further metaphoric force through the musical dance they perform in their cage, one which, in its frenetic and mesmerizing combination of music, movement, danger, and dizzying beauty, encapsulates so much about the aesthetics of the circus as a whole. The tigers are contained in a circular cage inside a ring, the bars of which form “one single blurred bar” as they speed around inside “until that single bar itself dissolved” (Carter 164). Their “confinement” is “apprehended but no longer felt” because “all that remained was the limitless landscape of the music within which, while the dance lasted, they lived in perfect harmony” (Carter 165). Not only are they distracted from the reality of their own confinement through performance, but the spectators are “all drawn to the amazing spectacle, all succumbed to it” (Carter 165). Again, however, the emphasis is on the temporary nature of the absorption through the immediacy of the spectacle as the act comes to an “(a)bruptly discontinuous” halt and “the enchantment was over” (Carter 165). Indeed a few pages later the Princess shoots the tigress who has tried to attack Mignon for dancing with Walser “her escort” (Carter 179). The Tigress’s body in these different moments of the drama has come to symbolize the power of bodily performance to construct an embodied illusion of escape from confinement, to authenticate that illusion for its spectators through a mesmerizing (aurally and visually) spectacle, one which is emphatically enhanced by the danger to humans the cats represent. Equally present, however, is the loss which accompanies the inevitable, and in this case bloody, destruction of both the performer and the performance as the tigress’s corpse comes to symbolize the “fugue of failure” (Carter 202) of the circus’s last night in St Petersburg.

In the third and final “Siberian” section of the novel this sense of loss becomes more profound and ontological as the connections between the various characters and their collapsing sense of self is explored through the material falling apart of Kearney’s Circus and the corresponding physical and existential crisis experienced by all its performers. Human and animal performers (though especially the females) are all shown to be caught up in the performance of identities which are also cages. To begin with, they are comfortably housed in the salon carriage of the train, surrounded by plush armchairs and multiple mirrors “that took up their stripes and multiplied them” (Carter 202), but when the train crashes Fevvers describes how “among the ruins” she discovers the “great wonder” of the tigers who had all “gone into the mirrors” (Carter 205). The “blood or sinew” which had been the basis of their “alien” and distinctive power is now “nothing;” they have been reduced to mere images in the form of “pile upon pile of broken shards of mirror,” “frozen in their own reflections” where they have “been breeding sterile reduplications” (Carter 206). Finally, they are destroyed by their own visual power in the form of “a thousand jagged discontinuations” (Carter 203/4). Like Buffo the clown, whose identity is entirely dependent on the face he paints for his performance (“And what am I without my Buffo’s face? Why nobody at all” (Carter 121)), the tigers represent an important warning to Fevvers not to expect to find freedom through performed images of herself which have been conceived during imprisonment. As such, the novel, though it performs many postmodernist narrative turns, confounds the sort of postmodernist approach to identity described above by Schulz and the ubiquitous and stylish ironies revealed by Foster Wallace. Its feminism is more materialist than poststructuralist because it critiques the purely performative tigers and clowns and stages the derailing of Fevvers away from the ’gilded cage’ of her act toward an exploration of the “confidence” (Carter 295) of her selfhood and agency.

But the tigers, unlike the clowns, leave behind a supplemental energy which cannot be completely detonated by the fracturing of the mirrors in which they are subsumed.

Although they can never return to their original selves, their disappearance simultaneously generates a “burning energy” in which “their pelts had convulsed” and “scattered their appearances upon that glass” so that when Fevvers tries to pick a piece up it burns her fingers (Carter 206). A trace of something wild, therefore, remains in the spectacle of the tigers’ destruction, unlike the elephants who “smashed their way easily out of confinement” but only to form “up in a line, good as gold” (Carter 207), unable to truly escape their subservience to their human masters. Later, Fevvers and the other survivors of the circus crash find themselves in the presence of an escaped convict, a man whose existence, like Fevvers,’ is directed “to the coming century” and to “the concentrated essence of all the good things of that ideal ‘tomorrow’”(Carter 239). In this space in which the present moment is suspended, existence as well as chronological time is displaced as new tigers appear on the roof of the house. Crucially, they are both “(a)uthentic” and yet imagined; they are the ideal and highly poetic, aestheticized tigers of Blake’s poem who are “fearfully symmetric tigers burning as brightly as those who had been lost” (Carter 249). Their authenticity, therefore, is derived precisely from the fact that they exist beyond civilization, living without “confinement or coercion” (Carter 249). As such they become figures for identity formed out with western order, without patriarchy, and driven by a self-determined agency which allows them to “make up their own dances” accompanied by a “new kind of music to which they will dance of their own free will” (Carter 250). Paradoxically, therefore, it is a representation of tigers (not tigers reduced to representation) that communicates the impossibly “authentic” tiger, impossible because it exists only in the imaginary and fantastical space of a double deferment (out of the realism of bodily existence into art/poetry/image/illusion and out of the present into a deferred ideal future). But this highly aestheticized and deferred concept of the authentic points beyond the confinement from which no confident selfhood can emerge.

Conclusions

To encounter the tigers (or any wild animal) in the ring is to face one’s mortal vulnerability, to be enlivened by the proximity of the death they threaten, and to experience the direct transmission of powerful feeling which, as Vermeulen claims, stands in briefly for authenticity, even while the safeguards of the circus offset these dangerous thrills with the skills of the animal trainers and necessary safety protocols required by any performance license. The power of this brief thrilling transmission, however, is circumscribed by both the aesthetic of spectacle through which it is transmitted (its artificial conditions) and the necessarily fleeting (and in Carter’s case deferred) nature of the moment in which it is delivered. Just as the intensity of the live moment is often produced by the proximity of the threat of death; therefore, anticipation of the fulfillment of authenticity is underwritten by its simultaneous and inevitable loss. The contemporary hologram images of circus animals accentuate the aesthetic beauty of the animals, adding color, light, and technical accomplishment to balance out the loss of physical and sensual presence and removing the accompanying intensity of the danger to life. Unlike live animal shows, Roncalli and others also have the advantage of replay, of performances which can be performed in exactly the same way, night after night. Yet the holograms conjure a double melancholy; the melancholy of being because, unlike Carter’s tigers, the movement of the animals is not authentic to them; they still perform in the language of (human) circus, and their spectacular technical embodiments have been emptied of the sensual and risky intensity of the “now” of the live moment.

The elaborate commitment to verisimilitude evident in the Roncalli circus holographs is reflected in Gruen novel which is characterized by a narrative realism that labors to produce and prove the concept of authenticity through narration, evidence, and persuasion. Yet as such the elephants are barely present as embodied animals or (with one notable exception) theatrical center pieces – rather they are background figures in a narrative about human identity which finally illustrates the central Romantic contradictions about authenticity around which the novel circulates: that the more detailed and elaborate the labors of literary realism, the more profound the sense of loss that attends its distance from the present and from the text which searches from it. By contrast, Carter’s novel turns its back, quite determinedly, on a journey toward a lost, authentic past, though the future it anticipates is equally inaccessible. It narrates a journey through its three-ringed narrative which moves from literary realism, in which its caged wild cats provide a striking metaphor for the patriarchal imprisonment of various female characters, toward a more postmodern and self-reflective narrative mode in which the dangerous performative energy of the tigers no longer presents a threat to the human performers or spectators. Instead, Carter’s literary tigers offer an imaginary possibility of a pre-civilized, identity formed apart from the constraints of capitalism and patriarchy and, as such, they embody something of the performative and imaginative promise of the circus as a whole. They at least offer a theatrical commitment to the beautiful trace of the live moment of performance and voice a consolatory but colorful indifference to, and indeed suspension of, the melancholy losses inherent in literary narrative.

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Helen Stoddart

Helen Stoddart is a senior lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Glasgow University. She is the author of Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester U.P., 2000) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (Routledge, 2009) and is Co-editor of The Crooked Dividend: Essays on Muriel Spark (Association for Scottish Literature, 2022).