Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Angelika Reichmann: Ledas and Swans in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop and Nights at the Circus
LED AS AND SWANS 51 Magic Toyshop intertexts play with the characters, in Nights at the Circus Fewers herself plays with intertextuality, probably with the hidden slogan that nothing is sacred. Parodies of postmodernist and magic realist poetics, Bakhtinian ideas and even some points in feminism are given by her —that is, she parodies practically all of the most important paradigms that seem to read her and the novel itself. She refuses and resists to be interpreted as a sign either by literary tradition itself or by literary criticism and thus, by way of analogy, undermines any attempts at reading the novel itself smoothly, without gaps and contradictions \\ it hin these paradigms. The narrative is like Fewers' body: it finally turns out that she actually does not have a navel —a centre —and the story ends at the note of her laughter, a nonverbal device. "The spiralling tornado of Fewers' laughter began to twist and shudder across the entire globe, as if a spontaneous response to the giant comedy that endlessly unfolded beneath it, until everything that lived and breathed, everywhere, was laughing" (NC 295). It might be "the big belly laugh" that certain extreme feminist ideas usually produce 111 readers according to Carter (Day 167). In Bakhtinian terms it might be the original universal medieval grotesque laughter of the carnival —a laughter that, as opposed to the totally destructive Romantic grotesque embodied by the Clowns in the novel, demolishes only in order to recreate. It might be that Fewers' case is similar to La Zambinella's elaborated in S /Z by Roland Barthes, though at this time it is not castration that is unnameable but a woman as a subject defies attempts to pinpoint her in any myth about Woman and to be read as a sign. This, however, does not mean that she does not exit. According to Hélene Cixous: It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain for this practice can never be theorised, enclosed, coded —which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system ... (Cixous 253) Thus the end note might be "the laugh of the medusa", the victorious laughter of a woman who has not only escaped patriarchal discourse, just like being encoded in the emblematic myth of Leda and the Swan, but has also rewritten it. As far as her reading is concerned, though, maybe just like a poem, Fewers—and a woman —"should not mean but be".
