H E L E N S TO D DA RT 109 Beginning with the claim that the popular infiltrates the novel’s thematic concerns, prose texture and narrative structure, the chapter proceeds by examining the ongoing dialogue it sets up between the comic exhilaration of its popular influences and figures (most specifically the clowns) and the philosophical and critical discourses that function to qualify, distance or critique the limitations of what seem only to be easy or inconsequential pleasures The pleasures and social and political implications of spectacle are crucial to this analysis Where other critics have tended to ignore or underestimate the character of Walser, here both Fewers and Walser are examined in terms of their contrary but connected relationships to popular spectacle Historically, Fevvers is more linked to nineteenth-century entertainments such as circus and music hall, whereas Walser’s fragmentary, kaleidoscopic and constantly shifting perception aligns him to the new visual pleasures of the twentieth century such as cinema and photography For both, however, their relationship to spectacle becomes potentially fatal: for Fevvers because she has become excessively absorbed in the spectacle of herself she sells on stage and for Walser because he is in danger of substituting his experience of external spectacles, such as Fevvers, for his own sense of an accumulated experience of the world The treatment of the clowns in Nights at the Circus also feature heavily here, both for the way in which they lie at the heart of Carter’s resistance in the novel to the political possibilities of the carnival and for the way they distinguish her mobilization of popular culture from that of the ‘high modernists’ such as T S Eliot (1888–1965) and W B Yeats (1865–1939) Whereas Carter confines her portrait of futility and self-destruction to the clowns, their references to the poetry of Yeats and Eliot pinpoint a misanthropy and sense of hopelessness and fatigue in their work that suggests mankind generally has no escape from the disintegration, meaninglessness and loss of tradition they see as inevitable in the modern world Moreover, Carter’s good-humoured and permissive mingling of popular and high culture ends on a note of both pleasure and possibility, though it is without either a plan for the future or a coherent, rational explanation of what has passed In both respects, then, Nights at the Circus is more postmodernist play than modernist lament Finally, by outlining what Carter saw as the political limitations of the concept of carnival, this essay goes on to describe how the clowns’ miserable performance of madness forms part of Carter’s investigation of the political dangers of laughter at popular forms and figures Laughter is not always freely or spontaneously given, nor is it always benign or generous, and since the novel begins and ends with Fevvers’ tumultuous guffaw, it becomes important to be able to identify both laughter’s destructive and its generative potential From Helen Stoddart, ‘Popular Culture, Carnival and Clowns’ Although Nights at the Circus may occasionally sound popular with its stage cockney, its exuberant style and tipsy excitement over colour, show and low bodily functions, the operation and effect of these elements of the prose are always directed by an intelligence that is critical and academic as well as pleasure-seeking