96 CRITICAL READINGS Carter approaches literary postmodernism with the discerning and transformative gaze of the bricoleur (see Text and contexts, pp 32–4), seizing on postmodernism’s disruptive textual practices and modifying them according to her own experimental vision Nights at the Circus is subsequently found to exhibit a highly idiosyncratic form of postmodern narrative, which is at once subversive in impulse but which also remains historically and politically engaged From Jeannette Baxter, ‘Postmodernism’ I have always used a very wide number of references because of tending to regard all of Western Europe as a great scrap-yard from which you can assemble all sorts of new vehicles bricolage.2 Night at the Circus is a flamboyant and provocative exercise in bricolage Flaunting an eclectic knowledge of European literature, literary and cultural theory, politics, philosophy, Greek mythology, music and the visual arts, Angela Carter mines the vestiges of Western culture and history with intellectual rigour and imaginative agility The question that this chapter addresses is whether her wideranging and thrilling engagement with such diverse cultural and historical materials can reasonably be characterized as postmodern A fertile point of entry into the postmodern debate is Jean-Franỗois Lyotards The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (see Text and contexts, p 31) According to Lyotard, the defining characteristic of the postmodern condition is ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’.3 He argues that in the second half of the twentieth century there emerges a profound disbelief in grand explanatory theories that make absolute claims to knowledge and truth (he cites the belief in human progress towards perfection characteristic of Enlightenment philosophy, as well as Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis as examples) However, metanarratives or ‘grand narratives’, Lyotard argues, function to regulate and restrain individual subjects by validating certain political or philosophical positions and forms of historical knowledge over others Metanarratives are also privileged over ‘micronarratives’ because these homogenizing and ‘unifying’ stories offer exclusive accounts of ‘legitimate’ knowledge and truth which negate or exclude the possibility of potential counter or ‘illegitimate’ narratives Lyotard exposes this exclusion of contradictory ‘little narratives’ while he himself champions them because in a ‘postmodern condition’ marked by indeterminacy and fragmentation he regards the ‘little narrative’ as the quintessential form of imaginative invention and resistance – experimenting with, challenging and dismantling traditions and myths of legitimation Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p 92 Jean-Franỗois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, Minn.: Minnesota University Press, 1984, p xxiv