98 CRITICAL READINGS Tour of Europe, she performed in Vienna and ‘deformed the dreams of that entire generation who would immediately commit themselves whole-heartedly to psychoanalysis’ (Pt I, Ch p 11) Displaying a postmodern incredulity, in Lyotard’s terms, to the grand narrative of psychoanalysis, Fevvers resists incorporation into the Freudian grand narrative that would seek to label and transform her from mesmerizing spectacle into mute symptom No single, overarching story about Fevvers exists Rather, her verbal autobiography consists of an accumulation of ‘little narratives’ Though billed variously as the ‘Cockney Venus’, ‘Helen of the High Wire’ and ‘l’Ange Anglaise’, Fevvers is the name ‘on the lips of all’, while her image proliferates across newspapers, billboards and posters, circulating vertiginously in the media circus that the Illustrated London News has dubbed ‘Fevvermania’ (Pt I, Ch 1, p 8) The promiscuity of quotation marks within Fevvers’ narrative, which is itself framed by quotation marks, distinguishes the novel as one in which a very postmodern sense of authorship and meaning operates It is one in which it is very difficult to draw clear distinctions between the voices of the author, narrator and character and in which the narrative is frequently highly self-reflexive, drawing attention to its own literariness and its fictional status An important critical reference point in this respect is Roland Barthes’s essay, ‘The Death of the Author’, which is a cornerstone of poststructuralist thought and a precursor for postmodern theories of author-text-reader relations Barthes’s thesis dismantles traditional views of the author as the authoritative ‘explanation’ of the work He argues that no unified authorial consciousness or stable locus of meaning exists behind (or above) the text Instead, he posits a theory of intertextuality (see Text and contexts, pp 31–4) in which the text is authored by a plurality of voices, textual references and narrative echoes in which it is ‘language that speaks, not the author’.4 Barthes’s theories of authorship are explored on a fictional level by Carter in a contest of narrative voices that pitches Walser’s scepticism against Fevvers’ and Lizzie’s experimental narration Accustomed to trading in facts rather than fictions, Walser scrutinizes each claim that passes through his narrators’ lips: ‘(How does she that?’ pondered the reporter.)’, ‘(check if she trained as a dancer.)’ (Pt I, Ch 1, pp and 16) Walser’s controlling narrative strategies cannot, however, curb the proliferation of meaning which Fevvers’ and Lizzie’s postmodern story exhibits Indeed, Fevvers’ and Lizzie’s playful and shifting narrative makes a dramatic feature out of what Barthes claims is true of all texts, which is that they are a ‘tissue of quotations drawn from the inumberable centres of culture’.5 Crucially, Barthes’s reconfiguration of textual paradigms goes on to place a different emphasis on how meaning is produced from this newly understood sense of literary texts as things which are not in the first place completely original and therefore more provisional Because the text has not been articulated and fixed by a godlike author figure, it is open to fresh interpretation by each new reader or, as Barthes puts it, ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’.6 As this suggests, Barthes’s theory of textuality as a place of intertextuality ushers in a reader who is no longer a passive consumer but an active producer of a text Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, 1977, p 143 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p 146 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p 148