JEANNETTE BAXTER 99 In ‘Notes from the Front Line’, Carter wrote explicitly about the role of the reader in the creation of the text in a way that explicitly echoes Barthes: ‘Reading is just as creative an activity as writing and most intellectual development depends upon new readings of old texts I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’7 Carter’s view of intertextuality as an explosive, disruptive textual strategy resonates clearly with what Barthes termed its ‘truly revolutionary’ potential in that ‘to refuse to fix meaning’ is to destabilize the dominant cultural ideologies of ‘reason, science, law’.8 What Carter’s approach to intertextuality particularly stresses, however, is the writer’s and reader’s position in relation to history Barthes’s modern writer is ‘born simultaneously with the text’, and writing or ‘enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered’.9 Similarly, Barthes’s reader is stripped of any personal identity, ‘the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted’.10 In contrast, as we see below, Carter seeks to emphasize the reader’s historical specificity Barthes’s removal of a sense of history from author–reader–text relations does not quite fit Carter’s historical and feminist agenda in Nights at the Circus As Aidan Day points out, ‘for all its flamboyant craziness’, a very real sense of history permeates Carter’s novel, from its ‘firmly historicised’ setting to its ‘reference to specifically historical facts and personages’.11 Day’s stress on the materialist or Marxist feminist dimensions of Nights at the Circus points up, in turn, the potential limitations of postmodernism for Carter’s fictional project According to Day, Carter ‘stands at odds’ with what he terms ‘extreme postmodernism’ because the ‘relativising impulse’ of postmodern philosophy, namely the notion that all historical systems (such as patriarchy), or political perspectives (such as sexism), are equally true and valid, threatens to undermine Carter’s ‘specifically feminist politics’.12 If postmodernism is, as Day asserts, apolitical and ahistorical in its outlook, then what potential remains for a grounded feminist critique? Although Day’s reading is valuable for highlighting potential theoretical tensions between postmodernism and feminism, his conclusion that they are mutually exclusive (he argues that for Carter to be a materialist feminist she must also be ‘fundamentally anti-postmodernism’) is potentially reductive on two counts.13 First, it refuses even to acknowledge the historical and political potential of postmodernist writing when others, such as Linda Hutcheon, argue that it is ‘resolutely historical and inescapably political’.14 Self-conscious narrative strategies function, she argues, reinstall ‘historical contexts as significant and even 10 11 12 13 14 Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, in Michelene Wandor (ed.), On Gender and Writing, p 71 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p 147 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p 145–6 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, p 148 Day, Angela Carter, pp 169–70 Day, Angela Carter, p 12 Day, Angela Carter, p 12 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London and New York, Routledge, 1988, p