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we saw earlier, Bukatman identifies the emergence in the modern age of a ‘kaleidescopic perception’, and in the novel Walser, described as a ‘kaleidoscope equipped
with consciousness’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10), echoes this perfectly. Carter takes this
phrase directly from an essay by the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67),
which is quoted in Walter Benjamin’s account of the modern city dweller (see Text
and contexts, pp. 22–4). Benjamin describes this figure as one who exists in a state
of nervous excitement as he experiences ‘shocks and collisions’ from the crowds
around him: ‘Nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession like the
energy from a battery.’10 A sense of perpetual movement and fragmentation is
also what typifies Walser at the beginning of the novel. His chaotic career, driven
by an addiction to sensational shocks and colourful, even violent, spectacle leaves
him ‘weary with all the spinning’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10). The description reminds us
of the pun involved in the name Walser shares with both a dance of eighteenthcentury origin and a well-known fairground attraction: the ‘waltzer’ spins its
occupants around in dizzying circular twists of movement, again echoing and
confirming his resemblance to the kaleidoscope with its emphasis on colour,
ceaseless movement, circularity and the blurring of form and vision.
Yet Baudelaire, Benjamin and Bukatman’s ‘kaleidoscopic perception’ is without a built-in safe distance, whereas Walser’s cynicism initially appears to offer
him some detachment. He scoffs, for instance, at a Calcutta crowd’s reaction to a
magician’s rope trick by referring to it as ‘a little primitive technology and a big
dose of the will to believe’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 16) – a description which could just as
easily be applied to early cinema. Though he is described as a ‘ “man of action” ’,
and to this extent exemplifies Bukatman’s modern subject, is he also said to have
‘subjected his life to a series of cataclysmic shocks because he loved to hear his
bones rattle’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10). The suggestion here is that Walser is both
submerged in the experience of the shocks and slightly removed from it as he
observes their effects on his bones with pleasure. Carter reinforces this sense of his
critical remove when she refers to him in interview as a ‘permanent bystander’
and as someone who, at the beginning of the novel, demonstrates a facility for

distance and ‘habitual disengagement’ (Pt. I, Ch. 1, p. 10), though he is then
shaken out of this safe distance as soon as he sets off with Fevvers.11 Thus, Walser
appears to have accumulated shocks, sensations and cynicism at the expense of
insight, experience and belief. The fact, however, that he has finally been ‘fooled’
at the end of the novel indicates that his mind has eventually been opened to the
possibility of belief, and his performances as a clown with the Imperial Circus
demonstrates his readiness at last to be the (humiliated) object of spectacle rather
than merely its spectator. Indeed Herr M.’s obsessive misuse of the new technology of vision described by Bukatman – the ‘Praxinoscope’, ‘Phasmatrope’ and
‘Zoospraxiscope’ (Pt. I, Ch. 5, p. 136) – points to the dangers to women posed by
thrill-seeking but detached male spectatorship. The progress of Walser’s character, therefore, demonstrates Carter’s acute awareness of the shifts of perception
and understanding brought about by the new forms of visual technology and
spectatorial engagement that dominated the late nineteenth century and the new
10 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, London:
Fontana, 1992, p. 171.
11 Haffenden, Novelists in Interview, p. 89.