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Smoking With Carla Chait

Interview by Christopher Allen (Read the Story) September 24, 2013

Carla Chait

art by Alexander C. Kafka

“The Circus” can be read on several levels. There is the personal level—the circus employee’s injury—but there is also the level of allegory. I hope I’m justified in reading the circus as a metaphor for society. How does the relationship of master and servant fit into this?

The circus employee has written himself as “obsequious servant,” intimating a dictatorial master. So their relationship might be interpreted as a satirical representation of this type of abuse. But the master’s voice is absent here; its “starched and scratchy” influence is constructed from the circus employee’s servilities and protestations. In this sense, the master-servant dynamic feeds into an existential dimension, in which the circus employee’s lame finger, glittering frock coat and shorts etc. are merely manifestations of his imagination —”an idea of the circus on which he’d based his miserable little existence.” Interpreted in this way, his injury is “his miserable little existence,” which he tries to escape by writing himself into the circus—another society.

And the performer’s relationship to the tiger?

If the actual conflict is between master and servant, then the tiger is a displaced outlet for the circus performer’s frustration, because the animal is as much, if not more, of a pawn than he is. The irony, of course, is that the circus employee is the tiger’s master, and yet he feels persecuted by the animal. On whatever allegorical level ‘The Circus’ is read—social or existential—the circus employee is a pathetic subject, trapped in a position he cannot justify, explain or escape.

I love the deferential yet desperate voice of the character in “The Circus”; it’s a compelling razor’s edge. Is the germ for this story the circus performer’s voice? Was this a letter to the circus master from the beginning?

Yes, the circus performer’s voice was certainly the germ for the story. I began it as it appears, introducing him through his injury, after which he begins his letter. We went through the remaining process together. When his hyperbole started to break up in the last part of the letter, and he could no longer articulate himself, literally and symbolically, we realized that his servilities and protestations were off the mark. As his letter tears through the air and floats to the floor, he is disillusioned, and the narrative voice returns to the third person, and becomes less effusive and somewhat harder.

It’s a brilliant voice. In the end, the performer sees that the circus has in some way broken all the performers. Is there a political message in this?

The circus performers are, as you say, broken by their profession, which reflects the perversity of the circus as an enterprise in which its employees’ distortions are exploited. There is an allusion here to the dehumanisation that occurs with persecution. Prisoners are defined by physical limitation and bodily degradation. The extremes are pronounced in the circus performers. But I think that the governance of the show—in this context, the “top-hatted mother goose of the carnival”—is too easy a target, because he is, after all, subject to the public, “the crowds coming back to the circus for more.” It is the construct of the circus as a whole, and the “principles” on which it operates, which is questionable.

Carla, thank you for elucidating “The Circus.” What are you working on now?

Writing literary essays for university takes up much of my attention.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reflect on my own creative work. And thank you to everyone at SmokeLong Quarterly.

About the Author

Carla Chait lives in Johannesburg, where she is sudying English at The University of the Witwatersrand. She has had writing published locally in New Contrast, Carapace and Wordsetc., and online in Itch.

About the Interviewer

Christopher Allen is the author of the flash fiction collection Other Household Toxins (Matter Press, 2018) and the episodic satire Conversations with S. Teri O’Type. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction America (Norton, 2023), The Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Split Lip, Booth, PANK, and Indiana Review, among other very nice places. Allen has been the editor-in-chief of SmokeLong Quarterly since January 2020, the publisher of SmokeLong since January 2022, and was the 2023 judge of the Bridport Prize for flash fiction. He and his husband are nomads.

About the Artist

Alexander C. Kafka is a journalist, photographer, and composer in Bethesda, Maryland. He created the cover image for Lost Addresses: New and Selected Poems by Diann Blakely (Salmon Poetry, 2017). His work has also been published at All Things Fashion DC, BuzzFeed, Fast Company, Juked, Vice, The Washington Post, The Writing Disorder, and many other periodicals. He has been on the documentation team for the Washington Folk Festival at Glen Echo and is a contributing concert photographer for DMNDR. Kafka studied fine-art figure photography with Missy Loewe at the Washington School of Photography and portrait photography with Sora DeVore at Glen Echo Photoworks.

This interview appeared in Issue Forty-One of SmokeLong Quarterly.
SmokeLong Quarterly Issue Forty-One
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