Think of the fairground: its crowds, lights, noise, music, smells, its tacky glamour, its hint of violence, its sheer sensory dazzle. Such variety necessarily produces juxtapositions which are sometimes startling enough to be paradoxes: for starters this very variety has a banal familiarity; then there are the screams from the rides that are equal parts pleasure and fear; the way that punters at the games of 'skill' connive in their own duping through a knowing gullibility; the healthy vanity of the hall of mirrors where we study reflections of ourselves as we never will be. Of course the most apparent juxtaposition is that between the showily cheap glamour of the night-time fairground and the drabness of the daytime fairground. And here's another of those paradoxes, or at least inversions, for this is the difference between the fairground at work and at rest: the aura of the working fairground is playful as against the drab workaday atmosphere of the fairground at rest.

Fairs (and festivals and carnivals, and I know these are distinct phenomena, but they are linked and I don't want to get bogged down in definition) don't, then, just produce sensory excess; they distort our perception, even alter topographies. When I think of the settings of fairs and festivals, it's this kind of alteration that comes to mind. The mangy field on the outskirts of town turns into a place of glamour alluringly tinged with menace when the Fun Fair arrives. The Old South Dining Hall at Queen's University, suffused with the bitterness of the generations of examinees who have toiled there, becomes the Guinness Spot during the Belfast Festival and takes on the smokily sultry ambience of a jazz club. The dour gravitas of Edinburgh is exploded by the frivolity of the Festival and its Fringe which, in a chain reaction, transforms the unlikeliest of places into venues. The most complete transformation I think I've ever seen was in a small town in France that I once passed through: it seemed to be a ghost town - every house shuttered, every shop shut - but it was deserted because it was en fête. The entire population had decamped and established a temporary alternative by a pond outside town (though I've long since forgotten the name of the place I remember that it was the Fête de l'Étang): all the shops - the butcher, the baker and the rest - had set up stalls, there was a temporary stage for the musicians and dance floor for the dancers and even a temporary altar for the celebration of mass. You could call this a form of madness (wouldn't they have been more comfortable eating, drinking, dancing, praying and what have you in the solid, purpose built places that they had for those activities?) but that would be like saying that a picnic would be better if eaten while seated round a dining table indoors: it may be a more comfortable and convenient way to eat, it's just not a picnic.

Distortion, alteration, transformation all play a part in the fun of the fair but impermanence too is an important feature, partly because we're prepared to forgive degrees of shabbiness, discomfort or inconvenience that are temporary but which would be unbearable if they were permanent. More importantly, the fair has to be a break from the norm, a rupture, an eruption: permanence displaces normality rather than challenging it. To my mind, then, there is nothing more unnatural than a permanent fair site: a production line of fun. The very thought of, say, Disneyland or Alton Towers makes me shudder because the permanent fair site does away with juxtaposition, inversion and paradox: permanence, and with it regulation and orderliness, is not in contrast with the temporary and the near-chaotic here, rather it has swamped them. These places are no longer an alternative to normality and reality; they are instead an alternative reality: cleaner, neater, more orderly, more normal and, even, more permanent than our normal reality. Children like such places, I know, but that's because children are natural conservatives, impatient with, even afraid of, disorder or breaks in routine.

If you have to have a permanent fair site, then Tibidabo in Barcelona is the way to do it. There the fairground is pitched between the Basilica of the Sagrat Cor, topped with a statue of Christ, above it and a very posh suburb below it and the whole place is named for the Bible episode in which the devil tempts Christ (all this I will give to you: Tibi dabo).

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Here, despite its permanence, the juxtapositions are saved and we are left wondering whether the fair fits more appropriately with the sacred realm above it or the secular below it. Here is a fair site which, despite its permanence, answers to one of the key words in that book full of key words, Finnegans Wake. When we come across the term 'funferal' in Joyce's great eruptive text, we're left bouncing between its various possibilities, notably 'funeral' and 'fun for all'. But I also like to think of 'fun fair all' since the fair is a place where pleasure is commingled with fear, where the intense aliveness of sensory overload is threatened by forms of obliteration, whether physical or existential. What any fair demands of us then is a question about its true nature: do we see the fairground more clearly in daylight or at night. Which version is the real one? Or to recast that question, what is the true identity of the fair?

This takes us into the area of the carnivalesque - the study, following Mikhail Bakhtin, of fairs, festivals and carnivals, their motives and consequences. Even the academic pursuit of this issue is not immune to paradox: as a friend once pointed out those academics who 'work on the carnivalesque' (itself an odd phrase) tend to be a joyless bunch, and this is another of those defining paradoxes and inversions associated with these things. (That's why other academic theories don't, as a matter of course, produce such paradoxes: the plain-speaking post-structuralist, say, or the prudish queer theorist, the racist post-colonialist, the misogynistic feminist.) In general terms, when we consider the fair, festival or carnival we are dealing with the sense that there are moments when the normal social order is suspended, inverted or even overthrown or obliterated, but the motives and consequences of such moments are always in doubt. Is the fair a holiday - a necessary relief from routine work, or is it a ritualised and regulated enactment of chaos which serves to protect the social order by injecting a homeopathic dose of disorder, or is the fair a sign of truly subversive energies roiling under the social surface, testing its weak spots and looking for a way to break through?

Such questions return us to the uncertain identity of the fair. The wearing of masks and disguises at many fairs and festivals is then not just a feature of such events but is rather a constitutive element, an indication of their true, but never singular, nature. The fair itself can be seen as a mask covering the face of the workaday world. As so often, my mind turns to recent events in Belfast. Here, at the moment, various authorities and institutions seem intent on proving that Belfast is not just buzzing, but is also normal, and they do this by running various fairs, festivals and carnivals. 'Look', these events seem to proclaim, 'we're normal because we can voluntarily give up normality secure in the knowledge that it will still be there when we want to return to it.' But fairs and festivals can't marshalled in this way, since their purpose is to challenge normality. Like many others, I was struck in early September, by an instance of the kind of juxtaposition I've been talking about. It was the last night of the Proms in London and, in this age of widening the customer base, Belfast had its own Proms in the Park. A festive crowd gathered in the grounds of the City Hall to listen to the Ulster Orchestra before joining, via satellite link, the main event in the Albert Hall. But as we were doing this, loyalist areas of the city were rioting, so an RAF fly past for the Proms was followed by the sound of spotter planes and surveillance helicopters; the music had to compete with police sirens; the light show playing across the Orchestra couldn't obscure the columns of black smoke from burning barricades. So, as the City Hall fiddled, Tiger's Bay was burning in the riots of the night. Which one is the real Belfast? Which was the festival, which was normality? A serious business, the fun of the fair.

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