JOHN FOWLES

JOHN FOWLES

John Fowles surprisingly merges past and present in his work, he tries to establish a bridge between a text and the twentieth century reader. Taking into account the worl around him and the works / texts already written, Fowles is aware of the complexity of a modern reader educated in the spirit of the contemporary sciencies and needs, a reader that also should be offered a new perspective of a nineteenth century literary atmosphere 121b17b in the novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman,1969. Together they would share a state for the patterned novel and for the association of large ideas with those patterns.

A few years before, in 1963, Fowles published The Collector, a strange novel which allows a Freudian interpretation. This fantasy is narrated by a first person that is not the author. A first person narrative technique appeared as a reaction to the omniscient author who provides the novel with artificiality. The distance between the author and the reader who is passive is annihilated through the first person narrative because of its confessional tone. This time the reader is a direct participant in the story as an interlocutor.

The Freudian background is evident in his following novels whose characters are hunted by psychic or sexual problems and try to find a way to escape them, sometimes in "self-indulgent erotic fantasy" like in Mantissa, 1982. In his short stories, Fowles combines the strangeness of his themes with a particular style similar to the mystery novels. However, Fowles has a larger field of action as his novel The Magus - written in 1966 and revised in 1977 - shows, "it is intricately translated into an omnifarious masque and proliferating orgy of mythology and literature ". - Martin Dodsworth.

Some critics noticed a certain self-confidence with Fowles as a writer, as Martin Dodsworth concludes: "he writes always from a position of confident intellectual superiority feelings with his successful novel The French Lieutenant`s Woman. The novel published in 1969 refers to events placed a hundred years before, in 1860`s. The link between those two periods emphasises Fowles`s interest in Victorian novel and his appreciation of it as a treasure of latent meanings and possibilities. But, he also insists that our century writer is capable of literary innovations.

Fowles`s novel can be considered a reading of a Victorian novel using a modern grid of reading. The main characters are Sarah Woodruff, a woman who is supposed to be abandoned mistress of a French lieutenant, and a palaeontologist, Charles Smithson. Their love affair develops in a scene - setting specific to the nineteenth century, and Fowles insists upon details that contribute to create the atmosphere. Both his characters "seek to break 'iron certainties' , the social, moral, and religious conventions of their day, much as the narrator consistenly endeavours to remind us of his presence and of his very present power". Actually, Fowles`s attitude towards the reader is similar to Sarah`s attitude towards Charles who becomes a toy deceived by Sarah, just as the narrator eludes his reader. The comparison is not accidental since Sarah is also a teller of a story.

Elusiveness is also suggested by the epigraphs that open each chapter. An empirical reader would be tempted to consider these epigraphs pillars sustaining the illusion of a Victorian novel. On the contrary, they were selected because of their latent meaning, which can be a grill of reading and a mirror of the chapter at the same time. By placing them at the head of each chapter Fowles intends to guide the reader on his way, he changes the horizon of expectation. These epigraphs which suppose a continuous change of grid or point of view make the author overstep the fringes of his stated by suggesting particular approaches of the text. Fowles, as a creator, places himself "next to God".

Although his technique could annihilate the openness and the ambiguity of the novel, Fowles does not realises a deceptive novel from that point of view. In the final chapter a 'rather foppish and Frenchified' figure, with 'more than a touch of the successful impresario about him' , adjusts his watch and seems to obliterate the second possible ending. This impresario drives 'briskly away, supposedly leaving Charles to his freedom and his doubts, but he remains a God who has declined to stop interfering."- Andrew Sanders.

The novel is provided with a structure that assures its transcendence. The author actully tricked the reader into directing his reading since he finaly offers three possibilities. Therefore Fowles only pretends to be building up a system within the narrative because he always suggests movement, change, double meaning, ambiguity. At this point, the author rises against the traditional novel, which follows a system that confers it rigidity and limitation.

Fowles`s intention of modernising the Victorian novel is expressed in the epigraph to chapter 45: "And ah for a man to arise in me, / That the man I am may cease to be !"

Fowles proposes the reader a game in which he deconstructs and reconstructs versions starting from a Victorian novel. According to his statement "writing fictional futures" is an innate quality.

Referring to "fictional futures" in the plural the author actually takes into account a text which would allow different approaches, whose articulations would permit a change of plan and imply variety. Such a text is based on the self-reflexive power of the word. A word capable of an unlimited reflection in itself enjoys a certain freedom in the whole context. The openness of a text depends on the freedom of the words - which become "spectral words". By creating such a text an author propeses a lot of mirrors which imply an unlimited number of reflected images. Reflection also means reiteration; yet, with Fowles every new version means progress. From this point of view "arises" and "cease" are two words that depend on each other. The old form must disappeare to offer a room to the new one.

Fowles realised this progress by putting together two moments of the history of literature. On the one hand he demonstrated that a Victorian novel can transcend its period, and this method emphasises the value of a work of art reflected in its openness. On the other hand he gives an example of desconstruction and reconstruction of the novel observing the rules / principles of modernism and keeping untouched the details specific to the Victorian period.

Randall Stevenson also considers that each work "is also a postmodernist paradigm, a prophecy of the self-reflexive fore-grounding of language and fiction-making that has become one of the central, distinguishing characteristic of postmodernism. There are now almost too many authors to list who have expanded the self-consciousness of modernist art, writing stories about storytelling, or intruding into the fiction to comment on their own practice and preceedings or to discuss other problems in relating language, fiction and reality. Lawrence Durrell, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, Christine Brooke-Rose (.) among many others, figure in this postmodernist idiom which has continued to expand and experiment with the conventions of fiction down to the present day".