FORM AND IDEA IN THE FICTION AND NON-FICTION OF JOHN FOWLES Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS of Rhodes University by JULIE-ANNE ETTER December 1985 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements iii Chapter One Introduction . 1 Chapter Two The Aristos and the Collector: Authentlc and Inauthentic Existence 20 Chc:pter Three The Magus: A Self-Portrait in Fiction 43 Chapter Four The French Lieutenant's Woman: Woman as Mystery • . • • 65 Chapter Five The Ebony Tower, and the Celtic Dream-Temple. .. 86 Chapter Six Daniel Martin: A Yes from the Heart of Reality .....•••• 111 Chapter Seven Mantissa: Plaiting the Real and the Imagined ... 131 Notes • . • • . 145 Bibliography 150 i i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following people for their various contributions towards this thesis: My supervisor, Dr N. W. Visser, for his invaluable professional advice and expertise throughout the years . My parents, Marcel and Gwynneth Etter, for their enthusiasm and financial assistance with regard to this research. ~Iy colleagues in the Department of English, University of the Western Cape, for their motivating interest and encouragement. My husband, Smuts Justus, for his support and understanding. iii Chapter One Introduction "The novel is dead," claims Maurice Conchis in The Magus, "as dead as alchemy." Fowlesian irony indeed, for John Fowles's Magus not only lives in the very medium he condemns, but is himself responsible for the fiction of Bourani. Like the alchemist, the Magus represents mystery, change and growth, and for Fowles--the Archmagus--it is these concerns that energise his work. But Fowles, like Conchis, has a fascination with facts; while his fiction includes two of the most famous British novels of the nineteen-sixties, The Magus (1966) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), Fowles is careful to describe himself as a writer, rather than as a novelist. His work includes essays, introductions and appendices to other writers' work, book reviews and translations; like Conchis, too, his interests are eclectic and reflect his wide range of knowledge and experience. Fowles's considerable critical and popular acclaim, however, has been directed at his fiction; his novels have been staged, filmed, and translated into a number of languages. Academic attention to his fiction is increasing, and critical articles are appearing in journals in an ever-increasing number . Yet the connection that Fowles himself makes between fi cti on and non-fi cti on--both his· own and other writers'-- has been strangely neglected by his readers. In his Afterword to Alain- 1 Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, a novel which has profoundly influenced him, Fowles directly relates the "true" experience of the writer to hi s fi cti on. He quotes the French writer as sayi ng, "My task 2 is to tell my own stories, only my own, with my own memories, to write nothing but poetic autobiography; to create a world, to interest people in very personal memories--for all that, the memories that make my deepest being what it is" {223}. Fowles believes that Alain-Fournier's life {itself "almost like another novel",} is the key to Le Grand Meaulnes; not only is the school and its environs autobiographical, but A1 a in Fourni er was haunted by hi sown meeti ng with the gi rl "Yvonne de Galais"--Yvonne de Quievrecourt in reality--the memory of whom was to last the writer the rest of his life. Fowles thus proposes that the source of Fournier's novel is unmistakeablyautobiographical. In his diary of June 17, 1905, Fournier tries to describe his first meeting with Yvonne; the parallels with his prose version of ei~ht years later are evident. Waiting near her house, for instance, Fournier notes in his diary that he was "seemingly enveloped in her lace, her boa, her dress, and as she passes very close to me I say, 'You are beautiful.' And then she is gone •.• I say half. 2 aloud to myself : my destiny, all my destiny, all my destiny. " {Afterword 214}. It need hardly be pointed out that Augustin Meaulnes uses the same words when he sees Yvonne de Galais. Like Meaulnes, too, Fournier was to meet the girl for a second time. Three months after this meeting, in July 1913, Le Grand Meaulnes was published. To Fowles, then, Alain-Fournier succeeded admirably in creating his "poetic autobiography". "Like adolescence itself," concludes Fowles, "this poignant and unique masterpiece of alchemized memory is to be - lived and felt". {223}. Fowles is fascinated by the writer himself; indeed, the man behind the pen is a frequent Fowlesian concern. For Fowles, then, as Peter Wolfe suggests, "the biographical reading of literature tells most about the composition and formation of an author's mind" {47}. Fowles's interest in authors' biographies is one of the 3 more consistent features of his writing; in Ourika, which Fowles translated from the French and published in a limited, autographed edition in 1977, he examines in some detail the life and circumstances of the author of the novel, Claire de Durfort. In 1779, Claire de Durfort was born Claire-Lou.ise-Rose Bonne de Coetnempren de Kersaint, only daughter of Admiral Guy de Kersaint. De Kersaint was guillotined in 1793; Claire spent some time with her Martinique-born mother in the West Indies before they settled in London in 1796. Though Claire married Amedee de Durfort in 1797, heir to the duchy of Duras, it was in 1808 that she met the person whom Fowles, in the Epilogue to Ourika, calls "the real man in her life •.•• This was Chateaubriand, then aged forty, and without rival the current personification of the European Zeitgeist" (53). Fowles describes this relationship as "one of those physically unconsummated but intellectually passionate liaisons for which [the French] race has such a special genius" (53). When Chateaubriand's attention turned to Madame Jeanne de Recamier, however, Claire's turned to novels, her first--Ourika--published anonymously in 1824. It is this novel which Fowles terms "a minor masterpiece" (Prologue to Ourika 7). Ourika is the story of a black Senegalese girl saved from slavery I as an infant and reared by "Mme la Marechale de B." in the aristocratic lux~ry of pre-revolutionary France. The happiness of Ourika, the African girl, turns to bitterness and despair when she realises her essential isolation from French society as a result of her race. Unable to mention or fulfil her love for Charles, the younger son of her benefactress, she falls ill upon his marriage to a beautiful young French heiress. After much distress, she enters a convent where she tells her story to a young doctor who attends her in her final illness. 4 Fowles makes explicit his concern for the relationship between the author and the work when he says, "So much for the bare facts of Claire's life. Let me try to relate some of them to Ourika" (55). Fowles suggests, for instance, that "one reason Claire was able to enter a black mind was that she saw in that situation a symbolic correlative of whatever in her own psychology and beliefs had always prevented her from entering into a full relationship with Chateaubriand" (56-7). It is, however, the incongruity of Claire de Durfort's perception of the social inequalities and conflicts--not only of 1824, remarkably, but of 3 all times--which most interests Fowles. Claire's pro-royalist and anti-progressive credentials are impeccable--and perhaps understandable. We know how her own father died; we know her mother-in-law [Louise-Henriette nee de Noailles] experienced and recorded some of the grimmes~ days of the Terror; we can understand the enormous deadweight of the Duras connection with its long history of military blind devotion to reaction and monarchy; we remember [the chateau] Usse, like something out of a medieval fairy tale--or a socialist's nightmare. (59) Despite these i'impeccable credentials", Claire de Durfort's judgement of her society is unmistakeably critical. Perhaps there is some echo in Fowles's rejection of the ethos of his own middle-class background; but while Claire's answer to the problems of the early nineteenth century, like that of Ourika, lay finally in the consolation of religion, Fowles's answer one century later lies somewhere in the individualistic, existential school of the twentieth century. In his epitaph to Claire de Durfort in his Memoires d'outre-tombe, Chateaubriand called her "that warm-hearted woman, so noble-spirited, of an .intelligence that united something of the intellectual force of Mme de Stael with the elegance of Mme de Lafayette" (Epilogue to Ourika 55). And Fowles pays tribute to Claire's essential individualism in the final paragraph of his Epilogue to Ourika: 5 There are a number of striking epigrams buried in [Ourika's] text, and this is one I have always especially cher1shed: L'opinion est une patrie. Shared views of life are a motherland. Mank1nd has only one true frontier, that of our common humanity--be it black, brown or white in face. This is the subversive proposition at the heart of Ourika; and therefore, strange though it may seem, at the heart of the unlikely woman who dared to think black in the whitest of all white worlds. (64) There are other examples of Fowles's concern with biographical detail; his essays accompanying Mehalah, After London and The Hound of the Baskervilles, for instance, evince this same concern for the man behind the text. It is hardly surprising, then, that Fowles's own personal history and interests have been related to his work; in most critical works of any length, Fowles's biographical details are regarded as significant in the discussion and analysis of his works.