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The Dangers of Being an Intertextually Inclined Character

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The Dangers of Being an Intertextually Inclined Character SYMBOLIC NARRATIVES: THE DANGERS OF BEING AN INTERTEXTUALLY INCLINED CHARACTER RICHARD LYNCH John Fowles’s first published novel was The Collector (1963), and since its publication, critics have offered a variety of reasons for the failure of the relationship between its two main characters, Frederick Clegg and Miranda Grey. Since Miranda’s first experience of Clegg is being kidnapped by him, perhaps we should not expect too much out of this relationship. But readers do expect something. The reading of a plot, as Peter Brooks points out, is a “form of desire,” an “arousal” that initiates the sense-making process in the reader (37-38), and given the conventional fictional situation of a young man and a young woman meeting under unusual circumstances, only some progression in the relationship–whether negative or positive–will make sense.1 We also expect some significant development in the relationship because there are only two characters physically present in this novel. Miranda and Clegg are all the reader has to work with–to identify with, or anticipate an outcome for, or wish an outcome for–and the narrative makes it clear that the characters themselves realize that the two of them are all they have to work with. As Miranda puts it in her diary, “It is not that I have forgotten what other people are like. But other people seem to have lost reality. The only real person in my world is Caliban” (148). The two characters do fail to produce one of the outcomes most readers might expect, however–friendship, love (even if it turns out to be the Stockholm syndrome variety), or at least understanding–and the usual reasons given for that failure to connect are social, philosophical, psychological, or some combination of these. Thus Thomas Foster sees the primary obstacles to mutual understanding as gender and social class. Miranda is better educated, not to mention sane (20, 26-27). Katherine Tarbox separates them according to their reactions to experience: Clegg gains no insight, while Miranda’s diary Studies in the Novel, Volume 41, number 2 (Summer 2009). Copyright © 2009 by the University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. FOWLES / 225 “represents real self-examination” (44). Carol Barnum agrees that Miranda acquires self-knowledge while Clegg is “frozen,” without the vitality needed to match Miranda’s development (41-42). Pamela Cooper (19-20) and Mahmoud Salami (49) both see the physical power Clegg exercises over Miranda as a main stumbling block to the development of any fruitful relationship. But there is another cause that has received relatively light treatment from the critics and that may be more important than the others, and that is the adoption by its characters of different narrative strategies, in particular strategies that allow them to reconstruct themselves and each other.2 Virginia Woolf, through the character of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, established what we have come to recognize as a central truth about the way we think about other people: as characters in a fabula we are either narrating or authoring. Alan Palmer describes this practice among fictional characters as “doubly embedded narratives,” which he defines as “versions of characters [that] exist within the minds of other characters” (15). In Woolf’s novel, Lily catches herself “writing” others as she thinks about the Rayleys, Paul and Minta, and what had come of their marriage: “And this, Lily thought…this making up scenes about them, is what we call ‘knowing’ people.…Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same” (173). So Lily, to use a term from Lisa Zunshine’s recent book on theory of mind in narrative, “metarepresents”; that is, she keeps track of herself as the source of her representations of the Rayleys and avoids the danger of treating these representations as “architectural truth” (48)–information about which there are no suspicions regarding its source, or even any identification of a source, the information simply existing as reality. At the same time, Woolf made clear what had always been true in fiction–that characters construct their own narratives, and that they can be as cleverly intertextual in their creative endeavors as any author or reader. Among twentieth-century novelists, Fowles has been especially interested in having characters become their own authors. In The Collector, the two characters employ a variety of techniques to construct what might be called symbolic narratives, narratives that are self-confirming and do not derive their truth value from verisimilitude or comparisons with the reality of their narrative world.3 These symbolic narratives are similar to what Umberto Eco in The Role of the Reader labels the WNc–a subworld within the world of the narrative (the WN) imagined, believed, or wished for by a character (235). Naturally, these subworlds include a reified self-image as well as the character’s beliefs or imaginings about what other characters wish or believe, akin to Palmer’s doubly embedded narratives. The subworlds that are actualized within the narrative are said to be real within the WN, but conflicting possible worlds refuse to accept one another, since there cannot be alternative truths. As Riffaterre says, in fiction, “truth is performative, and therefore not to be denied or ignored” (19). Part of the difficulty for Miranda and Clegg is that 226 / LYNCH although they seem initially to be aware of themselves as the sources of representations of each other (and themselves), they lose track of the source, and their creations become “architectural truth.” The fact that both Clegg and Miranda are engaged in constructing such narratives for themselves accounts for the permanent and inevitable divide between them, just as it accounts for the divide between Charles and Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which Charles wonders whether he will ever understand Sarah’s “parables” (460). Some fictional characters adopt ready-made symbolic narratives by opting out of their “assigned” roles and choosing alternate (intertextual) roles–roles that are truth for them.4 In fact, Tarbox (51-52) and Foster (24-27) criticize Clegg and Miranda for playing roles, and James Acheson declares Miranda “inauthentic” for engaging in this behavior (13), but as Eco points out, intertextual knowledge is part of who we are as readers, part of our sense- making equipment (Role 32-33), and there is no reason that knowledge should be denied to the characters, who have a more pressing need to make sense of their narrative world than we do.5 In The Collector, both Clegg and Miranda relocate themselves in their narrative through a variety of literary parallels, most openly as the characters Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest. Actually, Clegg lies about his name, which is Frederick, but Miranda has no way of knowing that. When he tells her his name is Ferdinand, she calls it a “vile coincidence” (129). Miranda counters in this game of literary parallels by referring to him as “Caliban,” assigning the “only real person” in her world a fictional identity. Considerable attention has been given to parallels with Shakespeare’s play, not only by the critics but by Fowles himself, who makes use of it in The Magus as well, where Conchis fills the role of Prospero. But The Tempest is also an important choice because it is part of the development of a literary fairy tale tradition in the English Renaissance, and the most important narrative form Miranda appropriates for herself is that of the fairy tale. Clegg is more eclectic in his choice of fictional analogues, but he always makes those choices in the service of what he must believe as truth, because it will not do to see his actions in an ordinary realistic or mimetic context. Miranda eventually chooses the fairy tale because it is the only context in which she can envision escape–not escape through cleverness, as in folktales (although she tries to be a folktale heroine early on), but through conversion of the beast. There is no more symbolic narrative, however (in the sense of its insistence on truth), than a fairy tale. As Jack Zipes points out in When Dreams Came True, a key initial impulse for fairy tales, or the oral folktales they grew out of–“wonder tales”– was to express an essential human desire for a better world, and to express faith that such a world was possible, was in fact the real world in a moral or transcendent sense (2). “Once upon a time” is not about the past. Neither wonder tales nor fairy tales are located in a definite time or place. They are FOWLES / 227 more about an indefinite utopian future (4). The development of the literary fairy tale, particularly in late seventeenth-century France, simply hardens that sense that these tales are expressions of absolute truth, since their primary use became socialization, reinforcing cultural codes and rules of conduct in a given society. So the failure of the relationship between Miranda and Clegg is assured by their choice of mutually exclusive narrative strategies. The difficulty for Miranda in particular (since she will not get another chance), as it is for fictional characters generally who wish to change their status in the narrative, is transforming her wishes and beliefs–what Eco calls “propositional attitudes” (Role 213)–into actual states of the fabula, no easy task in a written world peopled by characters with their own imagined, believed, or wished for subworlds. In fact, Miranda finds it necessary to play a little fast and loose with her part of the narrative.
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