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

“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. As she says in recounting a dialogue one day between herself and Clegg, “I’m cheating, I didn’t say all these things–but I’m going to write what I want to say as well as what I did” (141). Both Miranda and Clegg “cheat,” but out of the necessity referred to earlier. What they are cheating on is history, or the everyday world of events, in favor of symbolic discourse. And they serve that exclusive truth by manipulating language and by adopting intertextual roles. Clegg has a kind of built-in advantage in this manipulative activity, and not only because his narrative occurs both before and after Miranda’s, enclosing or symbolically imprisoning it. The novel consists of his recollections of events as they occur to him (or perhaps as he calls them up in his service) and Miranda’s chronological diary. In effect, she is working with a narrative properly speaking (a fictional construct whose arrangement of events is already decided) whereas Clegg is working with what amounts to a fabula (the basic stuff–characters, speeches, events–out of which narratives are constructed) which gives him more freedom to reshape it to suit his version of the truth. So in a way, both the structure and the nature of the narrative reinforces her position as a prisoner, and her decision to record dialogue that she has invented as though it had actually been said is a narrative attempt at escape, or at least resistance. When it suits his purpose, Clegg also engages in a kind of reversal of the normal process of constructing a narrative. Ordinarily, fabula precedes plot or sjuzet as the Russian Formalists called it–the ordering or plotting of events. But as Brooks notes, fabula may actually be “produced by the requirements of sjuzet,” on the assumption that “something must have happened because of the results that we know” (28). Clegg often finds himself adding to or changing what should be the givens of fabula because the original contents of the fabula cannot explain in his mind the results he knows. More than simply rearranging those contents–the job of sjuzet under ordinary circumstances–he reinvents them, and he does so not only with regard to Miranda’s character, but with his own character as well. So, in the scene where Miranda tries to seduce him, 228 / LYNCH

he remarks, “it was like a different me and a different she” (105). He excuses himself (as always) by explaining that he “wasn’t normal then,” but grants Miranda no such qualifying phrase. Clegg cannot bring himself to describe her actions in detail, but he “would never have thought it of her” (105). Had Miranda been the heroine of romance he thought she was in his “dream” (or fabula), she could never have done those “nasty” things, so he must cast her in a different role–that of a “common street-woman” (113). As a result, he need no longer treat her as a gentleman would. He can force her to pose for nude photos. Miranda, in fact, understands the fictional situation in general terms, as her remarks in the diary before the seduction scene demonstrate: “Something’s gone wrong in his plans. I’m not acting like the girl of his dreams I was” (254). But she cannot understand Clegg, and there is no scene in the novel where the divide between the two is more obviously unbridgeable than the one in which he demands that she pose nude. His reasoning is that he is not asking her to do anything different from what she had done in the seduction scene. For him, it is the same thing–nasty and obscene. For her, the seduction was a desperate attempt to change the nature of their relationship. She did it, as he reports her saying, “out of despair that there is nothing between us except meanness and suspicion and hate. This [the demand for nude photos] is different. It’s vile” (113). There are enough social and educational differences between Clegg and Miranda, as other critics have argued, to render difficult for each of them the reading of the other’s thoughts and feelings, but mind-reading, as Zunshine points out, is heavily dependent on context (8), and although these two young people are looking at the same event–the seduction scene–they have placed it in entirely different narrative contexts, making accurate readings of each other impossible. Miranda, as we will see, has reidentified herself as the self- sacrificing Beauty who offers herself out of generosity and forgiveness; Clegg, who initially regarded Miranda as pure and virtuous, can only read her actions as those of a fallen woman. Zunshine’s analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa as a story about two young people “fatally misreading each other’s minds” (83) could as easily be a description of The Collector. With regard to himself, Clegg never finds fault, never attempts any objective, rational examination of his own actions. Brooks’s analysis of an episode from Rousseau’s Confessions in which Rousseau lies about a fellow- servant, causing her to be dismissed for a theft he himself was guilty of, applies neatly to Clegg: “No analytic moral logic will give the answer to the question, why did I behave that way?” (32). As Brooks puts it, Rousseau’s only solution to the problem of understanding himself is “more narrative” (32)–precisely Clegg’s technique. In his discussion of the episode from the Confessions, Brooks refers to the problematic behavior to be explained as a “crime” (33), but Clegg’s crime is his identity: he must constantly reinvent himself and Miranda to escape it. As a result, Clegg avoids keeping track of himself as FOWLES / 229

the source of his representations of Miranda and her thoughts, allowing him to accept them as “architectural truth,” and allowing him behavior that would earlier have violated his chivalric code. Unlike Lily in To the Lighthouse, he never metarepresents. Miranda never mentions “Beauty and the Beast” specifically, but she tells Clegg a fairy story at one point that closely resembles it, and Mme. de Beaumont’s 1757 tale goes back to a more general purpose of such tales that connects with Miranda’s dilemma. The old wonder tales, as Zipes says, often represented the struggle to overcome, or to humanize, bestial and barbaric forces that terrorized both the individual (perhaps through nightmares) and the community and its values (1). And those are indeed Miranda’s two strategies– first, to overcome, and failing that, to humanize. Whether consciously or unconsciously, both Clegg and Miranda import many aspects of de Beaumont’s tale into their narrative world. Clegg, like the Beast, prepares a special (if less elegant) room for his captive, paying particular attention to her main interest: art. Fowles’s couple also repeat to some extent the ambivalence of Beauty’s position. On her first night in the Beast’s castle, she finds an inscription in a book that reads, “Your wish is our command. Here you are queen and mistress” (de Beaumont 37). Miranda remarks in her diary, “He keeps me absolutely prisoner. But in everything else I am mistress” (146). Both beasts propose marriage; both are refused. Beauty at first fears being eaten, while Miranda fears rape and/or murder, but both lose their fears as they come to know their captors. Both Clegg and the Beast use the occasion of meals to attempt to socialize with their captives, though they are equally inept in that regard, their idea of socializing being apparently to watch the young woman eat. The Beast knows his limitations in this respect, insisting to Beauty that he is not intelligent, and de Beaumont tells us that he entertained Beauty at every evening meal “with good plain talk, though not with what the world would call wit” (39). Clegg is constantly aware of the cultural divide between himself and Miranda (as is she), and she remarks frequently on his colorlessness, or dullness, or lack of wit. Marina Warner notes that in the literary fairy tale of the late seventeenth- century, “the Beast’s low, animal nature is…revealed by his muteness, uncouthness, inability to meet Beauty as a social and intellectual equal. Mme. de Villeneuve’s version of Beauty and the Beast–published in 1740 as a part of a novel (Les Contes marins, ou la jeune Américaine)–is a much longer narrative in which the Beast is enchanted because he rejected the advances of his foster-mother, a powerful fairy. Mme. de Beaumont’s tale is derived from the Villeneuve version but is considerably shortened and less dependent on fairies for the happy ending. Warner paraphrases that in Villeneuve’s version, “Beauty sighs that, though he treats her well, she finds him boring because he can utter only a few words and repeats them endlessly” (299). There could hardly be a more accurate description of Clegg, right down to the clichés 230 / LYNCH

he employs on every conceivable occasion. On whatever level–conscious, unconscious, or perhaps archetypal–Miranda’s thinking especially seems to be influenced by that particular tale. It is the main intertext she relies on to save herself. Warner, in her discussion of “Beauty and the Beast,” points out that such thinking is a near universal defense mechanism for women:

When women tell fairy stories, they…undertake this central narrative concern of the genre–they contest fear; they turn their eye on the phantasm of the male Other and recognize it, either rendering it transparent and safe, the self reflected as good, or ridding themselves of it (him) by destruction or transformation. (276)

Women in the stories being considered here are a subclass of the powerless in fairy tales generally: Beauty, who feels obligated to sacrifice herself to save her father; Bluebeard’s wife (to be discussed later), who gives special meaning to the “bonds” of matrimony; and Miranda, who has been kidnapped, and who like the other women is frail compared with her male counterpart. Clegg at first does not seem to be a candidate for a fairy tale character. His favorite role, in fact, is that of a “secret agent, or a detective” (22), and he prides himself both on the care with which he plans the kidnapping and on his ability to see through Miranda’s escape attempts. His dreams fall into the structure of fairy tales, however, and in particular of Beauty and Beast tales. He is an entomologist, and his vision of their ideal life together involves meetings of the “Bug Section,” where, “instead of saying almost nothing in case I made mistakes we were the popular host and hostess” (4). In his dream, somehow she transforms him into a socially acceptable character–a traditional role for the captive woman in de Beaumont’s tale and many others. Clegg elaborates on the process for attaining this dream after watching Miranda borrow a cigarette in a coffee shop. He calls it, in fact, “the dream that came true” (14), and his account shows the extent to which he is willing to borrow from and mingle stale fictional scenarios to serve his purpose. The dream, he says,

began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything. (14)

Clegg combines apparently incompatible fabulae in his effort to construct a “dream” of Miranda, but the end is a transformation typical of the shift in fairy tales from traumatic experience and melodrama to a normal, happy life–the stuff of “Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, or “The Juniper Tree.” So there is a Beauty and Beast element in Clegg’s thinking, specifically in his belief FOWLES / 231

that in an ordinary social context he could never get to know Miranda, but if she is forced to be in daily contact with him, “she’ll see my good points, she’ll understand” (14). And she will make him popular in his preferred social milieu: the Bug Section. What Clegg is banking on is precisely the moral of de Beaumont’s tale–the transforming power of love, especially its ability to enable one to value essences over appearances. At the very end of The Collector, when Clegg discovers Miranda’s diary, he is terribly bitter because, as he says, it “shows she never loved me” (303). Even if Clegg never thinks consciously of the tale, its narrative expectations are part of his mental processes, and the fact that he never puts a metarepresentational tag on his dream of Miranda, losing track of himself as the source of that dream, makes the betrayal all the more egregious in his mind. Miranda does not adopt Beauty’s methods of obedience and compassion at first, however. Her initial impulse is to outwit Clegg, to escape by tricking him. The trickster is characteristic of the folktale, as opposed to the fairy tale, in which the victim relies more on magic and enchantment, usually provided by some outside source (deceased relatives, fairy godmothers, etc.). Miranda expresses the trickster philosophy as she is thinking about her belief in God: “It’s no good trusting vaguely in your luck, in Providence or God’s being kind to you. You have to act and fight for yourself” (239). The victim is always weaker physically than the villain in folktales, and Miranda realizes that she is in the same position, so fighting means coming up with clever deceptions. For instance, she gets Clegg to allow her to write a letter, dictated by him, to her parents, and slips a tiny piece of paper into the envelope to indicate that she is being held captive. Or she pretends, quite convincingly, to have appendicitis, so he will have to take her to the hospital. These kinds of tricks do not work with Clegg, though, because he never alters his choice of intertextual role. He is always the hard-boiled detective, never trusting anyone, least of all her. He is also, however, incredibly adaptable–he can live more than one role at the same time. At one point, for instance, Miranda asks for a cup of tea. He takes her up into the outer cellar, and while he makes the tea, he remarks, “We didn’t say anything, it was nice. The kettle boiling and her there. Of course I kept a sharp eye on her” (56). Clegg is able to merge the domestic dream with his role as jailer without being bothered by the fact that those are competing realities. Miranda never really understands Clegg’s ability to live contrasting roles simultaneously. In fact, Clegg resembles one of those bits of quantum matter that bubbles up out of nothing and then disappears in the act of appearing, so that we can never examine it; and that quality serves him well, since he can never afford to know himself. So Carol Barnum is right in labeling Clegg a kind of reverse quester, an adventurer who avoids self-knowledge (39-40). This avoidance is intentional, and Miranda’s only comment to Clegg that gets near the truth is that he is like a Chinese box (100). 232 / LYNCH

Clegg is never ready to trust Miranda, but he is always ready to revise the fabula to reflect a temporary trust and hope. So again, in a single scene he can remark on her “cunning” (52) and yet at a positive word from her declare, “It was suddenly as I always hoped, we were getting to know each other, she was beginning to see me for what I really was” (53). And he retains this ability right up to the point at which he finds her diary. When she falls seriously ill near the end of the novel, he is still able to renew his dream: “All the part from when she took off her clothes and I no longer respected her, that seemed to be unreal, like we both lost our minds. I mean, her being ill and me nursing seemed more real” (287). It is “more real” because she is helpless and dependent on him–it is the right fabula for Clegg. Clegg is also talented at adapting for his purposes what Eco calls “inferential walks”–imaginary walks outside the immediate narrative world in order to use knowledge of other stories to confirm a reading of the current narrative (Six Walks 50). In one scene, he has chloroformed Miranda again during an escape attempt. He carries her to the cellar room and puts her on the bed. Her clothing is disarranged, and he records getting excited. “It gave me ideas,” he says, “seeing her lying there right out.” Then he takes the walk:

I remembered an American film I saw once…about a man who took a drunk girl home and undressed her and put her to bed, nothing nasty, he just did that and no more and she woke up in his pyjamas. So I did that. I took off her dress and her stockings and left on certain articles…so as not to go the whole hog. She looked a real picture lying there.…Like she was wearing a bikini. It was my chance I had been waiting for. I got the old camera and took some photos. (91)

The disparity between the chivalrous actions of the film character and his own actions does not trouble Clegg. For him, the film is a perfect analogue. Palmer notes that all fictional characters create “embedded narratives” of themselves, just as the reader constructs versions of characters based on observations of them in different scenes. And, as Don Quixote’s determination to be a knight- errant causes him to make the storyworld of the novel fit that desire, creating his own embedded narrative, so the far less noble Clegg will ignore details to make his version of himself fit. Clegg is constantly re-forming reality with words as well. Even as he prepares for the kidnapping, he denies that he really means to do it: “All this time I never thought it was serious. I know that must sound very strange, but it was so. I used to say, of course, I’ll never do it, this is only pretending” (20). After he has actually committed the act that he denied he had any real intention of committing and Miranda tells him he has done a terrible thing, he immediately metamorphoses into the intrepid adventurer in order to justify himself: “I was very happy, as I said, and it was more like I had done something FOWLES / 233

very daring, like climbing Everest or doing something in enemy territory. My feelings were very happy because my intentions were of the best” (27-28). As with the detective identity, Clegg’s adopted roles tend to be generic, which allows him to improvise and move more easily from one role to another. If words fail him, he has the option of taking an inferential walk to confirm what cannot be confirmed in the reality of his own narrative world. One of Miranda’s limitations is that she always adopts specific identities from other texts and invests herself wholly in the intertextual role, making it difficult to adapt to circumstances the way Clegg does. One particularly effective linguistic tool Clegg uses to reconcile opposing versions of reality is the cliché. At one point in his narrative, he tells Miranda he will fix a date for her release if she meets “certain conditions”: “I don’t know why I said it. I knew really I could never let her go away. It wasn’t just a barefaced lie, though. Often I did think she would go away when we agreed, a promise was a promise, etcetera” (45). The cliché is a way of expressing an empty contradiction of the narrative situation Clegg has constructed for Miranda and himself, a contradiction that makes no commitment to action. In her diary, Miranda assumes that the clichés are just an expression of Clegg’s colorlessness, his being out of date (171). She has no idea they are more than an annoyance, even though she herself uses language as a defense. Both Clegg and Miranda, in fact, attempt to “do things with words” (see n. 5), to introduce alternate realities into the narrative. Miranda talks specifically about using the diary to “write myself into the other world” (166), and her focus on an older painter (and potential lover) named George Paston is so intense at times that it is as if she has introduced a third character into the action of the narrative. And again, Clegg and Miranda try to do things with words because they both find themselves in a narrative that imprisons them. Words and intertextual roles are all they have. Miranda can find no way to escape, and Clegg can find no way to let her go. As Miranda herself remarks, he is as much a prisoner as she is, imprisoned, like the beast, in his own body (228). Miranda lives in both mimetic and symbolic narratives, but sequentially, not simultaneously, eventually moving from the role of folktale trickster to fairy tale heroine. And the change is also a recognition that the “real” world of the fabula–the mimetic narrative that imitates phenomenal reality–is not going to work for her. She has to rewrite it. The background of folktale is the everyday world, with all of its limitations; the world of fairy tale is one of unlimited possibilities. She announces the change of strategy in her diary:

I’ve given up too soon with Caliban. I’ve got to take up a new attitude with him. The prisoner-warder idea was silly. I won’t spit at him anymore. I’ll be silent when he irritates me. I’ll treat him as someone who needs all my sympathy and understanding. I’ll go on trying to teach him things about art. Other things. (245) 234 / LYNCH

Later, she becomes more specific about the “other things”: “Perhaps I really should kiss him. More than kiss him. Love him. Make Prince Charming step out” (254). The following day, she decides that she will sleep with him. She must abandon “selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.” Instead, she must use “generosity (I give myself) and gentleness (I kiss the beast) and no-shame (I do what I do of my own free will) and forgiveness (he can’t help himself)” (256)–all precisely like Beauty in de Beaumont’s tale, and a radical departure from braining Clegg with the blunt end of a small axe, a technique Miranda tried earlier, in her folktale mode. Unfortunately for Miranda, she does not make Prince Charming step out. In attempting to offer herself to him, in fact, she does the one thing that would ruin his fantasy. If she had been paying attention to the everyday reality of their interactions, she would have known that it was the wrong thing to do, but she is too involved in squeezing him into an alternate narrative structure to notice. Her language implies a belief that there is a “Prince Charming” inside Clegg somewhere, but she is not reading his mind; instead, she plans to recreate his character. Earlier, in an attempt to do essentially the same thing, she tells him the fairy story referred to above. It begins “Once upon a time…there was a very ugly monster who captured a princess and put her in a dungeon in his castle.” In this tale, the monster wants the princess to tell him he is handsome, but she keeps telling him the truth, and that the only way he can shed his ugliness is by setting her free. So he does, and “suddenly, he wasn’t ugly anymore, he was a prince who had been bewitched.…And they both lived happily ever afterwards” (199). This is “Beauty and the Beast,” with one key exception: in Miranda’s tale, the monster can turn into a handsome prince by setting the princess free; in the traditional tale, the Beast must get Beauty to love him in spite of his ugliness. There is no expectation that he will change. The handsome prince is extra, and happiness lies in commitment, not freedom. In Clegg’s fairy tale, or dream, Miranda is cast in the role of princesse lointaine, the distant princess. She cannot be touched. She cannot be ordinary in any way. But after she offers herself to him, Clegg remarks, “she had killed all the romance, she had made herself like any other woman, I didn’t respect her anymore” (110). It would be easy enough to argue that Clegg is simply a psychopath who kidnaps and in effect murders a young woman. But it is also important to understand that, apart from the actual kidnapping and the force used at times to retain his prisoner, Clegg is an extraordinarily passive character. In some ways, what really makes him evil are his fictions. Technically, Miranda is what Gerard Genette calls an intradiegetic narrator: she is already a character in a narrative that is not her own before beginning to narrate (84). In reality, however, both Miranda and Clegg are irredeemably homodiegetic in the sense that they can only tell their own stories; neither is capable of telling a story that is genuinely about the other. That inability is the primary cause of the hopeless air that hangs over the story, and that many critics FOWLES / 235

remark on in their discussions of the circular nature of the narrative.6 Miranda would like to be Beauty, but she is no more capable of that transformation than Clegg is of turning into the handsome prince. In a way, she resembles more closely Scheherazade, except that her life-or-death task is to maintain a single story, not to keep telling different stories. Clegg’s choice of detective as a role is an odd one in some respects. Fictional detectives, after all, live in the gritty, everyday world, uninhabited by distant princesses. A more accurate fairy tale analogue for Clegg is Bluebeard. Clegg does not have Bluebeard’s capacity for violence, but he has all his distrust, and in particular distrust of women. That is Bluebeard’s purpose, in fact; he is looking for the mate he can trust–but he can never find her, and the same is true of Clegg, who has however decided at the end of the novel to try again.7 In the fairy tale, Bluebeard leaves his young wife alone in his castle with the freedom to go anywhere, except for one room that is forbidden to her. He also leaves her with some object that she must keep with her and restore to him on his return–usually the key to the forbidden room, sometimes an egg. In his absence, curiosity gets the better of her. She enters the room, is startled to discover the bloody remains of his former, equally curious wives, drops the key (or egg), and gets blood on it which proves impossible to remove. Much has been made of the key or other object by Freudian interpreters, but fairy tales, although they present tempting opportunities for such interpretations, are originally content to have the object serve its function in the plot without elaboration, much as fairy and folktale characters often act without apparent motivation. Modern realistic narrative is more demanding, however, and assuming Clegg fills the role of Bluebeard and Miranda is the young woman he has chosen to test, the question becomes, what is the key or the egg? One possible answer is her identity as the distant princess, which he gives to her to keep for him, and which she defiles in a way that cannot be cleansed. Clegg is not going to cut Miranda’s throat with a sword and hang her corpse on a wall, as Bluebeard does to his earlier wives in the Charles Perrault version, but he will let her die of pneumonia. Miranda, though she is not thinking of “Bluebeard,” makes another guess at the key: “Deep down in him, side by side with the beastliness…there is a tremendous innocence. It rules him. He must protect it” (260). And that is probably the closest she comes to understanding his character, though she has no idea how fictional that innocence is.8 One reason readers can sympathize with Miranda, apart from her status as victim, is that she at least tries to understand Clegg. Her guess at the secret he must protect is in fact a perfect example of the doubly embedded narrative, and is similar to the mind reading referred to earlier, although there may be a more wishful element involved in it here. Palmer’s example of this kind of mental activity is Emma Woodhouse (ironically, Miranda’s favorite fictional persona), who constructs a doubly embedded narrative of Mr. Knightley. As Palmer says, 236 / LYNCH

“She wonders about what image [in return] Knightley has of her in his mind, and she cares desperately about what it is” (231). In a normal relationship, each character has an existence in the other’s mind. Clegg, however, does not “contain” Miranda’s mind within his own in that caring sense Emma does with Knightley. In a way, Miranda does not even exist in Clegg’s mind. According to Palmer, “The lack of doubly embedded narratives demonstrates some very solipsistic states of mind” (234)–exactly what we might say of Clegg. Doubly embedded narratives operate primarily in novels narrated in third person, but in The Collector we have two first-person narrators offering competing versions of events, so the novel functions as a third-person narrative in effect, with ample opportunities for double embedding. Clegg does not take the same advantage of those opportunities that Miranda does, though. To the extent he assigns any identity at all to her, it is invariably generic, like his choices for himself: she is either the distant princess or a fallen woman, a prostitute. Importing a specific intertextual role for her would make her a subjectivity he would have to recognize. In spite of his stinginess in denying Miranda a separate identity, Clegg shares a kind of generosity with both the Beast and Bluebeard. The Beast provides Beauty with everything she asks for, and Bluebeard gives his wife access to all of his treasures, with the single prohibition that she is not to enter that one small room. Clegg offers Miranda anything money can buy, so that, as she says, every day is like Christmas (180). But, like Bluebeard, he adds one exception: she is forbidden her freedom. In the story of Bluebeard, entering that small room may be considered the same thing: an expression of freedom, of independence of mind. Clegg makes it clear that in his mind, Miranda has no right to her freedom. So, when she attempts to alert her parents to her situation by slipping the tiny piece of paper into the letter Clegg had dictated to her, and he finds it, he records, “I was really angry and shocked” (71), as if her action were an unwarranted betrayal of his trust. Or after she hits him with the axe in an attempt to escape, he remarks, “Of course I was bitter about it.…It was just about the straw that broke the camel’s back, as the saying is” (97). In the context, it is clear that the bitterness is over her ingratitude and betrayal, not the physical injury to him. There is always in his narrative the assumption that she should be grateful to him for his generosity and his chivalrous and restrained behavior; and nothing maddens Miranda more than realizing that at times she unconsciously accepts that assumption, along with the view that there is something normal about her captivity. As she says in her diary, “he has me (it’s mad, he kidnapped me) laughing at him and pouring out his tea, as if I’m his best girlfriend” (135). In terms of her captor’s attitude toward her potential freedom, Miranda is in the same position as Bluebeard’s wife, or the late seventeenth-century wife whose social position she represents.9 Clegg believes he has a right to her, and as he explains it, that right is related to wealth: “All right, you think I’m not normal keeping you here like this.…But I can tell FOWLES / 237

you there’d be a blooming lot more of this if more people had the money and the time to do it” (72). He speaks as if his fortune justified the act somehow. Bluebeard secures his wife, who is initially put off by his appearance and the mystery surrounding his former wives, by such lavish entertainments and other displays of great wealth that his beard appears, “not so blue after all” (144). In general, in late seventeenth-century France, wealth and position gave men the “right” to many apprehensive young women, and Clegg, who prides himself on being old-fashioned in his manners, seems to believe that using his power over Miranda is just another example of accepted tradition. One other behavioral and narrative element Clegg and Bluebeard share is seriality. In Perrault’s version, Bluebeard has had six previous wives, and we learn at the end of The Collector that Miranda will have a successor, someone “ordinary” whom Clegg believes he can “teach” (304). Warner notes that in the Bluebeard tales, seriality indicates the “anonymity” of the former wives, “their interchangeability, the failure of stable subjectivity” (271). Maintaining a “stable subjectivity” is a major problem for Miranda. As she puts it in her diary, “Sometimes I don’t seem real to myself, it suddenly seems that it isn’t my reflection only a foot or two away” (242). Like Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, she often identifies herself with the heroines of novels, most often with the title character of Jane Austen’s Emma, declaring at one point, “I am Emma Woodhouse” (166). But she is also Marianne in Sense and Sensibility (215), an anonymous imprisoned heroine in The Arabian Nights (227-28), Anne Frank (238-39), Major Barbara (144), and of course, the Miranda of The Tempest. And while she is attempting to establish a subjectivity for herself, Clegg is busy resocializing her, stripping away any identity she might have built up before her capture. Miranda calls to her aid Jane Austen novels. Clegg’s guide book is Secrets of the Gestapo, from which he learns the importance of cutting off his captive from her old world, so that, as he reasons, “she’d have to think about me more” (41). Miranda never quite figures out why he will not allow her a newspaper or radio or television, but she does understand the effect: “I feel I’ve lost all my bearings” (250). Part of Miranda’s difficulty is that she is genuinely ruled by a “tremendous innocence” (The Collector 260), one that prevents her from adopting intertextual roles in a more mature and useful way, as do other heroines who must deal with “Bluebeardy” characters. Tatar, for instance, describes Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as, “making productive use of fairy tales by reacting to them, resisting them, and rewriting them rather than passively consuming them and internalizing their values” (Secrets 73). Nowhere does Miranda demonstrate the ability to rewrite such roles. If one role does not work, she simply moves to adopt another. Both Clegg and Miranda are engaged from the start in constructing exclusive doubly embedded narratives for each other, and they do not write those narratives from scratch, as Lily Briscoe seems to do in her account of the Rayleys. They import them from other texts (Clegg’s 238 / LYNCH

“texts” being the narrow range of identities based on his version of the world); and the discovery or adoption of intertexts, according to Riffaterre, equals the discovery of structural invariants, which readers (and characters) must see as truth (86). The desperate nature of Miranda’s situation in particular ensures her inability to tamper with that truth and make “productive use” of fairy tales and other narratives. She sees herself as Emma Woodhouse, but Emma, like Jane Eyre, keeps track of herself as the source of her doubly embedded narratives in a way that Miranda cannot. Each character’s objectification of the other allows for wild swings of identity, so Clegg can go from Caliban to Prince Charming, and Miranda from princess to prostitute, but the real purpose of assigning those identities is to confirm their own imagined selves, regardless of the realities of the narrative world they inhabit. Such use of intertextual identities and narratives makes intersubjective or shared thinking impossible, and Fowles’s metaphor for that impossibility is a narrative that has to be told twice. One of the larger ironies of the novel is that each character is convinced at one time or another that he or she has figured out the other. Clegg boasts repeatedly of his ability to see through Miranda, and Miranda repays the insult, assuming that his tremendous innocence is little more than naiveté or inexperience. In theory, many fictional characters construct self-confirming narratives of the kind Eco describes, but the more desperate the narrative situation the characters find themselves in, the

more likely that WNc is to break loose from its mooring to the WN and become an exclusive and competing narrative that the actual world of the narrative will not support, and that the other character will not recognize. Both Miranda and Clegg act or imagine out of that kind of desperation: Miranda because her life depends on it, Clegg because his imagined identity depends on it. The fairy tale analogues Miranda adopts, consciously or unconsciously, and the ones Clegg acts, raise the same kinds of questions about intersubjectivity. Miranda, like Beauty, must see through the beast-like exterior of her captor and recognize internal worth, but she finds in Clegg only an empty space that she attempts, unsuccessfully, to fill. Unable to generate an original, useful doubly embedded narrative for Clegg within their fictional world, she ventures outside that world to adopt intertexts, but has no ability to adapt them to her relationship with him. Clegg’s choices of intertextual roles–the secret agent, the hard-boiled detective–are the typological equivalent of Bluebeard in their rejection of the principle of trust. And just as Bluebeard strips his victims of their subjectivity, Clegg cannot see Miranda, or any woman, as a stable subject. She must be what he needs her to be in order to confirm his own imagined identity. Bluebeard is not a role consciously chosen by Clegg, but unfortunately for Miranda, it is the role he plays.

MISERICORDIA UNIVERSITY FOWLES / 239

NOTES

1 Brooks emphasizes the active role of the reader in “performing” the narrative. Eco sees the text as equally active, but makes the same point about what Brooks terms the “passion for meaning” (19). Readers generally want to cooperate with texts, to allow the text to do its work on them (Six Walks 10). Michael Riffaterre also remarks on the “kinship between desire and narrative” (Fictional Truth 87). 2 Cooper does note Clegg’s attempt to “write” Miranda (33), and Salami argues that Miranda’s “female subjectivity is constructed within male discourse” (53), but neither comments at any length on the way Clegg and Miranda take on intertextual roles. Critics who have remarked on that practice have seen it as a character flaw rather than a strategy. Cooper also refers to “Beauty and the Beast” in a brief footnote, and refers even more briefly to Clegg as the “typological equivalent of Bluebeard” (35), but goes no further with either parallel. 3 I have adopted the term “symbolic narrative” from Nichols’s foreword to Riffaterre’s Fictional Truth. Nichols explains the ideas of the ninth-century Irish philosopher John Scottus Eriugena on two types of narrative: “mystery” and “symbolic.” Mystery narratives are based on recollected events in the world (i.e., on history), and they are “mysteries” because those events cannot be known completely. They correspond to Riffaterre’s mimetic narrative, or to verisimilitude. Eriugena’s “symbols” are not narratives based on historical events, but, in Nichols’s words, “discourses relating things that did not happen as though they had happened for didactic purposes…symbolic narrative may invent scenarios at will for the purpose of conveying truths that transcend specific situations” (Fictional Truth ix-x). Riffaterre writes of “symbolic systems” in fiction that “have the function of injecting a qualitatively different truth, a poetic truth, into a world of truth by verisimilitude” (54). Riffaterre’s concept might seem to be a long way from Eriugena’s separation of mystery from symbol, but as Nichols points out in Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography, Eriugena did not regard accounts of events in the world as without value, for those accounts, which he labeled historia, were not mimesis in the usual sense–not a simple imitation of phenomenal reality. They were a “re-writing” of that reality. They “did not seek to describe events as they were, but to transform them into texts” that separated “the imperfect reflections of the sensible world from the Truth” (9). 4 Riffaterre appears to limit discovery of the intertext, which he describes as a sort of textual unconscious, to the reader. If, however, readers may uncover the hidden and in so doing, “perform an exercise of truth-finding” (86), there is no reason characters aware of other narratives cannot do the same. 5 Clegg’s “reality” (and Miranda’s) has the desperate quality that Eco finds in a character from a short story by Alphonse Allais (Un drame bien parisien). In Allais’s text, a young married couple gets into a bitter argument after coming home from the theatre. At the height of the argument, the husband, Raoul, moves to strike his wife, Marguerite, and she turns to run from him. Just as he is about to lay hands on her, she turns and throws herself into his arms, crying, “Help, my darling Raoul, save me” (Role 264). As Eco points out, Marguerite knows that what she wants–to transform Raoul from the villain into her hero–is “logically (or narratively) impossible,” but she wants it so much that she believes it, and her belief “acquires a sort of performative value; she does things with words” (Role 213). Marguerite is engaged in the same activity as Clegg: working backward from the sjuzet or plot to the fabula. 6 Salami (47) and Tarbox (41), for instance, regard the circular nature of the narrative as an image for the “trap” Miranda is in, as well as an image for the repetitive nature of Clegg’s actions. 7 In the frame story of The Thousand and One Nights, King Schahriyar has the same problem. His solution to the unfaithfulness of his first wife is to behead succeeding wives the morning after each wedding. So, as Tatar notes, “The arousal of desire…is punished with death” (63). Tatar is referring to the arousal of desire in the wives. The irony of Miranda’s attempt to “make Prince Charming step out” is that the arousal of desire (or what must pass for it) in Clegg is also punished by death. 8 Tatar writes that given a choice between reading Bluebeard’s mind and that of his wife (the heroine of the tale, after all), “most readers would elect to enter the taboo regions of Bluebeard’s 240 / LYNCH

thoughts” (48-50), but the same would be true for the Beast and for Clegg–not because of the villain’s “narrative verve” (48) as Tatar argues in the case of Bluebeard, but because that is where all the secrets lie. 9 Warner notes that during the ancien regime, “women of high rank suffered from total powerlessness” (277-78).

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