DOCSLIB.ORG

L-G-0012831965-0046432386.Pdf

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
L-G-0012831965-0046432386.Pdf The Fictions of John Fowles This page intentionally left blank The Fictions of John Fowles POWER, Creativity, Femininity Pamela Cooper with a foreword by Linda Hutcheon University of Ottawa Press Ottawa • Paris University of Ottawa Press, 1991 Printed and bound in Canada ISBN 0-7766-0299-3 Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Cooper, Pamela, 1955- The fictions of John Fowles Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7766-0299-3 1. Fowles, John, 1926- — Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR6056.O85Z56 1991 823'.914 C91-090461-8 UNIVERSITE D'OTTAWA UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Cover Design: Judith Gregory Text Design: Marie Tappin CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Foreword Linda Hutcheon vii Introduction 1 1 The Collector 19 2 The Magus 51 3 The French Lieutenant's Woman 103 4 The Ebony Tower 143 Conclusion — Daniel Martin, Mantissa, A Maggot 193 Bibliography 223 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The production of this book owes much to the hard work and energy of various contributors, to whom I should like to extend my thanks. Linda Hutcheon has been a consistent source of critical wisdom and personal encouragement. Her enthusiasm for and commitment to the book sustained and inspired me throughout its production. John Baird was not only enlightening but supportive, generous, and wise — when the going got rough as well as when it was smooth. For invaluable work on the manuscript and thought- provoking critical insights, I am grateful to Barry Olshen, Henry Auster, Jay Macpherson, and Sylvia Van Kirk. The commitment, professionalism, and good judgement of my editor, Janet Shorten, have been indispensable to me throughout the book's publication; I appreciate also the well-judged editorial work of Jennifer Wilson. For the friendships that provided me with a sustaining context in which to work, affectionate thanks go particularly to Catherine Griffiths, Ginny Lovering, and Lally Grauer. And special gratitude goes unstintingly to my spouse, Keith Hayes, upon whose literary and linguistic acumen, patience, love, and knowledge of computer software the creation of this work has, at every stage, depended. I am grateful to the University of Toronto, the Trustees of the Connaught Fund, the Government of Ontario, and the Canadian Federation for the Humanities for financial aid during the production of the manuscript and its publication. This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Mervienne Vickers Cooper and Clive Cooper. Pamela Cooper University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1991 FOREWORD Linda Hutcheon Pamela Cooper's The Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity, Femininity marks an important departure from other work on a major British writer who has managed to straddle the line between the popular and the academic in his appeal and success. This is not an introductory or descriptive survey; we have several of these already. Instead, it presents a carefully argued thesis that radically challenges the received wisdom, so to speak, or the now canonical reading of Fowles's work primarily from the perspective of his interest in how the artist comes to terms with existential freedom. Cooper has turned that relatively benign interest in freedom upside down and revealed its dark postmodern underside — power. In so doing, she has probably put her finger on at least one of the reasons for Fowles's popularity': the interplay and tensions between power and freedom aren't exactly foreign to the experience of any of us today. Fowles has proved a particularly difficult author to write about with any degree of fairness. By this I mean that his novels certainly have their detractors (and their name is legion): paradox- ically, perhaps, they are usually found either too ethically conser- vative or too postmodernly formalist, too "tricky." This study goes beyond such first-level responses to tease out the complexities and ambiguities — moral and psychological, as well as literary — of the power relations between author and character, between author and reader. In Fowles's world, creator figures can be both tyrants and liberators, masters and slaves. Fowles's consistent ambivalence is one of the reasons he can and does end up being the darling (or the bane) of what seem like mutually incompatible camps of readers. He seems in tune with the liberal humanist values of the British tra- dition (such as a belief in the individual creative imagination and ethical responsibility); at the same time he is exploring more cur- rent and problematic issues of class and gender, while deploying what are considered postmodern narrative and linguistic strategies of reflexivity. His novels have always openly challenged notions of genre, narrative authority, textual singularity, and closure. vii PAMELA COOPER The complexity of these kinds of paradoxes is explored in Cooper's study primarily through examining the representation of women and thus the relation between art and gender in Fowles's novels. Those strong, self-reliant, seemingly independent female characters appear to be empowered by their creator to combat their age's restrictions, but the argument here is a convincing one: they are, in fact, re-inscribed and re-confined in other ways by the texts' reflexive narrative techniques as much as by the plots. These women end up being rendered passive, manipulated by both the narrative and its narrator, their creative potential contained by its relegation to the "feminine" instinctual realm, their voice muted. The paradigm? From being a "master" fiction-maker, Sarah Woodruff (in The French Lieutenant's Woman) becomes, in the end, a model for a male artist. This critical study deconstructs the latent politics beneath Fowles's apparently feminist sympathies, and anal- yzes the contradictions that result in the final attribution of full and mature artistic "potency" only to the male in all Fowles's fiction. Though obsessively his subject matter and alleged inspiration, woman has no creative power here. The passive object of the male gaze, she is always the represent^; never does she do the represent- ing. In this her role differs little from the one she had been assigned by those male authors and artists of the past whose work forms the dense intertextual background of Fowles's writing. Working from this point of view, Cooper rereads Fowles's use of the ethical and psychological principles of the traditional Bildungsroman. She also asks us to rethink the romance tradition upon which Fowles depends so much, but this time in terms of gen- der and control — psychosexual, moral, and aesthetic. In activating the concerns of feminist theory, she raises the questions of textuality and sexuality, of the politics of language and its usage. What is par- ticularly original about this book's central thesis is its reading of The Ebony Tower as the moment of potential breakthrough, the moment when new ideas could have altered the carefully constructed and internally consistent universe of Fowles's fiction. However, the chal- lenge was not taken, Cooper argues. The novels after 1974 are here read as retrenchment, as the retreading of safe and familiar terrain. One of the many pleasures of reading The Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity, Femininity is having one's former readings of these well-known novels turned on their head. But another is watching the author foreground in such an articulate way her own ambivalence towards the novels about which she writes. Her admira- tion and her suspicion, in about equal doses, shine through, and the mixture feels just right. INTRODUCTION The intensity of John Fowles's interest in power is matched by the ambiguity of his attitude towards it and the com- plexity with which he treats it in his fictions. Most of the significant relationships depicted in his work involve some sort of power strug- gle, for Fowles is at once suspicious of and fascinated by the efforts of individuals to control and influence each other. His first pub- lished novel, The Collector (1963), presents this struggle in its sim- plest form, as Miranda Grey's fight to wrest physical freedom from her jailer Clegg — although the spiritual antipathy between the two lends an important moral dimension to their clash. Subsequent works analyze more subtle, intricate or abstract power relationships. In Fowles's second novel, The Magus (1966, revised 1977), Conchis is a kind of psychological bully who tries to torment Nick Urfe into emotional growth. The ambiguously benevolent despot- ism of a teacher/magician is questioned here in the alacrity with which Conchis combines seduction and brutality. The sadistic but enlightened older man rapidly becomes a symbolically resonant fig- ure for Fowles; he does in fact appear as far back as The Collector, in the form of Miranda's shadowy and rather sinister mentor, George Paston. In The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), Sarah Woodruff battles the conventional sexual attitudes of an era that seeks — mainly through Doctor Grogan as the representative of canonical scientific wisdom — to brand her a lunatic. Here Fowles's ambivalence about power is expressed in his authorial and narratorial refusal fully to grant Sarah the independent identity she seems to crave. This sense of literary characters as potentially and 2 PAMELA COOPER disruptively autonomous — despite their status as projections of the authorial imagination — reflects not only Fowles's awareness of the nouvectu roman, but the more palpable influence of one of his older contemporaries: Fowles evidently admires Flann O'Brien's boister- ous and anarchic At Swim-Two-Birds more than Robbe-Grillet's chilly and disengaged La Jalousie. O'Brien experiments as energetically with the stylistic legacy of Joyce as Fowles does with that of his favoured modernist, Eliot. Expanding their predecessors' interrogations of literary form in explicitly metafictional directions, both O'Brien and Fowles use the strategies of fictional self-consciousness to explore the different possible freedoms available within and operating upon the text.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Fiction John Fowles, the Collector, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963
    BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS BY JOHN FOWLES Fiction John Fowles, The Collector, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963. —— Daniel Martin, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977. —— The Ebony Tower, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974. —— The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969. —— A Maggot, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. —— The Magus, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978. —— Mantissa, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982. Nonfiction John Fowles, The Aristos, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964. —— The Enigma of Stonehenge, New York: Summit Books, 1980. —— Foreword, in Ourika, by Claire de Duras, trans. John Fowles, New York: MLA, 1994, xxix-xxx. —— Islands, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978. —— Lyme Regis Camera, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990. —— Shipwreck, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975. —— A Short History of Lyme Regis, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982. —— Thomas Hardy’s England, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984. —— The Tree, New York: The Ecco Press, 1979. Translations Claire de Duras, Ourika, trans. John Fowles, New York: MLA, 1994. 238 John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur Essays John Fowles, “Gather Ye Starlets”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 89-99. —— “I Write Therefore I Am”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 5-12. —— “The J.R. Fowles Club”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 67. —— “John Aubrey and the Genesis of the Monumenta Britannica”, in Wormholes, ed. Jan Relf, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 175-96. —— “The John Fowles Symposium, Lyme Regis, July 1996”, in Wormholes, ed.
    [Show full text]
  • A Critical Study of the Novels of John Fowles
    University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Spring 1986 A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE NOVELS OF JOHN FOWLES KATHERINE M. TARBOX University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation TARBOX, KATHERINE M., "A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE NOVELS OF JOHN FOWLES" (1986). Doctoral Dissertations. 1486. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/1486 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE NOVELS OF JOHN FOWLES BY KATHERINE M. TARBOX B.A., Bloomfield College, 1972 M.A., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1976 DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English May, 1986 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This dissertation has been examined and approved. .a JL. Dissertation director, Carl Dawson Professor of English Michael DePorte, Professor of English Patroclnio Schwelckart, Professor of English Paul Brockelman, Professor of Philosophy Mara Wltzllng, of Art History Dd Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I ALL RIGHTS RESERVED c. 1986 Katherine M. Tarbox Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to the memory of my brother, Byron Milliken and to JT, my magus IV Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
    [Show full text]
  • Choice of Theme in John Fowles's Mantissa
    school and in society. tudes one cannot give absolute interpretations of these results. The element of subjectivity could It can be concluded that children like any have been minimised by offering the sample a other age group of the human race, all have their limited number of responses and a forced choice own wishes and needs. Differences arise because would have had to be made. It would also be inter­ of the motivation one has and the goals for which esting to study wishes of other groups as well as fulfilment of these wishes is sought. Satisfaction or factors - such as family background and ability fulfilment of wishes may be immediate or delayed levels - which could contribute to a meaningful and age is an important factor in this respect. understanding of why children make particular However, what can be said with certainty is that wishes. whatever type of wish is expressed whether seeking belongingness, security, independence, adventure, new experiences, constructing or knowing something, requesting a material References possession or a future achievement, whether the wish arises from processes taking place within the Bellak, L. (1954) The Thematic Apperception Test and the body or stimulated by external objects or even the Children's Apperception Test in Clinical Use; New York, need for expression of feeling - all children have Grune and Stratton. their wishes and needs and they should be helped Cronbach, L.J. (1970) Essentials of Psychological Testing; New as much as possible to facilitate the realization of York, Harper and Row. these wishes. Murray, H.A. et al. (1938) Explorations in Personality; London, Oxford University.
    [Show full text]
  • Fowles's Portrait of the Artist As Failure
    California State University, Northridge FOWLES'S PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS FAILURE A thesis submitted in partial satisfac- tion of the requirements for the de­ gree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English. by Gary A. Maki Received: May, 1984 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction 1 II. Failure to Survive--The Collector 5 III. Failure in Revision--The Magus 10 IV. Effects of Creative Choice--The French Lieutenant's Woman 17 v. Self-Deception--Daniel Martin 24 VI. Necessity of Failure--Mantissa 31 VII. Summary 36 VIII. End Notes 37 IX. Bibliography 40 ii. 1 I. Richard Boleslavsky, in his Acting: The First Six Les- sons, details two conditions necessary to the conception of art: "You suffered just now; you felt deeply. Those are two things without which you cannot do in any art."l Ac- cording to Boleslavsky, an artist must be sensitive--must feel and suffer before he can create meaning through his art. Artists in modern existential literature conform.to Bol- eslavsky's prerequisite suffering and feeling. However, an ,.. .. existential.artist can pearch for meaning without being a maker of art: Existentialist Herman H~sse view's the artist as ,any· sensitive person cohdemned to-suffer and_to~ndure . life in an absurd universe: . "They (arti~ts). are not heroes, . ,. artists or thinkers· ip. the. same way ·that other· men· are judges, doctors, shoemakers or schoolmasters." Existential \ artists don't make a profession out of ·their~ suffering. He . continues: ''Their life ,·consists of a perpetual .. tiCI.e, un- ., ~ happy and to.rn with pain,, terrible ~nd meaningless-, UI?-less ' .
    [Show full text]
  • Abjection and Social Transformation in John Fowles's
    ABJECTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION IN JOHN FOWLES‘S MANTISSA AND A MAGGOT by Jenifer A. Skolnick A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2010 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis committee chair, Dr. Eric Berlatsky, whose guidance, thoughtful insights, and reassurance were critical to me during this process. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Wenying Xu and Dr. Robert Adams, for the inspiration I received from their courses and the encouragement to believe in my academic goals. I would like to thank my family for their patience, understanding, and faith in me. I could never have made it this far without their support. I am indebted to my colleagues who shared all the highs and lows with me because they were going through the same process. Having such caring and talented people by my side along this journey truly made the experience unforgettable. iii ABSTRACT Author: Jenifer A. Skolnick Title: Abjection and Social Transformation in John Fowles‘s Mantissa and A Maggot Institution: Florida Atlantic University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Eric L. Berlatsky Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2010 In John Fowles‘s last two novels, he alters his authorial project of discovering freedom for an individual from a social system to how a social system can be changed from within. Using Julia Kristeva‘s theory of abjection and her interpretation of the semiotic versus symbolic processes of signification, readers can determine how an imbalance in the human signifying process has become corrupted by power.
    [Show full text]
  • Re-Reading the Reforgotten Text: John Fowles' Mantissa
    Eger Journal of English Studies VIII (2008) 51–73 Re-Reading the Reforgotten Text: John Fowles’ Mantissa Tibor Tóth I start from the assumption that John Fowles’ novel entitled Mantissa 1 published in 1982 in Paris can be interpreted as a book which sums up its author’s earlier approaches to the theme of freedom, and that the hypothesis refers to the freedom of the author, of his characters, of his texts, the genre and his readers. I intend to follow the guidelines formulated by authorised interpretations of John Fowles’ art, to which I add my interpretations based on a close reading of the novel in the hope that the conclusions will justify the compatibility of my statements with some relevant theses formulated by contemporary theories. The methods by way of which I approach the above mentioned thesis are determined by the complexity noticed by Pamela Cooper in her excellent survey of John Fowles’ works entitled The Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity Femininity. She asserts that the novelist’s latest work repeats themes more convincingly formulated in his earlier works, but observes the original quality of the artist’s handling of his material in Mantissa: As a whole, Fowles’ Mantissa is a reconfirmation of the woman in her passive, instrumental role relative to art, language, and narrative, a kind of ‘road not taken’. (193) The complexity of the novel attracted the attention of Mahmoud Salami as well who in his book entitled John Fowles Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism formulates the thesis that the novel foregrounds the subjective authority behind the illusion of objectivity and defines the novel as a book which is about nothing else but itself: By and large Mantissa is a novel that challenges its own narratological making.
    [Show full text]
  • Proquest Dissertations
    INFORMATION TO USERS This reproduction was made from a copy of a document sent to us for microfilming. While the most advanced technology has been used to photograph and reproduce this document, the quality of the reproduction is heavily dependent upon the quality of the material submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help clarify markings or notations which may appear on this reproduction. l.The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". If it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting through an image and duplicating adjacent pages to assure complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a round black mark, it is an indication of either blurred copy because of movement during exposure, duplicate copy, or copyrighted materials that should not have been filmed. For blurred pages, a good image of the page can be found in the adjacent frame. If copyrighted materials were deleted, a target note will appear listing the pages m the adjacent frame. 3. When a map, drawing or chart, etc., is part of the material being photographed, a definite method of "sectioning" the material has been followed. It is customary to begin filming at the upper left hand corner of a large sheet and to continue from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. If necessary, sectioning is continued again-beginning below the first row and continuing on until complete.
    [Show full text]
  • The Writability of the Female Character in John Fowles's Mantissa
    Eger Journal of English Studies XV (2015) 59-72 Authority and Authorship: The Writability of the Female Character in John Fowles’s Mantissa and The Collector Tamás Tukacs In The Fictions of John Fowles: Power, Creativity, Femininity, Pamela Cooper paints a rather unfavourable picture of Fowles’s attempt at redefining the man- woman relationship and his philosophy based on certain metaphysical and romantic oppositions. Speaking about Mantissa, perhaps the most experimental and postmodern of Fowles’s text, she claims that Erato’s endless transformations are downright boring (205). She goes on to assert that “this presentation of the female would-be narrator in terms of a fantasy of narratorial transvestitism is extremely cynical” (209), arriving at the final verdict regarding Fowles’s 1982 novel: “Mantissa, like The Magus, reconstitutes and promotes […] male egotism” (212). In this essay I wish to show that, as regards the conflict of male authorship and female autonomy, both Mantissa and its obvious predecessor in this respect, The Collector, are far from being examples of “male egotism.” I am going to have a look at the concepts of supplement and repression to make sense of the woman characters’ ontological status in these novels and show those self-reflective and textualising processes that subvert Fowles’s didactic and metaphysical hierarchies, concluding that what a certain school of feminist criticism prefers to view as the conflict of tyrannical male authorship and the autonomy of female characters is, in fact, a dynamism endlessly reinforcing and mirroring these two sides of the antagonism in a mutually subversive manner. 60 Tamás Tukacs 1.
    [Show full text]
  • An Analysis of Daniel Martin by John Fowles: a Postmodern Novel with the Aspects of the Victorian Bildungsroman
    PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences ISSN 2454-5899 Berna Koseoglu, 2017 Volume 3 Issue 2, pp. 224 - 233 Date of Publication: 05th September, 2017 DOI-https://dx.doi.org/10.20319/pijss.2017.32.224233 This paper can be cited as: Koseoglu, B. (2017). An Analysıs of Danıel Martın by John Fowles: A Postmodern Novel wıth the Aspects of the Vıctorıan Bıldungsroman. PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences, 3(2), 224-233. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. AN ANALYSIS OF DANIEL MARTIN BY JOHN FOWLES: A POSTMODERN NOVEL WITH THE ASPECTS OF THE VICTORIAN BILDUNGSROMAN Berna Koseoglu Assist. Prof. Dr., Kocaeli University, Kocaeli, Turkey [email protected] Abstract John Fowles, one of the most significant post-war English novelists, produced remarkable postmodern novels in which he combined fiction with history. Dealing with the concepts of internal exile, individual isolation and loneliness, he dwelt on duality, fragmentation, discontinuity, the combination of the past and the present and the search of the individual for whole sight. His novel, Daniel Martin, portrays these features, however it not only includes these aspects of postmodern novels, but it also acquires the significant characteristics of the Victorian Bildungsroman, one of the remarkable types of realistic novels. Thus, the aim of this study is to identify the combination of realism and postmodernism in Daniel Martin in the light of the struggles of the protagonist, who tries to eliminate his fragmented identity and to achieve a sense of wholeness, so in this paper the characteristics of postmodern novels will be analyzed together with the traits of the Bildungsroman by concentrating on the relationship between history and fiction.
    [Show full text]
  • John Fowles in Focus
    SPRING 2016 A PETIT LITERARY JOURNAL VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 A WORD FROM THE EDITOR John Fowles in Focus John Fowles was truly a Renaissance man, one whose interests ran from a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of horticulture to collecting fossils and “All human beings should behave as if they coffee cups as well as writing fiction, non-fiction and poetry. We had a minor correspondence dating back to 19xx, but we never met until 1996 while I are mysteries to themselves.” was on a Leverhulme Fellowship to the University of East Anglia. We met at JOHN FOWLES in Interview with SUSANA ONEGA, Zaragoza* his Belmont home in Lyme Regis at which point I asked him if I could use his name as part of a literary series I wanted to organize. Fowles’s answer was to the point: “Anything for students.” And so, in 1997, I organized the first John Fowles Literary Series under the auspices of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing. Nineteen years later, I have started an online literary journal titled Mantissa, named after one of his favorite novels. It is especially important since most critics didn’t like the novel, but given Fowles’s somewhat irascible nature, that probably suited him. One of the definitions of Mantissa is a “minor addition to a text” and, in some ways, the aim of the journal is to be an addition to some of the undercurrents in the novel which deal with a panoply of themes from the writer-Muse relationship based on the Muses in Greek mythology to the subtheme dealing with Structuralist and post-Structuralist literary theory that states art is self- enclosed and self-referential and Fowles’s Mantissa is a novel about its own writing which makes constant reference to other writers and their work.
    [Show full text]
  • 145041175.Pdf
    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.
    [Show full text]
  • Writing and the Self: John Fowles' Autobiographical Non-Fiction
    SEFAD, 2017 (38): 23-32 e-ISSN: 2458-908X Writing and the Self: John Fowles’ Autobiographical Non-Fiction Yrd. Doç. Dr. Barış Mete Selçuk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Bölümü [email protected] Abstract One of the greatest novelists of the twentieth-century English Literature, John Robert Fowles (1926-2005), claims that he has always wanted to write poetry and philosophy. Despite the lack of the same critical interest in his non-fiction as in his fiction, it is his non- fiction as well as his fiction where Fowles makes clear what it means to him to be a writer, and a novelist in particular. Some of Fowles’ essays specially represent his obsessions with and passions for writing as a prolific novelist. He says, for example, referring to this idea that writing is a natural process like love. Moreover, Fowles’ essays quickly remind the reader of especially his fiction of the notions and the themes that he has already dealt with in his novels. In addition to all these, Fowles surprisingly confesses in one of his essays that a simple image of a woman standing at the end of a deserted quay and staring out to sea was how one of his most famous and one of his most acclaimed novels of the twentieth-century English literature came to life (This novel is the writer’s 1969 work, The French Lieutenant’s Woman.). Fowles, in his essays, does not hesitate to talk about the difficulties he had either. Writing, for Fowles, is a very personal business. Fiction making is creating another world.
    [Show full text]