1 John Fowles: the Life and the Work 2 the Collector

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1 John Fowles: the Life and the Work 2 the Collector Notes 1 JOHN FOWLES: THE LIFE AND THE WORK 1. He did not care for Leigh-on-Sea, his birthplace: 'The rows of respectable little houses inhabited by respectable little people had an early depressive effect on me and I believe that they caused my intense and continuing dislike of mankind en masse' (Wakerman, 1975, p. 485, quoted in Conradi, 1982, p. 22). 2. Fowles's only sister is fifteen years younger than him. 3. Fowles uses this French spelling throughout his work, presumably as a homage to Alain-Fournier. 4. 'the power to affect ... by imaginative means is strictly dependent on precisely that same active energy of imagination in the audience [as that whichllay behind the creation' (Islands, p. 101, emphasis in original). 5. I am far from the first to treat Fowles's works as romances. What I have sought to do is to follow through the implications of the romance form more single-mindedly (not to say obsessively) than other critics have done, and to try to locate the apparent contradictions and tensions of Fowles's work within his chosen form, rather than in a clash between that form and something outside it. It is only fair to add that Fowles has consistently rejected this interpretation of his work. The point is discussed in some detail in Chapter 7 (pp. 145-51) below. 2 THE COLLECTOR 1. Though in fact the use of Clegg's story to frame Miranda's was an afterthought and came as a recommendation from Fowles's editor. The author had originally submitted the two accounts in sequence (Dlshen, 1978, p. 20). 2. It may be objected here that there is no a priori reason to assume that Fowles thinks like G.P. To this I would answer, firstly, that Fowles almost always puts a magus or mentor into his books - G.P. is succeeded by Conchis, Grogan, Breasley, Professor Kirnberger; secondly, that what these mentors have to say varies astonishingly little; and thirdly, that what they say matches very closely what Fowles himself writes in propria persona, e.g. in The Aristos. Even the Goldberg Variations, favourites of Fowles's fictional characters in The Collector (p. 201) and Daniel Martin (pp. 627-8), turn out to be Fowles's (unplayed) first choice on Desert Island Discs! 3. There is also one point of flat factual contradiction. Clegg dates this celebration to 11 November, Miranda to 14 November. In view of the details given on p. 49 of the book I am inclined to think that this is merely a slip on the part of author and proof-reader alike, a view which Fowles himself confirms (personal interview). 155 156 Notes 4. This contrast between the spontaneous and authentic present and the cold and distanced past is one which Fowles returns to frequently in his writing (see Daniel Martin , passim, and The Tree, pp. 70 and 108-22). A most helpful and suggestive discussion appears in Walker, 1980. 5. 'The boy in The Collector stands for the Many; the girl for the Few' (Fowles in Newquist, 1964, p. 219). 6. 'I also wanted to attack [in The Collector] ... the contemporary idea that there is something noble about the inarticulate hero' (Fowles in Newquist, 1964, p. 218.) 3 THE MAGUS 1. References throughout are to The Magus: A Revised Version (1977). Page numbers are the same in both hardback and paperback editions. My argument (though not, of course, the detail of my quotations) applies equally to the first version, published in 1966 but in fact largely written in the 1950s. For accounts of some of the differences between the two versions, see Binns, 1977, or (more detailed) Docherty, 1981, pp. 122-3. 2. Fowles's comment here runs as follows: 'I find this paragraph slightly perverse. The donnt?e (right or wrong) is that he is trying to represent (or make present again) what he was at that age. "In my view then " is to be understood. Like everyone else, I think you rather undersell N's "honesty", if we are to treat him as autobiographer: 3. As used here these terms are borrowed from Scholes, 1968, pp. 15-17, 35-40. Plot is linear, chronological, recounting events in the sequence in which they occur in the book: we speak of 'a plot summary'. Design, on the other hand, is a slightly more elusive term: it covers those aspects of the story which give it shape and completeness, and which we often become aware of only after we have finished - after, that is, we have completed the line ofthe plot. If we say that an event/ollows another, we are speaking from the viewpoint of plot; if we say that two events (or characters, or situations) are related to one another, it is design we have in mind. 4. The classic combination of these forms in English literature is of course Great Expectations, and Fowles has acknowledged the influence of this novel by inserting two references to it into the text of the revised Magus (see pp. 6-7 of the Foreword, and pp. 347 and 392 of the text). 5. Fowles has often spoken of his admiration for Thomas Love Peacock, whose works are of precisely this type. 6. The act, which is of necessity incomplete and culminates in his ejaculating upon her breasts, seems to Nick 'like being with a prostitute' and makes him think of Alison as 'my mistress and my slave' (pp. 263-4). 7. The allusion (mine) is to Swann, significantly a collector of objets and of amours, who falls in love with one of his conquests in Un Amour de Swann because she reminds him of something from the world of art, a figure in a Botticelli. 8. It is only fair to point out that Nicholas is at least intermittently aware of the affinities between himself and the unspeakable Mitford: 'I disliked Mitford because he was crass and mean, but even more because he was a caricature, an extension, of certain qualities in myself ... I thought of Lily de Seitas; how to her I must seem as Mitford did to myself. A barbarian' (p. 616). 9. One of the more marked changes in the Revised Version concerns the rewriting of the final chapter so as to tone down drastically its violence of action and imagery, Notes 157 and thereby to emphasise the positive aspect of Nicholas. See Docherty (1981) for a more detailed discussion of this point. 10. To pick out only a few examples: Conchis is named after his mother (p. 81), as is Mrs de Seitas (p. 596); Alison's mother outlives her father (p. 33), as did Conchis's (p. 171); Conchis has a picture of his mother, supposedly by a mother-obsessed artist (p. 92); and Lily and Rose are so called to placate their grandmother, who was 'a hungry goddess' (p. 595). 11. This view is supported by Fowles's reading of The Tempest: 'It has, I think justly, been interpreted as a play with a cast of one; that is, its eleven main parts can all be seen as aspects of the one mind' (Islands, p. 104). 12. Fowles himself rejects this: 'Conchis/conscious offends me' (Huffaker, 1980, p.140). 13. See e.g. Daellenbach, 1977. 4 THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN 1. Ian Watt speaks of its 'harmonious ... mingling of the old and the new' (1969, p. 75), and Malcolm Bradbury describes it as 'the best book out of Britain in the 1960's' (Bradbury, 1980). 2. See for example pp. 15, 29, 40, 181, 242, 280, 321, 330. 3. Fowles reveals in a footnote to the English edition (p. 204) that La Ronciere was exonerated and rehabilitated in 1848. In the American edition (p. 245) the corresponding footnote is rather longer and gives the full background to the events which led up to the trial. 4. Her coat is caught on a bramble on p. 104, and on p. 158 she compares herself to a thorn tree. 5. Sarah is as elusive as Sue Bridehead; like Eustacia Vye, she is '[a] vivid heroine offered a job reading to an elderly lady', and like Eustacia (though with happier results) she is intimately associated with water. Where Tess worked at Talbothays, Sarah works for a Mrs Talbot (who, by yet another apparently meaningless coincidence, is '[her] own age exactly', p. 148); like Tess, she is the victim of her father's 'obsession with his own ancestry' (p. 51); and like Tess, Eustacia, and other Hardy heroines, her fortunes turn upon an undelivered letter. (For these and other references, see Wolfe, 1976, pp. 127 and 145.) 6. The distinction I am drawing here - between events in their time sequence, and events as they happen in the text - broadly corresponds to Shklovsky'sfabula and sjuzet (Bennett, 1979, p. 23) and Genette'shistoire andrecit (Genette, 1972, p. 72). 7. The first comment is from David Robinson, The Times, 16 October 1981; the second is from Alan Brien, The Sunday Times, 18 October 1981. 8. For Fowles's own comments on this aspect of the work, see pp. 141-3 of 'Notes on an Unfinished Novel'. 9. I prefer to relegate to a footnote a remark made by Fowles in an interview: 'The French Lieutenant's Woman was a cheat ... I thought it was ... obvious' (Sage, 1974, p. 35). 10. It has been pointed out that Sarah's character fits extraordinarily closely into a pattern suggested by lung, whose influence Fowles has often acknowledged. The relevant quotation is as follows: '[Woman's] moods and emotions do not come to her directly through the unconscious, but are peculiar to her feminine nature.
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