TICK-TOCK: DISLOCATION OF TIME IN JOHN FOWLES’S THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN By Kelly L. Miller A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate Studies Division of Ohio Dominican University Columbus, Ohio in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH August 2015 ii iii CONTENTS CERTIFICATION PAGE …………………………………………………………..ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………………...iv INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 1: JOHN FOWLES’S WORKS AND LITERARY CLIMATE ………..4 CHAPTER 2: “I DON’T THINK OF IT AS A HISTORICAL NOVEL”: A CASE FOR A POSTMODERNIST HISTORICAL NOVEL ……………………..12 CHAPTER 3: WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?: QUESTIONING AND DISLOCATING TIME ………………………………………………20 CHAPTER 4: NAÏVE NEEDS: CONCORDANCE AND ENDINGS …………….51 CONCLUSION: TICK-TOCK ……………………………………………………..68 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………71 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to sincerely thank Dr. Juliette Schaefer for her guidance, patience, and suggestions. In addition, thank you for introducing me to Fowles and re-introducing me to Victorian literature. I would also like to thank Dr. Martin Brick for his support, suggestions, and graduate-level study of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Dr. Schaefer and Dr. Brick, each of your courses brought me to realize my interest in the ideas of this thesis. I would like to express my deepest gratitude for my husband, Brian, and my children, Dayne, Graden, and Nora. Your support is my most treasured blessing. I would also like to thank my family. Your help with the children made this project possible. Finally, thank you to my friend and classmate Sara. I am so grateful we completed this journey, this degree, together. 1 INTRODUCTION Tarbox. How do you deal with the feeling that your reader has expectations of you—that you tell a story, that you end a book, and so on? Fowles. I hope they’ll follow me in that department. No writer is in control of how people read his books, and this, in some moods, is the delicious thing about the book; because, no matter how precisely and fully you describe something, you never, never know how the reader’s going to read it. --The Art of John Fowles, “Interview with John Fowles” 176 John Fowles revels in the unknown, the ambiguous, and the never, never knowing. In fact, his penchant for the paradoxical is one of his most defining authorial traits. His ambiguous narrative is both a common complaint by critics and a common point of interest. Even before his most popular novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, was published in 1969, he amassed an American, contemporary following with his 1963 novel The Collector and 1965 novel The Magus. Fowles’s success in Britain trailed because of deprecatory criticism by British critics’ reviews. His popularity with general readers preceded his popularity with scholars. In John Fowles: A Reference Guide, Barry Olshen and Toni Olshen cite his lagging acceptance in academia as a perceived imbalance in his work. Fowles’s body of work, on one hand, critics perceived as moralizing: “the overly didactic features of nearly everything he writes, fiction and non-fiction alike, has tended on the whole, to detract from his reputation as an artist” (Olshen and Olshen viii). On the other hand, critics voiced consternation that his fiction: “sometimes seems even too suggestive, too inexplicit, especially in regard to his characteristically open or multiple endings” (Olshen and Olshen viii). It seems that Fowles’s works said too much and yet did not say enough, at least not clearly enough. However, The French Lieutenant’s Woman brought acclaim to Fowles, situating him in the graces of both academic and popular readership. The popularity of his works illustrates that an audience “follows” Fowles. 2 However, Fowles’s work is not always easy to follow because Fowles often denies readers the expectations they have for telling a story and ending a book. The novelistic structure and narrative devices in The French Lieutenant’s Woman challenge readers by using the novel as a means to bring readers to see expectations of novels as restrictive by focusing on various forms of time—a universal entity, and by undermining novelistic conventions. The novel highlights the unstable nature of time, bringing to the forefront temporal flux, instability, and illusion. Fowles crafts a theme around this concept of time by engaging readers’ interaction by problematizing temporal representations in ways that disorient readers and questions what readers “know” about time. The text guides readers in recognizing their disorientation and addressing their confusion. In order to explore this topic, Chapter 1 examines the qualities of John Fowles’s work and his reception in the literary climate in which he wrote. Fowles’s life works show a dedication to readers’ engagement and heuristic discovery by using Postmodernist techniques that engage in history and show relevance to contemporary readers’ time. Chapter 2 explores a common argument by scholars who try to classify the genre of The French Lieutenant’s Woman as either a historical novel or a contemporary novel. However, the novel is both a nineteenth-century and a twentieth-century novel. The conflation of time, the coexistence of two centuries, is an early identifier to readers that Fowles challenges expectations of time. Chapter 3 illustrates various ways that Fowles dislocates time in the novel. By questioning and subverting expectations of time, Fowles challenges readers to recognize their expectations of novels and their discomfort when he restructures the novel. Chapter 4 highlights one of the most debated elements about the novel, the multiple endings. Though critics recognize three endings, a fourth ending should be considered. By creating a relation between eschatology and fiction, the expectations for endings are shown to be overwhelming machinations conferring tyrannical significance onto the 3 beginning and middle of fiction. By examining the ways in which Fowles undermines expectations of time and challenges traditional novelistic structures, the novel illustrates that disoriented readers engage in a heighted participatory act of reading. 4 CHAPTER 1 JOHN FOWLES’S WORKS AND LITERARY CLIMATE John Fowles’s Works In Fowles’s first published novel, The Collector (1963), a clerk’s obsession with collecting butterflies becomes an obsession to collect a young and beautiful art student. Critics praised Fowles’s ability to write suspense and narrative in The Collector. To avoid a too rigid classification as “novelist,” Fowles then wrote his collection of philosophical aphorisms in The Aristos. His next novel published, The Magus, was written before The Aristos in 1950 but underwent revisions and was published in 1965. He revised the text and published it again in 1977. The Magus is a suspense novel that employs heavy symbolism. Fowles’s protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, teaches on a Greek island where he befriends Conchis who plays suspenseful psychological games on disillusioned Urfe. The Magus became a “cult” novel in America with adolescent fans intent on reading spiritual self-discovery novels (Olshen and Olshen xiii). Fowles’s first three works began to show a thematic trend towards self-discovery. Fowles’s next work The French Lieutenant’s Woman aroused debate regarding the genre of the novel. In brief, the nineteenth-century historical setting holds the interest of the Victorianist; the meta-narration by a twentieth-century narrator holds the interest of the Postmodernist. Regardless of the genre, this novel represents the point in Fowles’s career when his popularity established him as a literary force with an increase in academic critiques in scholarly journals and doctoral dissertations (Olshen and Olshen xvi). In 1977 Fowles published the novel Daniel Martin, another novel whose protagonist, Daniel Martin, wrestles with a self- reflective crisis. Fowles published Mantissa (1982) next and received negative reviews for tiresome imaginary dialogue between ideas in a protagonist writer’s head and a muse. His last 5 published novel, A Maggot (1985), was another “historical” novel set in England during the 1730s. He also published collections of short stories, a book of poetry, and various nonfiction essays. Fowles claimed: “one thing a modern writer should not be committed to: a style. The next great mega-European writer will write in all styles, as Picasso has painted and Stravinsky composed” (“I Write” 11). Fowles’s reviews are often bifurcated between praise and pejoratives, and he took risks in his writing that did not always enhance his reputation, and yet Fowles’s body of work show a writer’s exploration of style. Fowles explored styles, but he maintained consistency to a thematic concept throughout his works. While the clerk in Fowles’s The Collector is obsessed with collecting and classifying butterflies, Fowles’s works show resistance against stultifying classifications and literary boundaries: “What to Fowles’s admirers represents philosophical consistency and an insistent moral concern from The Collector through Daniel Martin can appear as redundancy to his detractors” (Olshen and Olshen ix). Katherine Tarbox writes in The Art of John Fowles about his philosophical consistency through six of his works: The Magus, The Collector, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin, Mantissa, and A Maggot. She claims: “All the novels are the same story at bottom . They begin with a protagonist who suffers some degree of narcissism. He (or in the case of The Collector and A Maggot, she) has been living an inauthentic life and playing roles that substitute for true identity” (2). Tarbox continues by explaining that Fowles’s protagonists learn to see their boundaries and test those boundaries in an effort to attain freedom. It is telling that for each of these six major works, she makes one totalizing statement: Fowles’s corpus exhibits a predominant theme of coming to see, and through that “seeing” his protagonists are educated on the inauthenticity of their lives (2). Tarbox is not alone in this observation.