Reality And Illusion As a Palimpsest Of Perception In John Fowles Novels

Chapter I

Brief biography of John Fowles

John Fowles – naturalist, philosopher, poet, and novelist – is often considered one of the more important writers since the Second World War because he has succeeded both in being popular and in being esteemed by literary scholars, a feat accomplished by only a small few. Fowles has lived exclusively in his native England since 1966, but his years living abroad in France and Greece and his interest in French literature and thought have had a tremendous impact on his work.

Born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, to middle-class parents, Fowles entered the Bedford School near London in 1939, where he studied French and German literature with intensity and depth. After serving in the Royal Marines from 1944-1947, he returned to the study of German and especially French literature, now at New College at Oxford. Moving to France in 1950, he taught English literature for a year at the University of Poitiers. He spent the following two years teaching English at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School on the Greek island of Spetsai in the Aegean Sea. Here he wrote the “Greek Poems” included in his Poems(1973), and here he met Elizabeth Whitton, whom he later married.

I.1 Main works and novels

Though he started writing “The Magus” first, “The Collector”(1963) was Fowles’s first published novel, and its popular success enabled him to give up teaching and become a full-time writer. The Collector was followed by “The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas”(1964), a series of philosophical notes conveying the existentialist beliefs formed initially from Fowles’s reading of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The experimental novel “The Magus”, set in the Greek island of Phraxos(clearly Spetsai), was completed after twelve years of sporadic work and published in 1965. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”(1969), generally considered Fowles’s most important novel, is also experimental in its complex blending of nineteenth-and twentieth-century perspectives and in its self-conscious testing of the boundaries of conventional fiction with multiple endings from wich the reader is invited to choose.

Daniel Martin(1977), the most autobiographical of Fowles’s novels, is set partly in the United States. The inspiration for this novel came from his impressions of Hollywood during a 1969 trip to arrange the adaptation of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” for film.

Mantissa (1982), which is even more self-consciously metafictional than “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, and “A Maggot”(1985), an historical novel about an unsolved mystery in the 1730s, complete the canon of his novels.

In 1988 Fowles suffered a stroke that apparently ended his career as a novelist, though he has continued to write critical and philosophical nonfiction, as well as works on nature. The most notable of his nonfiction writings are brought together in the 1988 collection, “Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings”. Fowles once said: “I don’t want to be an English writer; I want to be a European one, what I call a mega-European (Europe plus America plus Russia plus wherever else culture is essentially European)… I don’t even want to be English. English is my language, but I am mega-European”.

His initial reaction to Greek culture was hostile, but in his experience with what he calls the “wild Greece” of remote and lovely hills, he came to have an intense and abiding love of Greece. Fowles clearly conveys this deep attachment in the Greek section of his Poems and in The Magus. Fowles exiled himself from Greece after his return to England in 1952, because he feared that he would be disappointed in returning to the scene of such powerful, mystical experience in later years.

France holds an equally special and even more extensive attraction and influence over Fowles: the impact of French literature and philosophical thought, more particularly, was profound and lasting. It is certainly worthy of note that Fowles included in “The Ebony Tower”(1974) his own translation of Marie de France’s twelfth-century romance Eliduc, and that two of the volume’s four original stories are set in France. But despite his time in France and despite his extensive reading of French literature, including the several works he himself translated from French into English, Fowles explains in “A Modern Writer’s France” that he considers it impossible to understand truly and absolutely any cultures other than one’s own. He says of his own reading of French that he may understand the text “in every semantic and grammatical sense; but because I am not born French, nor bilingual, a final understanding – indeed , the final understanding – is forever beyond me”( in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, 45). Between all cultures, Fowles says, there are always “ghosts” of what we experience in our multicultural interactions but can never fully know.

Robert Huffaker (1980) offers valuable discussion of Fowles’s time in France and Greece and of the influence these experiences had upon his life and work. James Aubrey(1991) provides an equally valuable biographical essay and critical survey of Fowles’s fiction and nonfiction writings. Thomas Foster (1994) is especially helpful in negotiating the sometimes unsettling complexities of Fowles’s fiction. There are several valuable articles on Fowles’s narrative technique, existentialism, and reliance on the quest motif in Ellen Pifer’s collection of critical essays(1986). Perhaps the most thorough discussion of Fowles’s existentialism in the early novels is offered by James Acheson(1998) in the Modern Novelists series.

I.2 Globalization and the novel; Novel and fiction in the twentieth century

The word “novel” is scarcely applicable to anything written during the Elizabethan period, but it was from the prose fiction of the period that the English novel was born.

But at very least, the twentieth-century novel has served as a culturally important means of representing the often traumatic and frequently violent transitions that mark the historical shift from traditional societies to modern life. From at least the time of Walter Scott to the present day, the novel has provided one of the most culturally influential means by which writers have imagined and represented the process of the global spread of modern culture, a process that has frequently entailed the destruction of pre-modern or anti-modern form of human existence.

When applied to twentieth-century fiction, the term “globalization” denotes, among other things, the diminishing importance of the cultural, generic, and linguistic boundaries that have traditionally demarcated national literatures. The “globalization of the novel” describes a prolonged and ongoing historical process in which a new kind of ‘world literature’ emerges, one in which the cosmopolitan, international, or global novel assumes a central place. While the globalization of the novel is a particularly notable feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary history, it should be noted that the increasing hybridization and cross-fertilization of the novel as a literary form begins well before 1900.Literary history has always been characterized by the frequent and productive exchanges of literary genres and styles across cultural and linguistic borders.

The relationship between the novel and globalization is necessarily a very complicated one, if only because globalization is itself such a complex process of spreading culture.

I.3 Fowles – an universal author

John Fowles came to public notice on the American literary scene earlier than in Britain, and was sooner appreciated by popular fiction reviewers than by academic circles. In Britain, it was only after the publication of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” in 1969 that academic critics started paying systematic – although not always sympathetic – attention to Fowles’s work. According to Malcolm Bradbury, the reason why the critics virtually ignored John Fowles in Britain was that the 1960s where “characterized by a general diminution in critical discourse and by the lack of mythology and sociology about the nature of fiction and art while Fowles’s emphases and concerns were very much of a piece with aesthetic speculation in the novel elsewhere, especially in the American novel”

Though Fowles’s work drew more critical attention in the 1970s, much of it was shallow criticism as late as 1977. For example, in an article entitled “the English Sickness”, Pearl K. Bell laments the absence of any major contemporary British writers worth adding to the Leavisite canon1, and chooses Fowles’s “Daniel Martin”(1977) – with Margaret Drabble’s “The Ice Age”(1977) – as a pointed example of a novel dominated by the “passionate intensity” of “the worst”, an indictment that curiously contrasts, for example, with John B. Humma’s contention that John Fowles’s fictions are a good example of “the signally evident continuation of the great tradition in English fiction”.

If we are to properly assess Fowles’s contribution to contemporary British writing we should first attempt to place his work within the larger context of the crisis in Weltanschauung that took place in the 1960s – the decade that saw the publication of “the Aristos”(1964) and of his first three novels, “The Collector”(1963), “The Magus”(1966) and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”(1969) – and the ensuing effects of the crisis on the theory of art and literature.

There is general agreement among critics and historians alike that the 1960s was a period of crisis, heralding a complex change of sensibility in the Western world at large. This decade was characterized by widespread demands for engagement and commitment, expressed, for example, in the [anonimizat] of May 1968 in France and, in the united States, in the anti-Vietnam war and Civil Rights protests.

In America, by contrast, writers and critics were fully aware of the shift in world-view. Thus for example, as early as 1967, John Barth published an article entitled “The Literature of Exhaustion” in which he tried to analyze the reasons why the contemporary novel had apparently reached a dead end, and seemed incapable of responding to shifting cosmovision. He explained how the old literary forms progressively degenerate in the hands of successive generations of writers until they reach a point of exhaustion. Barth developed the idea further in another essay, “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction”, in which he described postmodernism as the new literary form arising out of, not one, but rather two “exhausted” forms; classic realism and modernism.

John Barth’s selection of Beckett and Borges – two writers for whom Fowles has expressed great admiration – as the necessary links between modernism and postmodernism is significant in that their conception of self and world may be described as diametrically opposed through complementary extreme developments of the modernist conception, which Fowles would try to absorb and transcend in his own fiction.

Expressing his preoccupation with renewing the novel without sacrificing intelligibility and the old humanist values of classic realism, Fowles shows the characteristic hesitation between the modernist “consolation of form” and the “longing for the return to the traditional relish in story telling” that Hutcheon – as well as Barth and Lodge – considers to be the basic trait of contemporary fiction. With characteristic accuracy, Fowles is intuiting that, for all its practical difficulty, in literature as in other arts, the contemporary writer’s assimilation and emulation of past forms can only be achieved through parody. The same realization is presented as a fulcrum in the education of David Williams, the purblind abstract painter in “The Ebony Tower”, confronted with one of Henry Breasley’s masterpieces:

“There hung the huge Moon-hunt, perhaps the best-known of the Coetminais oeuvre… As which so much of Breasley’s work thercharacteristic hesitation between the modernist “consolation of form” and the “longing for the return to the traditional relish in story telling” that Hutcheon – as well as Barth and Lodge – considers to be the basic trait of contemporary fiction. With characteristic accuracy, Fowles is intuiting that, for all its practical difficulty, in literature as in other arts, the contemporary writer’s assimilation and emulation of past forms can only be achieved through parody. The same realization is presented as a fulcrum in the education of David Williams, the purblind abstract painter in “The Ebony Tower”, confronted with one of Henry Breasley’s masterpieces:

“There hung the huge Moon-hunt, perhaps the best-known of the Coetminais oeuvre… As which so much of Breasley’s work there was an obvious previous iconography – in this case, Uccello’s Night Hunt and its spawn down through the centuries; which was in turn a challenged comparison, a deliberate risk…just as the Spanish drawings had defied the great shadow of Goya by accepting its presence, even using and parodying it, so the memory of the Ashmolean Uccello somehow deepened and buttressed the painting before which David sat. It gave an essential tension, in fact: behind the mysteriousness and the ambiguity (no hounds, no horses, no prey…nocturnal figures among trees, but the title was needed), stood both an homage and a kind of thumbed nose to a very old tradition”

Rimgaila Salys has pointed out how “The medieval paintings of the Ebony Tower…in both their style and subject reveal the heart of Fowles’s thinking on nature and the depiction of nature in art”. Like the mature painter’s recasting of Uccello’s “Night Hunt”, Fowles’s “The Ebony Tower” – as well as his other fictions – is meant to stand both as “an homage and a kind of thumbed nose to a very old tradition.”

Beneath their structural and thematic differences, Fowles’s novels and short stories share a single unifying topos: that of the young hero’s quest for maturation and cosmic integration, usually carried out simultaneously in its archetypal, psychological and existentialist version.

Chapter II

The Literary Theory and John Fawles’s Fiction and Illusion

II.1 Illusion vs. Reality

Illusion versus reality forms a significant component of many works of literature. Some characters live their lives based on illusions that protect them from reality. Others are forced to face the reality of their lives when the illusions are no longer believable. Others come to realize too late that their whole lives have been meaningless because they never really lived at all. In all these stories, there is one common message that comes through: accept your life for what it is and live that life. Authors offer this message in different ways, but the overall message remains the same.

Although all of John Fowles’s works of fiction grapple with common themes, each new volume has seemed to be fresh creation of an experimental writer determined not to repeat himself.

Many of the difficulties of narrative technique in the fiction of John Fowles seem to stem from an inability to agree on how to interpret his complex and metaphoric fictional structures. The problem is often further complicated by the identity of the narrative voices he deploys, by the mixture of different voices and tenses within one narrative, by the combination of fiction and history, and by the peculiar device of multiple endings in some of his novels.

It is obvious that in his style and narrative techniques, Fowles is a contemporary writer who violates the rule of narrative tradition, and who, like his eighteenth-century forebears, Fielding and Sterne, undermines and problematizes his narrative by shifting the reader’s attention away from narrative content towards the actual narration or circumstances in which the story is produced.

Fowls’ fiction is in fact an embodiment of freedom, of individuality, and of existentialism. However, the strategies of narration, the relationships among the author, narrator and the reader in relation to the text, constitute the central and operative questions throughout his novels.

Perhaps the best way to begin the study of Fowles’s narratives is to focus on the theory of narration as it impinges upon his fiction. In narration we concentrate on the story being narrated, on the sequence of events, and on the manner in which these events are mediated to us. We also pay attention to the central and peripheral factors affecting the story. The most appropriate definition of narration is introduced by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan in her book ‘Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics(1983)’. She argues that narrative fictions means ‘the narration of a succession of fictional events’. Although this definition may seem very simple, it is polemical enough to distinguish the novel as a literary genre from all other forms of narration, such as newspaper reports, history books, fils, gossip, dramatic writing, and many other forms of narrative that permeate our lives.

The main feature of narrative fiction is that it presents a series of imaginative structures. The phrase ‘succession of fictional events’ perhaps can be found in other forms of narrative, but what gives it a special significance in relation to the novel is its fictionality.

The major difference between the fictional narration and the nonfictional is well portrayed in relation to the narrator or the mediator of events. In the nonfictional narration of history, such as autobiographies and biographies, the author is the actual agent of communication, the real subject of the discourse, and s/he is responsible for the production of the sequence of events as whole. But in fictional narration of fables, short stories, and novels, the author is no longer explicitly visible as the mediator of the events. Indeed, the communication of the fictional events involves a fictional mediator who is mostly assumed to be synonymous with the author, and who transmits and mediates the narrative to the reader.

Moreover, the particular shift of point of view that structures the novelistic form of writing in Fowles’s fiction, and the startling use of the narrative past in ‘Daniel Martin’ in particular, make it possible to see the multiple forms of narrative: subjective narrative with the use of ‘I’, objective with the omniscient ‘he’, and indeed the narrative past in which events narrate themselves. However, the major form of narration used by Fowles is the ironic voice in relation to the concept of the ‘author’ and the manipulation of ‘character’.

Since Fowles’s fiction deals with different literary models and polemical styles ranging from realism, modernism, and postmodernism, a review of these narrative forms seems indispensable. Fowles’s early novels ‘The Collector’ and ‘The Magus’ and the later ‘Daniel Martin’, exhibit the greatest debt to realism. ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, however, demonstrates openly a critique of the conventions of classic realism as it mostly appears in nineteenth-century fiction. In “The Magus”, Nicholas Urfe’s fictional adventures on a remote island in Greece are constantly authenticated through historical references from World War Two; in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ the reader is also invicted to verify the ‘truths’ of narrative and to compare and contrast the ‘realistic’ Victorian norms and styles of narrative with a self-conscious, postmodernist narrative techniques. Fowles himself, as Ronald Binns argues,

“inverts the traditionally assumed dichotomy between the romancer and the realist writer, manipulating the romance form to effect both a sceptical examination of the romance experience and, more radically, a critique of contemporary realist fiction for its absence of moral responsibility”.

Indeed, as Belsey argues, classic realism is a form of narration that is primarly characterized by ‘illusionism, narrative which leads to closure and a hierarchy of discourses which establishes the truth of the story’’. Fowles’s novels demonstrate serious subversions of all three characteristics. The first function of creating the illusion of telling the ‘truth’ about the world seems to be self-explanatory because all writings create this illusion in order to affect or impress readers. Fowles’s novels demonstrate a self-conscious violation of the realist notion, particularly in chapter 13 of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”:

“I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind…I am writing in…a convention universally accepted at the time of my story…We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is”.

This is how Fowles’s modern narrator subverts the illusion of reality by claiming that he does not know his characters or his narrative. Indeed the narrators voice is ironical because while he disclaims responsibility for his fiction as a way of breaking the narrative illusion, he actually sustains this illusion by making his fiction more real, more believable since he seems sincere in claiming that he really does not know his characters.

The second feature of classic realism is narrative closure. The “classic realist text” is characterized by order and organization of beginning, middle, and end. Despite its complication, the plot is mostly organized in such a way that it leads to a propped ending. The narrative movement always ends with a closure and a reinstatement of the order that has been violated during the process of narration. Thus, the epilogue common in nineteenth-century fiction is deployed in order to describe the new identity and harmony established at the end of the story.

In Fowles’s novels, however, there is no closure of discourses: the two endings in “The Collector”, the various and mysterious open endings in “The Magus”, the three alternative endings in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, the openness and deviation from the plot in “The Enigma”, the circular endings of “Daniel Martin” and “Mantissa” where both return the reader the beginning, and finally the mysterious ending of “A Maggot”. All these endings comprise Fowles’s challenge to the closed ending of classic realism. Fowles rejects totalized, single and determined narrative, and advocates instead openness and pluralism. Despite its circular and self-conscious technique, “Daniel Martin” is the only one among Fowles’s novels to conform to realism through its unified and happy ending.

The third and probably the most important feature of classic realism is the hierarchy of discourses. This category implies that the author organizes the narrative in such a way that some discourses are more privileged than others. Although gaps in Fowles’s novels texts are left open for the reader to fill in, these texts still possess a great deal of inner coherence. The reader never really creates literary meanings hazardly; there are always codes, rules, and conventions that precipitate their production, and that the reader can never ignore. Although the reader achieves freedom throughout reading, this freedom is not absolute but is still induced and, to some extent, given by the author. In other words, Fowles appears to manipulate these techniques in order to generate the illusion of freedom. Indeed, the most striking technique employed by Fowles to create illusionism through realistic ploys is the treatment of history as narrative and narrative as history.

II.2 Comparison between Fowles’s novels

There is some relation between “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “A Maggot”. The central issue here is the way that Fowles deploys history as a narrative text, as an intertext, or as a text that is constructed in the present as a means of producing a critique of both past and present. This ambivalence stance towards the historical novel becomes very clear when he actually writes history, but moulds it in the form of a fictional narrative:

“I like to think the novelist is equipped to discover things the others can’t. I’d still recommend going to the novel to really get a sharp impression of another society, but I don’t really think the inherent pattern of the quest or the race can determine how good the particular account will be”

Clearly Fowles admits that these two novels are historical, contradicting his earlier claim that they are not. He also anticipates the ascription of the epithet “historical”, which may be attached to his latest novel “A Maggot”. Indeed these two novels are merely historical in the traditional sense, but are in fact historiographic because they radically problematize and deconstruct the identity or the techniques of both history anf fiction. This deconstruction or subversion is primarily enacted through the process of intertextuality, where history is being deployed as a text that is radically reformulated within, and contrasted, to fiction.

In her book “A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction”, Linda Hutcheon explores the various implications of “historiographic metafiction”. This term is deployed to encompass those novels which are “intensively self-reflexive”, “fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political”. In fact, historiographic novels, such as “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” and “A Maggot”, do not deploy history in the conventional sense of referring to, or “re-telling”. Instead, they use the critique of history mainly to subvert its mimetic reference to the “real” world. Both novels actually represents, reconstitute and reconstruct what might have been reality. Thus both history and fiction are inseparably interrelated as narrative constructions and undeniably pluralistic in their discourses.

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: paradoxically, perhaps, they are usually found either too ethically conservative or too post-modernly 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 comparison to the work of their women contemporaries, the novels of John Fowles (b. 1926) and Anthony Burgess (b. 1917) can seem strained, contrived, and forced. Fowles’s “The Collector” (1963) is a post-Freudian fantasy, a first-person narrative supposedly written by a repressed, butterfly-collecting clerk who, having won the football pools, kidnaps (or collects) the sophisticated art-student whom he has admired from a distance.

Fowles has continued to be fascinated by repression and by what he tends to see as its happy antithesis, the release of sexual energy which an be equated with personal liberation. In “Mantissa” (1982), this espousal of the cause of psychic and sexual liberation wastes itself in an explosive, self indulgent erotic fantasy; in “The Magus” (1966, revised1977), it is intricately translated into an omnifarious masque and a proliferating orgy of mythology and literature. In Fowles’s most popular and admired novel, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1969), the juxtapositions of repression and release serve to dictate not just the novel’s argument, but its narrative shape as well. The novel’s narrator looks back, somewhat smugly, from the moral and narrative redefinitions of the 1960s, “the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes”, to the narrower determinants of doing and telling in the 1860s. He both appreciates the art of the Victorian novel and feels infinitely superior to it. His central characters, a Darwinian paleontologist, Charles Smithson, and the supposedly abandoned mistress of the French lieutenant, Sarah Woodruff, play out his theme for him. Both seek to break ‘iron certainties’, the social, moral, and religious conventions of their day, much as the narrator consistently endeavours to remind us of his presence and of his very present power. Sarah tricks and eludes Charles, just as the narrator rejoices in his own tricksy elusiveness. He admits in his thirteenth chapter (typically choosing what has always been regarded as a dangerous number) that he “stands next to God”, but insists that liberal modern novelists ‘are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority’. God-like to the end, he offers his readers a trinity of possible conclusions to the narrative; one conventionally happy; one unconventionally happy; the last uncertain and open. In the final chapter a “rather foppish and Frenchified” figure, with “more than a touch of the successful impresario about him”, adjusts his watch and seems to obliterate the second possible ending. This impresario drives ‘briskly’ away, supposedly leaving Charles to his freedom and his doubts, but he remains a god who has declined to stop interfering. Anthony Burgess’s narrators tend to be just as knowing as Fowles’s, but they are far less tricksy, A cocky, and manipulative. Kenneth Toomey, the autobiographical narrator of Earthly Powers (1980), loves effects. His “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me” is perhaps the most striking opening sentence in modern English literature.

In Fowles’s world, creator figures can be both tyrants and liberators, masters and slaves. The complexity of these kind of paradoxes is explored in Pamela 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.

From being a “master” fiction-maker, Sarah Woodrull (in The French Lieutenant’s Woman) becomes, in the end, a model for male artist. This critical study deconstructs the latent politics beneath Fowles’s apparently feminist sympathies, and analyses the contradictions that results in the final attribution of full and mature artistic “potency” only to the male in all Fowles’s fiction.

Fowles’s subsequent novels, while less provocatively seductive, focus even more crucially on the hazard of existence, the burdens of social conditioning, the challenges of existential awareness, and the importance of personal authenticity and meaningful relationships.

The intensity of John Fawles’s interest in power is matched by the ambiguity of his attitude towards it and the complexity with which he treats it in his fictions. Most of the significant relationships depicted in his work involve some sort of power struggle, for Fowles is at once suspicious of and fascinated by the efforts of individuals to control and influence each other. His first published novel, “The Collector”(1963), presents this struggle in its simplest 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.

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 sadistic but enlightened older man rapidly becomes a symbolically resonant figure 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 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 disruptively autonomous – despite their status as projection of the authorial imagination – reflects not only Fowles’s awareness of the nouveau roman, but the more palpable influence of one of his older contemporaries: Fowles evidently admires Flann O’Brien’s boisterous 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. Perceiving these freedoms as at once exhilarating and threatening, O’Brien and Fowles both experience the potential escape of characters from writerly control as less an intellectual fallacy than a metaphor of authorial impotence. The problematic relationship between the author as potential tyrant and the characters as seekers of freedom is not only manifestly a subject of Fowles’s third novel, but is more or less present in all the fictions he has published since “The Collector”.

This novel also provides a suggestive introduction to those issues of power, creativity and gender so crucial to the rest of his aeuvre. It explores these within a flexible generic structure that combines an awareness of novelistic trends in the 1950s with elements of detective fiction, the thriller and the Gothic novel.

The Ebony Tower(1974) reiterates the motif of conflict by exploring various different rivalries, both between individuals and between ideas. The latter story is Fowles’s most obscure and indeterminate fiction, expressing in extreme form his sense of narrative closure as itself a kind of authorial power-play. Like his younger contemporaries Graham Swift and Julian Barnes, Fowles often eschews closure in order to problematize the authority of narrative, to question its ability to frame and transmit meaning.

If Fowles’s work is consistently fascinated, as we shall see, with the idea of the enclosed space, the magical landscape modelled on the domaine perdu of Alain-Fournier , his first fictional expression of this idea is ironic. Unlike Bourani, the Undercliff or Coetminais, for example, Clegg’s house, Fosters, is a savagely deromanticized domaine.The apparent illogic of an author ironizing a central image before its unironic presentation in his work is mitigated by the fact that Bourani, Fowles’s first romanticized domaine, actually predates Fosters in imaginative conception. Fowles began work on “The Magus” in the early 1950’s, well before he wrote ‘The Collector’. Although insulated from time and mundane reality, Fosters generates its own mundanity by its lack of beauty and imaginative resonance, for the events which take place within it cannot and do not partake of the magic, the experiential unpredictability, that usually characterizes these reserves in Fowles’s work. Clegg’s basement, combining trendy furniture and art books with ten-inch bolts and a reinforced door, is instead an anti-domaine which, lacking in mystery, is almost entirely without the imaginative possibilities that mysteriousness evokes for Fowles.

The Collector’s engagement with power as physical force and mere control is further seen in its portrayal of its heroine, Miranda Grey. She is Fowles’s first fictional embodiment of the princesse lointaine , the idealized and erotically desirable woman who inhabits the Edenic enclosure, and whose elusiveness usually reflects its numinous mystery. As Clegg acts out his erotic fantasies by kidnapping Miranda and making her his ‘secret guest’, the novel depicts the systematic abuse of the heroine with an explicitness and consistency, rare in Fowles’s work. With the possible exception of “The Cloud”, Fowles would not again present so directly such a competitive and brutal model of gender relations until twenty years later, in his first fiction of the 1980s, “Mantissa”.

Given its emphasis on physical violence, it is appropriate that “The Collector” should explore power specifically as tyranny and tyranny as a consequence of impoverishment. Clegg’s fantasies about Miranda are basically possessive, and spring partly from his frustrations with a tedious job and a depleted emotional life. Moving between his ledgers at the Town Hall Annexe, his austere Nonconformist home, and meetings of the Bug Section, Clegg imagines Miranda ‘loving [him and his butterfly] collection, drawing and colouring them…[s]he all pretty with her pale blonde hair and grey eyes and of course the other men all green round the gills’. The novel’s awareness of Clegg’s economic poverty and intellectual and social limitations which this imposes upon his life associates it generically with that fiction of the 1950s which depicted English working-class experience.

The Collector portrays the class conflict essential to this kind of fiction while also rebelling, in ways that the reader comes to expect of Fowles’s work, against some of its premises. Thus it reformulates, in the direction of the sinister and obsessive, that 1950s fictional convention of the fruitless encounter between an educated, class-privileged woman and a resentful, socially deprived man. Fowles’s interest in the flexibility of fictional form is further evidenced here in his reversal of the terms of class struggle as it usually appears in ‘proletarian’ fiction. Instead of imitating Sillitoe and making Clegg into a kind of Arthur Seaton, who tries to liberate his heroic vigour from the environmental torpidity that impressions it, Fowles constructs a wholly negative working-class protagonist.

Obviously Fowles admits that he creates this novel through fantasy in spite of its realistic coloring. It is based upon the image of an isolated girl who is rescued by the man of her dreams. But what is the nature of this fantasy? Why is it that ‘The Collector’ is seen as a fantasy? In order to answer these questions it is first necessary to define fantasy and the fantastic and how is different from realistic.

In her book “A Rhetoric of the Unreal”(1981), Christine Brooke-Rose argues that the basis of the fantastic is “the ambiguity as to whether the weird event is supernatural or not”. From this definition we can deduce that the fantastic is always associated with ambiguity. Indeed Broke-Rose bases her argument upon Todorov’s theory of the fantastic. According to him, an ambiguous or fantastic text “must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described”.

For example, the reader in “The Collector” does really “hesitate” as to whether to consider Clegg to be a real or unreal man, a natural or supernatural object. However, the reader recognises quite early in the text that Clegg seems a fantasizer of supernatural worlds. The fantastic is thus considered as unreal or, as Rosemary Jackson argues in her book ‘Fantasy’, “ ‘transcending’ reality, ‘escaping’ the human condition and constructing superior alternate, ‘secondary’ worlds”.

In “The Collector” Clegg pursues his dreams through the self-conscious construction of alternative worlds that challenge the “reality” of his everyday world. At the center of his fantasies resides the problematic relation of the Self to the Other, the “I” to the “not-I”, the “I” to the “you”. According to Todorov, there are two groups that constitute fantastic literature: the first involves themes of the “I” and the second deals with themes of the “not-I”.

Fowles deliberately questions a fictional concept of the anti-hero and his rebelliousness as misunderstood nobility by revealing in Clegg a quiet and meticulous capacity for evil. Here Fowles ‘s refusal to accept the usual nobility of the hero in “proletarian” fiction and illusion, meets his interrogation of glamourized masculine violence in other novelistic forms.

Stylistically this implies that Clegg’s unimaginative pedantry, while effectively domesticating his obsessionality, acts as a kind of narrative solvent throughout the book. Thus “The Collector” combines certain melodramatic features of the Gothic novel-the impregnable cellar, the persecuted maiden, the besoted tyrant – with an insistence on the tedium of Miranda’s ordeal. Her experience at Fosters does not evoke the supernatural and it completely lacks the suggestiveness or excitement of mystery. Thus Clegg’s refusal to engage with experience as potential growth is shown in the hobby which provides the novel with its central metaphor: collecting.

The metaphor of collecting governs Clegg’s sexual nature as well as his mentality in general. Observing Clegg’s treasures, with their ‘little wings stretched out all the same angle’, Miranda identifies with them: “poor dead butterflies, my fellow-victims”. The sustained comparison between man and collector in the novel, provides the terms for Clegg’s initial idealization of Miranda:

Seeing her always made me feel like I was c atching a rarity, going up

to it very careful, heart-in-mouth as they say.A pale clouded yellow,

for instance. I always thought of her like that,I mean words like elusive and sporadic, and very refined – not like the other ones, even the pretty

ones. More for the real connoisseur.

The imagery of lepidoptery illuminates Clegg’s worship of Miranda as a kind of ratification – words like ‘it’ and ‘connoisseur’ imply his perception of her as an object – while also showing the double-edged nature of his reverence. Clegg’s language here associates the adored woman with the humanly unattainable perfection suggested by the butterfly’s beauty; it also arrogates sexual power exclusively to Clegg himself as collector. Thus when he presents Miranda in his narrative as a butterfly, Clegg is celebrating not only her beauty, but her vulnerability to capture as well .He is elevating her spirituality – the Greeks used the same word for ‘butterfly’ and “soul” – even as he locates her firmly within the non-human world as a particularly fragile example of a lower form of life. The extremes in this novel simply ignore her human reality.(pg27)

“The Collector” is unique among Fowles’s fictions, not so much because it shows the destructiveness of erotic idealization, but because it deals very explicitly with those processes of reification which tend to operate less obtrusively in later works. By identifying pornography as a product of the imagination which also manifests itself in photography, the novel effectively engages with those aesthetic issues that preoccupy Fowles in subsequent books.

In Fowlesian terminology, Miranda’s failure to educate Frederick Clegg, to teach him the language of art to help him abandon his collecting and voyeuristic activities, can be interpreted as Clegg’s inability to achieve “whole sight”, that is, as the kidnapper’s failure to bring about his transformation from collector to creator, from disciple to magus or, in archetypal terms, from man to Anthropos. The archetypal quest pattern is more overtly presented in Fowles’s second published but first-written novel “The Magus”, a work of great complexity, which Fowles kept rewriting for over ten years and from which we can say all the other novels and short stories derive in one way or another.

Significantly, these philosophical, esoteric, psychological and archetypal versions of the hero’s quest are eventually revealed as a wholly fictional. The lesson Urfe learns is basically the same that Miranda failed to teach Clegg: how to redefine his notions of self and world. To do so, Urfe, the self-centered womanizer, will have to be re-educated by means of a series of trials intended to test and correct his perception of reality. Maurice Conchis, the mature artist/magus, will organize for him the godgame, an elaborate performance involving several artistic mechanisms, and he will also make Urfe listen to the narration of his own life story and of a series of tales with a moral such as “The Tale of the Prince and the Magician.” This tale ironically sums up the aim of Conchis’s teaching. It tells the story of the young prince who is told by the king, his father, that princesses, islands, and God, do not exist. The prince then meets a stranger who presents himself as God and convinces him that his father had lied. He returns to the king who retorts that in reality the stranger is only a magician, and that all kings and gods are merely magicians. On hearing this, the prince is distressed and wants to die. But when he sees the awful face of death and remembers “ the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses”, he decides that he can bear the burden of unreality. As soon as he accepts as the only reality the unreal reality of magic, the prince himself starts turning into a magician. Peter Wolfe sums up the moral of the tale asserting: “No reality underlines appearance; the phenomena is all. Truth and reality do not exist objectively but inhere, instead, in the perceiver.” Although basically correct, this interpretation of the tale places the emphasis on the artificiality and construction of the human representation of reality, and not on the capacity man has to palliate the awful awareness of the reality and limitation of human knowledge through art: it is the prince’s acceptance of the value of the artist/magician’s constructed reality that turns him into a godlike magician.

We can say, therefore, that the aim of the tale and of the other trials set by Maurice Conchis is to correct the young Nicholas’s conception of reality and truth as a way of bringing about his transformation from an egotistic woman collector (like Clegg, another equivalent of Bluebeard) and failed poet-to-be, to a loving husband and a truly creative writer, a description of the mature artist/magician that is in line with Henry Breasley’s warning “The Ebony Tower” that love and creativity go hand in hand and that, for all the infinite variety of incidents, both art and real life can be summed up in a simple story of love and death that goes back to the myth of Tristram and Yseult. In consequence of this, Urfe’s realization of Alison’s worth and the abandonment of his collecting activities – necessary prerequisites for his achievement of “whole sight” – closely follows his realization that fiction and reality cannot easily be separated, and that reality cannot be reduced to a totalizing formula, that, as Maurice Conchis himself discovered as a young man, “that great passive monster, reality, was no longer dead, easy to handle. It was full of mysterious vigour, new forms, new possibilities”(309). It is this complex, versatile, and mysterious kind of reality that only art in its most creative expression can hope to reflect or symbolize

Chapter III

Fowles’s realistic/fictional construction and characters

III.1 Fowles’s Heroes

In “The Magus”, “The Ebony Tower” and “Daniel Martin” particularly, the Fowlesian heroine moves into a more or less asexual association with the hierophant, while the young male protagonist is directly involved with him as existential – and usually artistic – apprentice. This allows Fowles to deal in subsequent fictions with the magus-figure as a kind of creative father to the younger artist while marginalizing the potentially threatening creative woman more decisively.

In “Daniel martin”, Fowles, in a characteristic development, sets himself the task of finding an alternative to the solipsistic dead end by rejecting existentialism and moving toward what we can describe as a Borgesean position. The novel tells the story of a world-famous screenwriter in the process of making the momentous decision to give up his career in order to start an autobiographical novel. He thinks he has been wasting his life and talents and hopes that autobiography will help him to come to terms with himself. Rather than feeling the alienation of the modernist subject, Dan suffers from what Fredric Jameson has described as a characteristically postmodernist fragmentation, as his university nickname, “Mr Specula Speculans”, a man of infinitely mirrored faces, suggests.

In “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, the intrusive and parodically omniscient narrator once toyed with the possibility that “Perhaps Charles is myself disguised” (85), and he also suggested on several occasions puzzling identity between the flesh-and-blood writer and the fictional narrator. These playful suggestions were metafictional winks primarily aimed at undermining the traditional division between fiction and reality and at enhancing the constructedness of the external as well as of the fictional ontologies. In “Daniel Martin” this possibility is taken to the limit: John Fowles, a writer in his forties, writes a novel about another writer in his forties called Daniel Martin, who in his turn must write an autobiographical novel, using for his hero the pseudonym “Simon Wolfe” , a name Dan has picked up at random from the Hollywood directory, but which, as the critics have pointed out, can be rearranged to from the name FOWLES (Simon WOLFE).

With characteristic delight in surprising the reader, Fowles has hidden this vital information until the very end of the novel. Now, by making the first sentence in Fowles’s novel – “Whole sight, or all the rest is desolation” – both the flesh-and-blood author’s real beginning, and the unwritten intended ending of the fictional Dan’s future autobiography, Fowles’s novel entitled :Daniel Martin” acquires a circular structure in which the real and the imaginary, the written and the unwritten, the actual and the potential, merge, standing astride the boundaries of fiction and reality.

The acquisition of :whole sight” by Daniel Martin is eventually brought about by his understanding of the nature of his love for Jane – the sister of his ex-wife – by accepting that the real and the unreal cannot be separated and that, in fact, reality can only be pinned down by true art, as Daniel Martin finally intuits: “To hell with cultural fashion; to hell with elitist guilt; to hell with existentialist nausea and above all, to hell with the imagined that does not say, not only in, but behind the images, the real” (454).

Dan’s rejection of existentialism could be interpreted at face value as evidence that Fowles has finally solved his doubts between French experimentalism and British realism in favour of the latter – this was David William’s wrong interpretation of Henry Breasley’s defence of representational art. It is relevant in this connection to recall that when Dan decides to create his past he rejects film for fiction, because, as he reflects, the medium the novel employs, the world, is imprecise enough to permit a recreation of reality exclusively by analogy, with no “fascistic overstamp” :

“Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience…the world is the most imprecise of signs… What I was trying to tell Jenny in Hollywood was that I would murder my past if I tried to evoke it on camera; and it is precisely because I can’t really evoke it in words, can only hope to awaken some analogus experience in other memories and sensitivities, that it must be written.(100, my emphasis)”

Dan’s contention that the world can evoke reality analogically in a way film cannot brings to mind the classic dualist outlook on art and literature summarized above. As he explains, the kind of art he is interested in should be capable of reproducing not only the external world accurately but also, and more important, of expressing the reality that lies “not only in, but behind the images”. Therefore, by rejecting existentialist formulas, Daniel Martin is not advocating a return to classic realism, for it was precisely with the advent of rationalism that literature and art lost their reassuring spiritual ability to reproduce the metaphysical world analogically. What in fact Daniel Martin is advocating is a recovery of the transcendental function of art, restoring to it the capacity to suggest the complex nature of the “real” reality that lies hidden behind or beyond the material world. For Daniel Martin – as well as for the other mature artists/magicians and for Fowles himself – art, not reason, is still the superior form of knowledge capable of conferring meaning on human existence and of making man godlike, conscious though he may be that there is no metaphysical reality beyond or beneath the textual reality created by art.

From this perspective it is easy to see the close complementarity of “Daniel Martin” and “Mantissa (1982), a satiric novel in which Fowles takes up again the question of the split between self and world from what we can describe as a Beckettian perspective. He presents the amnesic writer Miles Green, trapped in a hospital room that is eventually realted to be the inside of his own skull. Daniel Martin’s identity, was fragmented and mixed up with that of Fowles and with his fictional alterego, simon Wolf, and he shared with them the roles of author, character and reader. By contrast, Miles Green appears to be obsessed with the preservation of his self-identity and his autonomy in writing: he repeatedly and stubbornly refuses the help of Erato, who is both his muse and the doctor who has restored his creative capacity.

“Mantissa” may be described as the clearest of Fowles’s definitive parodic rejection of Beckettian solipsism and nouveau roman formalist excesses.

After it, “A Maggot”, his latest novel to date and, significantly, his most powerful historiographic metafiction, would seem to be Fowles’s most sustained attempt to reconcile the theoretical question about self, world and art he had been tackling separately in his earlier fictions. In tune with his definition of reality as complex and mysterious, Fowles situate a “A Maggot” in Augustan England, only to confront the Enlightenment, with its empiricist achievements in the sciences, its cult of rationality and its religious and political conservatism – represented in the novel by the Tory barrister Henry Ayscough – with more ancestral, secret alchemical and esoteric practices, embodied in the Cambridge scholar and aristocrat, Mr Bartholomew. In line with the efforts of historiographic metafiction to decenter history and to open a space for the articulation of marginal cultural facts, the novel’s plot hingers around the birth of Shakers, a minority dissenting sect which is described in the novel as full of vitality and spiritual force by comparison to official Anglicanism.

III.2 The historical novel

As Fowles has often done in the past, in “A Maggot” he stresses the relationship between freedom and creative imagination, and, by casting his protagonists in the role of surrogate novelists, he celebrates the novel as a vehicle for the imagination’s transforming power. His remarks in the prologue on one of the meanings of the book’s title live no doubt that “A Maggot” itself is meant to serve as a paradigm of such metamorphosis: “A maggot is the larval stage of a winged creature; as is the written text, at least in the writer’s hope”

The novel focuses attention on history not only because it is set in the eighteenth century but also because one strand of the plot involves Ayscough’s attempt to reconstruct de past. The bulk of the novel consists of an inquiry into the disappearance of Bartholomew following a strange journey to a cavern in Devonshire, where an enigmatic series of events takes place.

Because Fowles’s narrative is unconventional in the way that Chatman describes , it actually subverts the concept of “fabula” and corroborates Peter Brooks assertion that “the apparent priority of fabula is in the nature of a mimetic illusion , in that the fabula – is in fact a mental construction”. What Brooks appears to mean is that, since the events of narrative fictions are at least in part author’s fabrications, there is no anterior reality to which the sjuzet at very point corresponds. But, as Todorov has shown, detective fiction has traditionally created a powerful illusion of the independent reality of the fibula, the crime which has already occurred and which must be reconstructed.

“A Maggot” resists unambiguous interpretation and closure. Like the majority of Fowles’s fiction, it suggests that to impose finality on narratives is to falsify the existential uncertainty which is an inescapable part of being alive.

As mentioned earlier, like most of Fowles’s novels and stories, “A Maggot” is a metafiction which lays bare the problematic and exalts the possibilities of its own medium. Like The Magus’s Maurice Conchis and The French Lieutenant’s Woman Sarah Woodruff, Lee is a story-telling substitute for Fowles within the fictional world of the book.

Mr Bartholomew’s comparison to the world of theatre and of mankind to an audience in a playhouse, a well-worn literary device, brings to mind the metatheater in “The Magus”. Like Maurice Conchis, Mr B. Hired two players and a prostitute, Rebecca, reputed for her acting ability, as companions for his journey. But unlike Conchis, who enjoys godlike control , and more in line with Nicholas Urfe, who is acutely conscious of having “ a god like novelist…”, Mr B. is painfully. aware of the fact that the notion of self he and his fellow travellers have wholly depends on their not knowing that they are just cardboard puppets, the literary figments of somebody else’s imagination.

This reading gives an unexpected metafictional twist to Mr B.’s journey, undermining the mythical interpretation and suggesting that the versions of reality art provides cannot after all confer meaning on human existence, that its only power is to transform the flux of experience into patterns

There is a passage in “Daniel Martin”, John Fowles’s longest and most mimetic fiction, that clearly prefigures the problematic role of woman in “Mantissa”(1982), his newest and least mimetic one. As Daniel meditates on all the ruptures and responsibilities such a relationship would inevitably entail, he slowly focuses on an image of erotic womanhood that is by now thoroughly familiar to Fowles’s readers: that of a mysterious and subversive Other capable of eroding men’s “reified” beliefs and of restoring their very selves to a more inclusive version of reality:

“He could defuse the inevitable sexual suspicion but not admit the other truth, that his obscure ex-sister-in-law was someone whose spirit remained not quite like that of any other woman he had known; that there are some people one can’t dismiss, place, reify…who set riddles one ignores at one’s cost; who, like nature itself, are catalytic, inherently and unconsciously dissolvent of time and all the naturalist tries to put between himself and his total reality”.

Reality is certainly no less elusive or mysterious in “Mantissa”, nor is the heroine any less baffling to conventional expectations. If anything, Fowles’s newest work represents a determined effort to embrace and then enlarge the element of “pure hazard” in his fiction. In the process he inevitably extended the role of woman, and thus the relevance of the female principle, into areas of authority previously reserved for the artist alone. Hence, for example, it is a moot and irresolvable question whether it is Miles Green, the novelist-hero, or his muse Erato who is the “true” author of the work entitled “Mantissa”. Such teasing ambiguities are central to the novel, and arise in part from Fowles’s continued allegiance to the power of woman.

What this amounted to in his own fiction was the illusory abandonment of the omniscient author, who controls and manipulates his characters at will, in favour of a “new” improvisational narrator autonomy and mystery. The operative words here are illusory and apparent, since Fowles is as keenly aware as Wayne Booth of the impossibility of eradicating the author completely from a work of fiction, however impersonal or avant-garde.

It was for the sake of this “principle”, oddly enough, that Fowles repeatedly stressed both the artifice and the artificiality of his own fiction, reminding his readers of the wholly arbitrary nature of all imagined or created worlds.

The narrative line of “Mantissa” divide into four parts, is that of a mischievous metafiction. Cast in the dreamlike from a surrealist film, it attempts to explore and dramatize the conflicting impulses that both precede. Even by Fowles standards “Mantissa” is a thoroughly fabulistic work that exhibits little or no connection with his earlier fiction. Casting about for precedents, Fowles puzzled reviews have noted a certain similarity of theme and structure between his latest novel and his earliest one, “The Collector”. For example, in both works the relation between the principal characters is that of a captor to captive; in both an attempt is made by one of the characters to suppress and solipsize the other; and in both works, finally, the value of personal discreteness, of living fully in one’s own imaginative freedom, is consistently upheld in the face of cruelty, confinement, torture and death.

“Mantissa” is a narrative that mimes this “zig-zag principle” in art, on the thematic level, on the figurative level, and on the overall level of its organization as text. Especially does it do so on its portrayal of Erato, who might be said to embody the principle in a purer form than any of her predecessors. Any narrative act, George P. Elliott reminds us, is first of all a series of “false starts, wrong turnings, bungled opportunities”.

III.3 Fowles’s work about fiction

Fowles’s work investigates issues of power in various ways and contexts, and this can be seen as the corollary of his acknowledged concern with freedom, individual choice, and the quest for identity. When Daniel Halpern asked him in a 1971 interview what has ‘remained important’ for him in his work, Fowles described the obsessive hold which the idea of personal liberty has over his creative imagination: “Freedom, yes. How you achieve freedom. That obsesses me. All my books are about that. The question is, is there really free will? Can we choose freely? Can we act freely? Can we CHOOSE? How do we do it?”.

The power of creativity intrigues Fowles. This is one reason for his commitment to metafiction, his concern to explore power by means of a dialectical interpenetration of form and content. Fowles’s fiction never promulgate any definition of postmodernism, and I do not intend systematically. But in its preoccupation with those historical, narratological, linguistic and sexual pressures which operate upon the contemporary writer, his work offers a composite portrait of the authorial consciousness in the era of postmodernism.

Despite a certain diversity of subject-matter, his fictions consistently return to images or processes of liberation, evasion and escape. Very often these processes govern the structural intentions of a work while also describing or shaping its content. So Sarah Woodruff, for example, seeks to escape the hidebound assumptions of Victorian society in a novel which tries to free itself from the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction.

For Fowles, the relationship of women to this particular kind of power is always ambiguous. They are regularly presented in his fiction as art students, like Miranda and Diana, as potential or aspiring artists, like Sarah, Isobel and Catherine. But the mature artist, a usually formidable and often magical individual in Fowles’s work, is invariably male. It seems that Fowles will bring his women characters within reach of full creative capacity, but the dual role in which he consistently, if indirectly, valorizes them, is as guardians of the flame of the masculine genius and providers of the material for art. Thus the specific power of woman is for Fowles an contradictory quality; unrelated to force and without self-determined efficacy, it is nonetheless presented in his fiction as somehow retaining its identity as power. It is clear that sexuality and gender play a vital role in the artist’s efforts to own and exercise his power. Fowles’s fiction emphasizes women as providers of the material for art and it confines them in different ways to ineffective positions relative to creativity.

In his work the woman is literally an objet d’art and it is not surprising to find many references to paintings of women in his books: for example, in “The Magus”, Julie Holmes is compared to the women of Renoir and to Goya’s Maja desnuda; in “The Ebony Tower”, Diana reminds David of a Gauguin maiden and a baigneuse of Manet; Sarah is associated with the conventions of Pre-Raphaelite art through her connections with the Brotherhood.

Even Miranda in “The Collector” is presented in terms of pictures: Clegg assimilates her image to the inverted aesthetics of pornography, one of the metaphors in the Fowles corpus for the destructive potentialities of art. And this idea of woman degraded by means of her own photographed image is reiterated in Daniel Martin’s rejection of Jenny McNeil, a film actress.

This conjunction gives to his work its characteristic tonal blend of anxiety, desire, and mysterious threat – an imaginatively and atmospherically rich mixture which Fowles himself has identified in terms of a passionate indebtedness to the conventions of medieval romance, that is, a fictional sensibility compelled towards motifs of ordeal, quests, and erotic reward.

III.4 About the reliability of the narratives.

The Magus – detailed composition

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

These lines may be seen as an encapsulation of the narrative structure in which repetition is embodies throughout the novel. But the most striking issue here involves the key word “know”, which captures Nicholas’s task in the production of knowledge, in recasting it differently, and in the deriving of beginnings. What this means for Nicholas is that he must reinvestigate, restructure his past experience, and reconstitute the narrative of his own history. Thus, Nicholas insists on exploring the meaning of his life and the meaning of the mystery he encounters in Bourani. At the end of the novel he seems to have understood some of the implications of these mysteries, namely Alison’s freedom. Nicholas describes Alison’s silence as a mystery he is trying to discover: “she would not answer. She was mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back several steps, and start again; and know the place for the first time”. In fact, the figure of woman in this novel is a symbol of the mystery that Nicholas has to explore. Hence Alison, Julie, and Lily are all inscribed by the male narrators as mysterious, unpredictable women, precursors of Sarah in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”.

The analysis of the novel’s structure culminates in the treatment of its narrators. Nicholas is the main narrator who actually narrates the frame text of the novel. But the text inscribed within his averarching narrative are told to him by other characters, and he in turn recounts them to the reader. For example, Conchis communicates to Nicholas the events of his own past, which comprise the major portion of his contribution to the novel’s narrative.

On his first visit to Bourani, Nicholas faces the same problem of whether really to believe Conchis’s first story. Nicholas says: “there was some fatal extra dimension in his objectivity, which was much more that of a novelist before a character than of even the oldest, most changed man before his own real past self”. This is the first critical reaction that Nicholas expresses towards Conchis’s authenticity, and it foreshadows the sceptical line that he adopts throughout the novel. He demands proof of everything he encounters at Bourani and he suspects all stories he hears from other characters. These characters, who act as narrators, are unreliable because they are deeply involved in the action of the story. Thus Nicholas acts as a reader and critic of the somewhat unreliable narratives employed by Conchis. Indeed, through reading, rereading, and reproducing these texts, Nicholas is implicated in them as an unreliable narrator because he, most of all, is enmeshed in the events of the novel.

Conchis, on the other hand, is a more reliable narrator despite the overwhelming irony that stems from his numerous stories that epitomized in the reason behind these stories and in the premise upon which these deceptions are played out. Conchis echoes his creator, who says while writing his fiction: “If you want to be true to life, start lying about the reality of it”. Conchis is thus the author’s surrogate and he represents the professional writer in so many ways. This fictional relationship between the author and Conchis is maintained by making the latter the artist figure of the novel. Also by making Nicholas an artist who fails to understand the function of art and magic, Fowles elevates Conchis’s position as a successful artist and a master of the games that are played in the novel, an important point.

Nicholas-narrator is therefore seen as a reader, an under-developed author, a kind of Everyman caught between real life and the labyrinth of fiction-making. Nicholas refers self-consciously to his status as a character in a novel, a character who will never be able to trace any center to the narratives within he is inscribed. For example, towards the middle of the novel he tells Alison: “It’s like being halfway through a book. I can’t just throw it in the dustbin”(p.273). Here an artistic game is being played between the author and the reader: it reflects the reader’s own position towards the mystery of the novel that s/he wishes to discover. Like Nicholas, the reader searches for the meaning of the novel, but never possesses it; meaning is always deffered. The ultimate irony of Nicholas’s quest is that Conchis tries to teach him the limits and boundaries of art, but what becomes more ironical is that the teaching itself is done through art and fictionality. Stressing the narcissistic element of the novel, Malcolm Bradbury argues that the dilemma of “The Magus” lies with “the artist himself, and it is in this sense that the book is a self-conscious inquiry into its own structure”.

Having analysed the novel’s fictionality, and its implications for both characters and readers, we can turn to the second major problem, and that is the construction of an alternative world as a form of escape from reality. This involves the setting of the novel as well as literary allusions.

“The Magus” explicitly constructs an alternative world both as an escape from reality and as a metaphor for the process of fictionality. The implications of both coalesce together because an escape from reality is a fictionalization, a way of constructing a different account of reality. For Nicholas, reality becomes a narrative, a fictional construct, and narrative itself controls his reality, his life. Nicholas’s entire journey in the “lost domain” of Bourani is a fantasy, a reconstruction of reality as he wants it to be.

Indeed, it is constantly emphasized in the novel that Bourani is an art world, a metaphor. Conchis frequently stresses the fact that the masque is only a metaphor. For example, when Nicholas reads the French book about masques given to him by Conchis, he says: “I read the passage you marked in La Masque Francais”. And Conchis replies: “It is only a metaphor. But it may help”. However, Nicholas realizes that “no doubt the passage was a hint to me” to appreciate the metaphorically of the masque “that happened at Bourani”(p.165).Nicholas then discovers the various metaphorical pattern that link Conchis’s texts to the experiences he is undergoing. This is how Conchis’s fictional texts control, ‘colonize’, and mould Nicholas’s subjectivity. Ironically, Nicholas tries to free himself from Conchis’s net but only to fall into the web of his own fantasies. For example, when he talks of his life he says: ‘I talked about my own father, and perhaps for the first time in my life without bitterness or blame; rather in the way that Conchis talked about his life’(p.254). Thus, the narrative techniques and coherence of Conchis’s multiple texts, and Nicholas’s understanding of them, are overshadowed by the constant concretizations of these analogical links that the reader is able to establish for him/herself.

The reader is obviously warned early in the novel about its metaphorical implications. For example, Nicholas looks back at his inauthentic existence at Oxford where he and his friends misunderstand the “metaphorical descriptions of complex modes of feeling for straightforward prescriptions of behavior”. Therefore, when the imaginative world is created only through fictionalization it may perhaps be seen to be less real than everyday life; it is a reality mediated through narrative, a construction of a reality. And the contents of that constructed reality are types of human individuals. Its people live in a fictional world and only act as if they were in a real world. “The Magus’ is thus about Nicholas attempts to distinguish between the two worlds, to learn the process of differentiation and fictionalization.

Indeed Nicholas’s existence as a fictional character instigates his own realization of what he really is and what position he occupies in his fictional world. For him, existence involves narrative and the production of a fictional account of experience. He tells his own experience in order to authenticate his reality, to identify his own existential position in the world, and to “realize his own uniqueness”, or his own subjectivity. This task of authentication is achieved with the help of literary allusions. These allusions are fictional texts employed by Nicholas and other characters in the novel in order to authenticate its own fictionality.

In his foreword to the revised version of “The Magus”, Fowles states three possible influences on the novel. The first is related to the inclination of the original text to the supernatural element along the lines of James’s “The Turn of the Screw”. The second profound influence is Alain-Fournier’s “Le Grand Meaulnes”. The third is Dickens’s “Great Expectations”, which Fowles admits as an unconscious influence. The three novels deal with alternative worlds as a process of fictionality. “The Turn of the Screw” is seen as an exploration of the ways in which experience itself refuses easy analysis and appears to grant the characters the power to construct their own world out of the real materials available to them.

Fournier’s influence upon Fowles is epitomized through the image of the quest for a mysterious lost land and its beautiful, unknown girl. The resemblance of “The Magus” to “The Lost Domain” is demonstrated through the quest taken by both Nicholas and Meaulnes reflecting the real quest for identity as a writer when he was teaching, along the lines of his fictional hero, on the Greek island of Spetsai. His real anxiety was to discover himself as a writer during the early 1950s, the actual time of writing the first drafts of the novel; he recalls: “I had no coherent idea at all of where I was going, in life as in the book. A more objective side of me did not then believe I should ever become a publishable writer”.

Fournier’s real quest, however, is related to his own experience of unattainable love, his falling passionately in love at first sight with Yvonne de Quievrecourt, a girl he yearned for all his life although they met only at once for a short time. But what is especially important here is to analyze the thematic significance of “The Lost Domain” in relation to “The Magus”.

Both “The Magus” and “The Lost Domain” are closely related to each other through this romantic description of the “lost land” and its enchanted landscape. In fact, through this image of enchantment and the magic atmosphere of Phraxos where the quest takes place, another important literary allusion emerges: it is of course Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, whose images of art and magic recur throughout the novel.

The importance of “The Tempest” within the novel’s godgame is derived from the fact that both works employ magic for the sake of freedom. This is how the novel’s title becomes important for its theme of freedom: it is Conchis, the magus, the trickster, the freedom granter, and the skilful art player. Peter Wolfe argues that a magus is not only a good figure, but the “archfraud, the trickster or joker supreme”; and Arthur Edward Waite defines him in “The Key to the Tarot as a magician, or juggler, the caster of the dice and mountebank in the world of vulgar trickery”. Thus Conchis , being a magus, does understand the implications of being a free individual who is willing to allow freedom to others.

Conchis’s employment of magic reflects that of Prospero’s in “The Tempest”. Conchis is a kind of Prospero who, though at times seems to Nicholas to be evil, appears as a good and beneficial trickster. This element of magic paves the way toward achieving freedom. Moreover, Fowles wants the reader to be fully aware that “The Magus” is a game and the magus himself is both a teacher and the leading actor-director in the game. Nicholas is enchanted by Conchis’s game and he wants to be part of it. Thus, Nicholas becomes deeply involved in the games, in the excitement of detecting the novel’s mysteries. But the deplorable thing for him is that when the game ends he is left alone, with nothing, losing his job, Lily, and any hope of finding the origins and meanings of the various stories he hears during the godgame, particularly those concerning Alison’s death.

Art is the means through which Nicholas acquires knowledge about life. This quest for knowledge is significantly compared to the quest undertaken by the Fool in the Tarot myth. The connection between The Magus and the Tarot is concretized in two ways. The first is related to the number of chapters in the novel – seventy-eight – which reflects the exact number of cards in the Tarot. The second way involves the quest for knowledge by both Nicholas’s and the Fool in the Tarot.

This is how the numerous references to the Tarot (representing a “game” of both reality and illusion) in the novel become important in demonstrating Nicholas’s quest for knowledge. Thus the Tarot’s significance is emphasized because it represents the journey of the individual, the Fool, Nicholas as he advances through the experiences that help him to reach spiritual enlightenment.

However, this journey of enlightenment takes place within a fictional world. Stressing this fictionality Lily de Seitas tells Nicholas: “in the godgame we start from the premise that in reality all is fiction, yet ni single fiction is necessary”(p.627). In other words, if the godgame is all fiction and none of it is necessary in ordinary life, then all fiction is contingent. Stressing this element of contingency, the uncertainty of the world of fiction, Fowles often repeats his belief that in the novel “nothing is certain”(p.339). Thus these games remain within the novel as the means and end of fiction; they will never evolve into anything real. Indeed, fictions are employed here to give coherence to life. But ironically, this life itself is made of fictions, made of language and its arbitrary sign systems. As a fictional character, Nicholas undertakes his task of ordering his life through signs and images.

To illustrate this further, it is important to emphasize the novel’s mimetic illusion. Mimesis, by definition, is an imitation, a representation and artistic reconstruction of everyday reality. Since mimesis is a reproduction of reality, then it is seen as “incomplete consciously simplified, superficial” and therefore illusory. It is often “a pleasantly stylized reality” directed to the “mimetic imagination of the reader, to this memory-pictures” of similar milieus. This is often true in realistic fiction. But in “The Magus”, this reconstruction of reality is never truthful; it is only an illusion. Indeed The Magus is an illusion within an illusion. For example, the revision of the novel functions as a major indicator of the double illusion sustained throughout the narrative. Revision by its very nature involves the displacement of one version by another; this, the original mimetic text, is actually replaced by another mimetic illusion, and the new text is also liable to further revisions. Thus, if Nicholas’s past life is real it should not change under any type of revision: what is real in one version will always be the same in others. But the fact that Nicholas’s supposedly mimetic stories change from one version to the other suggests only their illusory nature. The upshot of this argument is that the novel’s “mimetic” elements refer not to a quotidian reality but to other mimetic elements, to other fictional texts. Hence, the novel’s radical textuality is foregrounded: texts refer to other texts, signs to other signs, images to other images, and fictions to other fictions. The Magus is thus an ensemble of signs, images, texts, fictions, and illusions that have no referential status.

This can be linked more properly to Derrida’s notion of difference, that is, “a pure textuality from every last taint of referential meaning”. This is the vital point that Conchis tries to advance throughout the godgame. For example, Conchis analysis of the parable of the Prince and the Magician implies that Nicholas has to learn what the ancient magician taught his son in the fable, that becoming a magician involves the comprehension and acceptance of the fact that “there is no truth beyond magic”(p.552).

The fact that Conchis’s godgame is an ensemble of illusions triggers the problem of fictiveness in the novel. Fowles demonstrates this fictiveness through the fundamental effort exerted by characters and narrators as fiction-makers in order to gain freedom from their author.

Although “The Collector” and “The Magus” appear at first sight to be very different novels, they are in many ways engaged with similar themes. Thus “The Magus” returns us to that symbolic location which is crucial to Fowles’s imagination and his novelistic creativity: magical enclosure, the domaine sans nom of Alain-fournier.

”The French Lieutenant Woman”- The novel actually “plays upon the truth and lies of the historical record”. Certain historical facts are deliberately fictionalized, mystified, and changed in order to foreground the possible failures of recorded history and the related errors that the record may contain. This is illustrated, for example, in the documentation of Victorian sexuality in the novel, and the exaggerated, even falsified statistics. It is also seen in the fictionalized documents about the trial of Lieutenant Emile de La Ronciere and the woman with whom he was involved. The narrator admits the fictionality of the trial through his narrative in chapter 28: he narrates from another text obtained from Dr. Grogan, who in his turn took it from another text by a German doctor, who himself wrote it in his own exaggerated manner in support of a defendant. There are numerous documents like this in the novel where a text is taken from another text, neither of which is totally authentic.

Moreover, Lukacs argues that historical fiction usually incorporates and assimilates such “real” documents in order to establish their connection with the literary world. But in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” or in “A Maggot”, such historical facts are overtly incorporated but not fully assimilated as pure fiction. Instead, it is the process of assimilation, the actual reconstruction of texts, that is foregrounded in both novels. The reader realizes that these documents remain as narrativized as facts from the real past.

This could also be applied to the historical figures of the past that are deployed in the novel. They never achieves the position of real historical figures, but are merely employed in order to authenticate fictional events, fictional worlds, and most importantly to enhance the novel’s ultimate illusion and metafictionality. The interaction of fiction and history results in more problematic issues related to the novel’s poetics. They include the problem of intertextuality, the ideological combination of fiction and history, the issue of subjectivity, and authority in the novel.

As explained, the fictive and the historical interact through the intertexts of the novel, for it is in this way that the narrator of “The French Lieutenant’s Women” fleshes out the cultural and historical contexts of the novel world. These intertexts range from the real documents of Victorian history to other writings from Victorian literature. Following Said, we may say that the novel is a textualization of other texts. In this novel, and later in “A Maggot”, intertextuality is the concrete means through which the past is linked and also reconstructed through the mediating narratives of the present.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman, then, conform to the metafictional tendency inherent in intertextuality and operating in the spheres of both history and fiction. As Patricia Waugh argues, metafiction – like this novel – “suggests not only that writing history is a fictional act… but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design”. Umberto Eco explains the ironic implication of deploying history in fiction; he argues that “the past leads to silence, must be revised: but with irony, not innocently”.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman poses a challenge both of fiction and history as two distinct genres of discourse. The novel breaks this conventional separation between historical facts and fiction, and opens up the boundaries of both in order to contain each other. This means that fiction can easily absorb and contain history within its discourses; history becomes a text like any fictional text. This porous quality of fiction and history is not a defect in either discourse. On the contrary, it becomes a problematic quality that enhances their capacity, their elasticity and plurality. The novel is indeed an attack on Victorian conventions and an acceptance of the mixture of history and fiction. This is the point at which the narrator forces the reader to reinterpret history and to decide which position s/he must choose in relation to the dilemma of “whether we make history or history make us”. We make history in the sense that we employ its discourses in order to understand its culture; afte all history is made of and by human beings. But when history makes us it means that we become its subjects.(J.F Fiction and the poetics of post..)

Although the crisis of realism – that is to say, the refusal of an unproblematic representation of the real – was apparent already in the first half of the 20th century, postmodernism further eroded the coordinates of realism, playing with language’s power to create other worlds, but also deconstruct them from inside.

Suffice it to think of “The French Lieutenant Woman” with its alternative endings and its repeated authorial intrusions. Fowles’s omniscient third-person narrator intertwines his pseudo-realistic narrative with passages where he addresses readers in the first person to reflect on the rules of the game they are playing.

Readers thus learn that what they have just read has happened only in the mind of the main character, and are reminded of the importance of story-telling as a self-questioning activity that may actually shape their future, for we unceasingly “screen in minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us”.

Conclusion

Despite the United Kingdom’s prominent place in the European Community and despite the significance of the English language both to Europe and to the world as a whole, English literature still shows a marked tendency to be insular and to dwell on a narrow view of the past.

Although it likes playing games with narrative, and with the idea of narrative, it has relatively few grand ideas and rather fewer epic pretensions. As old assumptions go, as old ideologies turn rancid, as old borders are superseded, as some nations tear themselves apart or as others attempt to live in unprecedented intimacy with one another, so a future English literature might respond with new forms, sounds, subjects, and preoccupations. But then it might not.

Stuffy, smug little-Englandism would, however, seem unlikely to be capable of nourishing the embryonic writing of the twenty-first century.

In the early 1990s the novel remains the most accessible, the most discussed, and the most sponsored literary form. Literary prizes, such as the annual Booker prize, founded in 1969 on the model of the French Prix Goncourt, have helped to stimulate an interest in new fiction which cannot be anything but healthy (even though a number of the prize novels have not fully justified the temporary prestige they acquired). Judging from the work of new, or newish, novelists over the past fifteen years, the forms and subjects of the late twentieth-century novel remain plural but conservative despite, or perhaps because of, the plethora of contemporary narrative theory. What some critics see as ‘post-Modernism’ has entailed both a return to the basic challenges posed by the pioneer experimentalists of the early century, and, by extension, a degree of subversion of the very assumptions upon which both traditional and early- Modernist fictional forms were based.

The novel has properly reflected ‘modernity’, the changes in how we think, move, and have our modern being, and the fragmentation and chaos of contemporary life. It has also had to readapt the Modernist insistence on new kinds of meaning.

Broadly speaking, other recent British fiction can be seen as having explored four particular areas of interest: it has, sometimes outrageously, continued the development of the well-established Gothic tradition; it has sought a newly distinct feminist expression; it has tried out new varieties of historical writing; and it has begun to widen its horizons to include writers and subjects stemming from the old colonial Empire and from a wider world. All four areas overlap, interweave, and inform one another.

Fowles progressively refines his own concepts of self and world in the light of this theory of art. What is more, the fact that all his novels may be described as variations on the male hero’s quest for maturation with the heroines invariably playing the suspect archetypal double role, adds the reader’s impression that, although Fowles has repeatedly defined himself as an atheist, a socialist, and a defender of feminist issues , the roots of his imagination are firmly rooted in patriarchal humanism.

Whether we agree or mot with Fowles’s attempt to recover the transcendental component of writing and with the clearly humanist and patriarchal stance of his creative imagination, what we cannot deny this extraordinary writer is the colossal effort he has made to absorb and recast the Western tradition of writing.

As a conclusion, the heroine in Fowles has been an invaluable resource in this ontological endeavour. Mysterious, subversive, often melodramatic figures, the dark ladies of his fiction have been typically instrumental in expanding the hero’s consciousness and alerting him to reality’s unexpected “monstrousness” and “vigor”. For that very reason, however, the heroine herself has become one of the last free of Fowles’s literary characters.

In her essay “Against Dryness”, (note- Iris Murdoch, “Against dryness”, Encounter, XVI(1961), 16-20.) Iris Murdoch set the terms of what is one of the central dichotomies in recent fiction. In a discussion with Frank Kermode, she points out the difficulty of creating character, when “often it turns out in the end that something about the structure of the work itself , the myth as it were of the work, has drawn all these people into a sort of spiral, or into a kind of form which ultimately is the form of one’s own mind.” Much post-war fiction is testimony to this latter comment, and many novelists, certainly those practitioners of the nouveau roman and their progeny, have adopted the hermeticism of the “crystalline” work with its self-referential stance, subsuming character into function or pattern, person into participle in the “sentence” of the next.

Humanity and morality are important to Fowles, and he refuses the retreat into the formal mythoi of his novels, emphasizing instead the content and human character rather than the medium of the artifice. Fowles wants to create the illusion that his characters are as real as we who read – not just “like” people we know, but of the same ontological status as the readers of their texts.

Even if the fiction of the last twenty years may still be called modernist in the fracturing of its narratives and the openness of its endings, it is clear that it has altered course. The boundaries between reality and fantasy have, at times, clearly dissolved. The novel’s illusion or reality, even when fractured in the ways we have suggested, is no longer just being examined or just parodied. The wish to spin our fictions which cannot be pinned down to a material world is a response, no doubt, to an age of global electronic information where more can be known and communicated than ever before. The elusiveness of fictions gives them a special pedigree in a culture which is increasingly documented and saturated by self-advertisement. It is a way in which the world of the book can resist the world of the screen. Whether it can continue to do so into the next century remains yet to be seen.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Salami, Mahmoud (1992), John Fowles's Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism, Associated University Presses;

Warburton, Eileen (2004), John Fowles; A Life in Two Worlds;

Leonard, John (1982-08-31). "Books of the Times: Mantissa". New York Times. Retrieved 2011-05-31;

Paris, Barry (1982-09-07). "John Fowles muses about fiction". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.. Retrieved 2011-05-31;

Onega, Susana. Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989;

Roessner, Jeffrey. “Unsolved Mysteries: Agents of Historical Change in John Fowles’ A Maggot.” Papers on Language and Literature 36.3 (2000): 302-24;

Tony E. Jackson (Summer 1997). "Postmodern evolutionary theory in The French Lieutenant's Woman". Twentieth Century Literature.. Retrieved 2009-03-09;

Mel Gussow Talk With John Fowles in The New York Times, November 13, 1977;