INTRODUCTION: John Fowles and Postmodernism ………………………. 6 I. Historical elements in John Fowles’ s Novels: ………………………………….. 13 1.1. The Magus or… [603308]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: John Fowles and Postmodernism ………………………. 6
I. Historical elements in John Fowles’ s Novels: ………………………………….. 13
1.1. The Magus or the Godgame …………………………………………………………………….. 16
1.2. The French Lieutenant’ s Woman – A Contemporany Perspective on
Victorianism………………………………………………………………………………………. ……21
1.3. Daniel Martin – The Quest for the Self……………………………………………………… 28
II. The Conditio n of the Reader in John Fowles’ s Novels ………………………. 33
III. The Condition of the Writer………………………………………….. ……………………… 46
IV. Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………. 52

6
Introduction:
John Fowles and Postmodernism

The reality of today’ s word is a mixture of perspectives, clashing ideas and a
multitude of traditions. Whether we want to accept it or not, the fantastic transformations and
the phenomena such a s: communication facilitators (phone, internet ), travels into space,
widespread genocide, new viruses, to name but a few, have penetrated the cultural
expressions, including literature.
The concept of P ostmodernism cannot be defined in literature if we disregard the
socio -cultural, historical and philosophical background that has made it possible. All aspects
of life have contributed to the death of Modernism and appeara nce of a new cultural trend.
Conce pts as post -industry, post -history are symbols of a world that has suffered dramatic
changes. The informati onal boom brought upon by mass -media development has as outcome
a total access of every individual to any bit of data, at any time, in any place. Hen ce,
postmodern man is empowered to question the validity of any rules, theories and conventions
as he is constantly confronted with a shifting environment, speed change and an accelerated
rhythm of life. The atrocities of the Second World War coupled with developments in
genetics, robotics and space exploration are reflected in nihilism and existentialism
philosophies, presenting the image of a man as a fluctuant entity, surrounded by relative
values, incapable of seeking ultimate truths. Everything is arbi trary, changes are unpredictable
and it appears that nothing can shock us anymore.
At the same time, as far as literature is concerned, the reader has to adapt to the new
reality of the text and he is new eager to establish links, connections between the real and the
fictional. The reader is now more inquisitive than ever, he is forced by the author to see the
text as constantly in the marking, to interpret and communicate with the text, to seek for the
real message.
Postmodernism is a term that can be used extensively f or everything that makes
today’ s world, from fashion and advertising t o literary theory, but we shall refer to this
phenomenon from the point of view of literature.
It has been seen as a phenomenon in the wake of Modernism, being both continuit y,
as pushing beyond as a well as an opposition to the modernist writing.

7
John Ba rth published in 1967 an article entit led: The Literature of Exhaustion in
which he explained how the contemporary novel had reached a dead end, how the old literary
forms slowly and degenerate until they reach a point of exhaustion. The n, he took the idea
further and in the essay called: The Literature of Reple nishment: postmodernist Fiction, he
described postmodernism as the new litera ry form arising one of two “exhausted ”1 old form :
classic realism and modernism. More than that, postmoderni sm in literature is characteriz ed
as a parodic relationship to both these literary movements that preceded it: realism and
modernism. For Linda Hutcheon the most important and definitory char acteristic of
postmodernism is “a return made problematic by overtly m etafictional assertions of both
history and literature as human constructs ”2.
An interesting assumption was drawn by Frederic Jameson in trying to defi ne
Postmodernism. In his book : Postmodernism, or the Cu ltural Logic of Late Capitalism , he
said that: “postmodernism presumably signals the end of the dilemma, which it replaces with
a new one. The end of the borgeois ego, or nomad, no boubt brings with it the end of the
psychopatologies of the ego…”3.
In the course of the 1970’ s, postmodernism was drawn into a poststructuralist orbit.
It was first associated with the decons tructionist practices that were inspired from Roland
Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Later it drew on the work of Michel Foucault a nd Jacques
Lacan. In 1979, Jean -Francois Lyotard wrote: La Condition Postmoderne and the term
adopted when this was translated in 1984. Like post -structuralism, this postmodernism rejects
the idea that language can represent reality and that the world is accessible to us through
langua ge. Accepting Derrida’ s de monstration gives up on language’ s representa tional
function and follows post -structuralism in the idea that language constitutes, rather than
reflects the world, and that knowledge is distorted by language, by the historical
circumstances and the environm ent in which it arises. The subject then is constructed in
language and determined by language. Inter textuality and history being re -written, the text
seen, in the terms used by Roland Barthes . In the place where exists a variety of writings we
think no one are original and these are some of the characteristics of postmodernism in
literature.

1 BARTH, John – The Friday Book, Essays and Other Non -Fiction: The Literature of Replenishment: postmodernist
Fiction, Ed. The John Hopkins University Press, London, 1984 , p. 194
2 HUTCHEON, Linda – A Poetic o f Postmodernism, Ed. Taylor& Francis e -Library, London, 2004 , pp. 124 – 125
3 JAMESON, Frederic – Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Ed.Duke University Press,
Durhan, 1991, p. 15

8
One of the critics of Postmodernism, Ihab Hassan, in: The Dismemberment of
Orpheus – Towards a Postmode rnism Literatur e formulates some of the characteristics of such
writing: indeterminacy, relativity, fragmentation, decanonization (derision of the authority of
genre), hybridi zation, carnivalization, deconstruction of language, irony, participation and
performance (the text wants to be written), parody. Ihab Hassan sees strategies of internal
disruption which stem from the heroics of unmaking and form “a literature of silence which
consents to dismemberment, but yet continues somehow to sing on a lyre witho ut strings”4.
This principle of silence means subversion of language and convention , “the turning of
consciousness upon itself, the exploration of ecstasy, trance and other extreme states of
feeling”5. Hassan also observes that “postmodernism is irrational, indeterminate, anarchic,
but also participative”6.
Another theore tician that has been interested in defining postmodernism is Brian
McHale. He finds postmodernist fiction to be a carnivalesque interweaving of style, voices,
and registers. Conse quently, these are juxtapositions between fictional words and the real
world/ worlds. McHale po ints to be shift of emphasis from epistemological concerns (how a
world can be known) to ontological ones (what is the world, what kinds of worlds are there,
how are they constituted and how do they differ). The stress is on a multitude of possible
universes, which has as a result literary strategies such as multiplication of endings as in The
French Lieutenant’ s Woman , parodic treatment of author or reader, deliberate confusion
between action and f iction, myth and reality, self reflexiv eness and metafiction. The border
between history and fiction is blurred, all the texts, including historical ones are subjective,
because history cannot be taken for fact or r eality, yet is another version of history.
Irina Toma observes that “the stress on the fictiveness of fiction is deeply rooted in
the overwhelming sensation of b affling anxiety that confronts the contemporary writer. In a
world of altered human and epistem ological relationships, of high technology and strange
and distorted history, of flimsy individual consciousness and a disoriented sense of human
purpose, postmodernist novelists have tried to re -define the ficti onal act in altered ways.
Realiz ing the futi lity of the enterprise as far as contemporary life was concerned, some of
them turned to history as a backup. It was the case of John Fowles and John Barth, turning to

4 HASSAN, Ihab – The Dismemberment od Orpheus – Toward a Postmodernism Literature, Ed. The University of
Wisconsin Press, London, 1982, p. 12
5 Ibid, 1982, p. 12
6 Ibid, 1982, p. 13

9
19th and 18th century respecti vely, in The French Lieutenant’ s Woman ” and The Sot -Weed
Factor”7.
Peter Brooks, in his book: Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
states that “we live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our
past actions, anticipating the outcome of future projects, situating ourselves at the
intersection of several stories not yet completed”8. It is what the hero of “The French
Lieutenant’ s Woman” does and “the contemporary narrator interrupts to forestall our
objections in the name of a kind of postmodernism mimesis of proces s reminding us that we
too do this constantly”9.
Self reflexiveness is another feature of postmodern writings, as Irina Toma points out
to be “an essential dominant of postmodernist literature, which permanently lays stress on the
fictiveness of fiction, o n its game -like quality, on the artificiality of the artifact”10. This fiction
draws attention to it being an artifact, its aim is to display the artificiality of realistic
conventions, but at the same time to use, employ these conventions in the making of the text .
John Fowles does that in The French Lieutenant’ s Woman, where he uses the convention of
the Victorian literature only to repeatedly tell the reader that it is an artifice. The reader is
invited to interpret, to be a player in this game of fiction – writing and the stress is on how it is
narrated, not on what is narrated. The reader shares the pleasure of creation and participates in
the reconstruction of the text, as it happens in Daniel Martin and The French Lieutenant’ s
Woman.
Postmodern fiction open relationship between reality and fiction of question, it
challenges the reader to become critical, to reflect on a type of universe they help create.
A borderline that is crossed in postmodernist literature is the one of fictional versus
truthful description and depiction. The resultant form the historiographic met aficion , a term
used by Linda Hutcheon and considered by her “a paradigm of postmodernist literature”11.
On the level of narrative technique, this position is reflected by the fact that the reader is often
presented with a certain interpretation which is la ter on undermined.
Postmodernism, according to Hutcheon does not claim that all past events are textual
constructs that never have existed outside representation. The dialectic conviction is that

7 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 52
8 BROOKS, Peter – Reading f or the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Ed. Harvard University Press, London,
1984, p. 3
9 HUTCHEON, Linda – The Politics of Postmodernism, Ed. Taylor& Francis e -Library, London, 2004, pp. 48 -49
10 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Pos tmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 17
11 HUTCHEON, Linda – The Politics of Postmodernism, Ed. Taylor& Francis e -Library, London, 2004, p. 35

10
“past events existed empirically, but is epistemological terms we can only know them through
texts”12. This is why exists just o ne way to materialize th is conviction and this is the use of
footnotes that direct the reader to another texts.
In postmodernism literature we also remark different strategies as: metaf iction,
intertextuality, pa rody, irony or variety, things which I will discuss later, in the following
chapters, one exception is parody and irony. One strategy of postmodernist writings is
authorial intrusion in a parodic way. As McHale cites William Gass : “authors are gods, a
little tiny sometimes, but omnipotent no matter what, and plausible on top of that, if they can
manage it”13. This device, which is used Fowles so successfully , is meant also to undermine
the authority of the author who makes the rea der conspire with him in creating the novel.
Irina Toma, observes that “this im plied reader cannot be identified with the authentic
one, he is a comic character, participating in the making of the book… The presence of the
implied reader is actually instrum ental in the frame – breaking process that the postmodernist
novel achieves. The reader should be able to understand that the present day status of the
writer is that of a god whose power lies not in his omnipotent authorship but in his
willingness to let o thers enjoy their freedom”14.
Parody and irony are two essential devices used by postmodernist writers and it is
obvious that “the relation between postmodernism and tradition can only function via parody
as a mediator”15. Irina Toma points out that “postmodernist parody perform a counter –
entropic function within the fragmentary, disorderly context of late 20th century fiction… and
both irony and parody operate on two levels: a primary, surface, or foreground and a
secondary, implied, or background on e… Both types of approaches suggest the existence of a
critical distance from the tr adition, be it literary or non -literary, combined with a
transgression which is not always subversive”16.
Moreover, literature allows the freedom of choice, imagination, op inion and it is the
perfect common ground for the interplay of opposities, using words to represent words and
questioning unity. In literature, postmodernism may be recognizable at the level of a text that
has some features like: the return to history (which interferes with one’s private life and
intimate e xperiences and which can be re -written); the return to narrative (abolishing the

12 Ibid, 1989, p. 81
13McHALE, Brian – Postmodernist fiction, Ed. Taylor& Francis e -Library, London and New York, 2004, p. 122
14 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 16
15 Ibid, 2004, p. 48
16 Ibid, 2004, p. 45

11
chronology, clear structure and plot); the presence of fiction/ reality para dox (the reader is
made to understand that the only reality he can observe is the textuality of the text and his
interpretation of it). Postmodernist l iterature uses irony and parody ( embedding tradition and
at the same time, disclosing the false pretence of reality). It enters the post -symbolist phase
(using symbol as an archetype) and it blurs the border between fiction and history
(underlining the idea that history cannot be taken for fact or reality, as reality itself is
constructed by each of us). Obvi ously, other features of postmodernism are governed by
intertextuality, by magic realism and principles of fabulation (including fiction within fiction
and misleading the reader, trying not to match his/ her expectations). At last, postmodernist
literatur e constructs a surrogate reader/ author (the author becomes character or the reader is
invited to construct the text).
As a conclusion I can draw, it should be said that the Postmodernism is a complex
phenomenon which is to be discussed within the context of the relati onship between this
socio -cultural trend and tradition, this relation being , as Irina Toma expressed in her book,
“one of use of former by the latter”17. In he r opinion the “using and abusing of the tradition
in the postmodernist fiction”18, as well as “the multiple layers of literary and non – literary
allusions pervading the works of Jhon Barth, John Fowles and Thomas Pynchon never cease
to engender new readings verging on the utmost literary sophistication”19.
All in all, postmodern novels try to estab lish or re -estab lish communication between
the author of the text and the reader, making the text complex, fascinating and intriguing,
alternatives and involving the reader into a very process of creation.
Susa na Onega observes in the work, Self, World and Art in the Fiction of John
Fowles that “Barth and Nadeau, as well as Hutc heon “The Real Worlds”, pp. 81 -94) and
Longe (“Modes”, pp.226 -227), consider John Fowles a key writer, linking modernism and
postmodernism in Britain, and he is indeed a writer placed generationally after Becktt,
Borges and Durell, with a double background in the English and the French literary
traditions as well as in the post structuralist critical theory; he has also often pointed out his
feeling of alienation and exclus ion from the English way of life and is perfectly aware of the
problematic crossroads between the temptation of mimetic transparency and the desire to

17 Ibid, 2004, p. 27
18 Idem
19 Idem

12
undermine and renew the inherited conventions in which the contemporary writer in
trapped”20.

20 ONEGA, Susana – Self, World and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles , Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42, Ed.
Duke University Press, Spring 1996, p. 36

13
Chapter I
Historical elements in John Fowles’ s Novels

“Which is the real Fowles? Readers may disagree, and in disagreeing come up with
extremely varied readings. We may take the book as a very Whig novel, a novel about
emancipation through history, with Victorian hypocrisy and ignorance y ielding up to modern
truth and authencity, to good faith and freedom, the whole enterprise aided by appropriately
sympathetic techniques in which the characters are set free from the formal containments of
tradition Victorian fiction… What , at any rate, is ob vious is that John Fowles is – through we
been slow to notice it – a sophisticated novelist; and it is worth asking briefly hot it is that sort
of sophistication can have emerged in pos twar English fiction… We have, with Fowles, as
with writers like Nabokov and Barth and Borges, out difficulties in deciding just how modern
a novelist he is or wants to be , for there is, as with them, a decided element of protective
withdrawal fr om authoritative commitment to l ose ele ments of existential and revolutionary
lore which his work obvious ly copes with and comprehends -from, in fact, the establishment,
modern’ though of our day”21.
In comparis on to the work of his contemporaries, the novels of John Fowles can
seem strained and forced. “All my life a have turned life into fiction, to hold reality away;
always I have acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me m arks for
good and bad behavior -a god like a novelist, to whom I turned like a character with the
power to place , the sensitivity to feel slight ed, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he
believed the no velist -god wanted. This leech -like variation of the super ego I had created
myself, because of it I had always been incapable of acting freely. It was not my defense; but
my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a death too late”22. Fowles described himself as a
collector, hunter and gar dener. These passions, from the psychological points of view, prove
emotional instability and also a multiple personality, fascinated with role plays, games and
travesties. His pathological fear of reality, his wish to escape from the visible substantial
world made Fowles ceaselessly live a second/ double reality at the level of the mind, probably
turning any material fact into its infinite imaginable forms.

21 BRADBURY, Malcom – Posibilities essays on the State of the Novel, Ed. Oxford University Press, London, 1973,
pp. 257 -259
22 A BBC interview with John Fowles for the BBC Television Show, The Lively Arts, October, 1977, source:
internet, at: https://www.fowlesbooks.com/BBC%20interview.htm , Accessed February 18, 2017

14
Naturalism, partly informed by attitudes learnt from Zen, i s an important part of
Fowles’ s life an d books and affects his attitude to people: “these is nothing nicer to me than
sitting in a window over a street and just watching how these weird bipeds pass each other
and speak to each other”23. His range of reading includes Sartre, Camus, Alain -Fourier and
Hardy, by all of whom he has been influenced in some way, and, in a random list, twelfth –
century romance, Defoe, D. H. Lawrence, Flaubert and John Berryman. “In the novels an
equally generous narrative enthusiasm and recoil from a determining authorit y coexist with
the compulsion to explore coercive and manipulative narrative power”24. Irina Toma adds
that “Fowles artful handling of both 19th and 20th century literary techniques represent his
way of permanently reminding to reader that both the epistemological assumptions and the
aesthetic conventions on which his Victorian novel is based are set in the perspective offered
by the episteme and aesthetic s of his own age”25. For John Fowles, writing is a natural
process, it is like the essential things in life. Dumitru Ciocoi – Pop noticed that writing and
probably art in general “represents for Fowles the revolt of the individuality”26. These ideas
are illus trated in a later interview, where Fowles confesses he believes that “existentialism
will take place of the old, dogmatic religion… It’ s the great individu alist philosophy, the
twentieth -century individual’ s answer to the evil pressures of both capitalism and
communism”27. John Fowles was b orn on March 31, 1926 in Leigh -on-Sea; a small town
located about 40 miles from London in the country of Essex, England. He recalls the Englis h
suburban culture of the 1930’ s as oppressively con formist and his family life as intensely
conventional: “The rows of respectable little houses inhabited by respectable little people had
early depressive effect on means I believe that they caused my i ntense and continuing dislike
or mankind”28. Of his chil dhood, Fowles says: “I have tried to escape ever since ”29 As a boy,
Fowles was introduced to the wonders of the social life by his uncle, including the art of
butterfly collecting. Fowles was a hard -working student, he even won a scholarship to
Bedford, a p restigious boys school. But looking back, Fowles has described the school as “a
proper English institution… traditional, academically demanding and brutal”30. Fowles went
to Bedford School, an English public school where he became a “head – boy”31: “Bing a

23 CONRADY, Peter J. – John Fowles, Ed. Methuen EEC Series, 1982, p.24
24 Idem, 1982, pp. 24 -25
25 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 55
26 CIOCOI – POP, Dumitru – Notes on the Modern Britich Liter ature, Ed. Societății Academice Anglofone din
România, Sibiu, 1999, p. 72
27 CONRADY, Peter J. – John Fowles, Ed. Methuen EEC Series, 1982, p. 72
28 Ibid, 1982, p. 22
29 Ibid, 1982, p. 23
30 Idem
31 Idem

15
head-boy was a weird experience. You had total power over 800 other boys, you were totally
responsible for discipline and punishment… I suppose I used to beat on the average three or
four boys a day… very evil, I think. Terrible system”32.
Oxford was the place where Fowles earned an honours degree and his interest in the
concept of free will and hazard -later becom e primary themes in his novels -grew, together
with his affinity for the random complexity of nature, also influe nced by the existentialism of
writers such as Sartre and Camus. He even says: “I now think of existentialism as a ki nd of
literary metaphor, a wis -fulfillment. I long ago began to doubt whether it had any true
philosophical values in its assertions about freedom”33.
John Fowles spent 1950 -1951 as professor of English literature at a University in
France, during which time he taught himself Latin and continued to write. Then he accepted a
position as a teacher of English as a secon d language at a Greek boarding school on the island
on Spets es, about 60 miles southwest of Athens. It was here that Fowles first met his future
wife, Elisabeth. The school and its surroundings would also subsequently provide a setting for
The Magus, and a passage from an early chapter in the novel illustrates how much Fowles had
fallen under the spell of Greece: “It was a Sunday in late May, blue as a bird’s w ing. I
climbed up to goat paths in the island’ s ridgeback, from where the green forth of the pine –
top rolled two miles down to the coast. The sea stretched like a silk carpet across the shadowy
wall of the mountains on the mainland to the west , a wall that reverberated away south, fifty
or sixty miles to the horizon, under the vast bell of the empyrean. It was an azure world,
stupendously pure, and as always when I stan d on the central ridge of the island and saw it
before me, I forgot must troubles. I walked along the central ridge, westwards, between the
two vast views no rth and south. Lizards flashed up to pine trunks like living em erald
necklaces. There was thym e and rosemary, and other herbs; bushes with flowers like
dandelions dipped in sky, a wild, lambent blue”34.

32 Idem
33 CONRADY, Peter J. – John Fowles, Ed. Methuen EEC Series, 1982, p. 30
34 FOWLES, John – The Magus, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 61

16
1.1.The Magus or the Godgame

The Magus (1965), tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, a cynical young English man
who accepts teaching post at a boarding school on a Greek island and quiqly becomes into an
elaborated game by wealthy recluse named, Maurice Conc his. Reality and fantasy are
deliberately consufed as Conc his takes Nicholas on a roller coaster ride of staged deaths,
erotic encounters and ultimate betrayal. Forced to confront his past transgressions and s elf-
delusions, Nicholas, learn s valuable lessons about meaning of life, love hazard and free will.
Conc his is the master of magic and hallucinations in his Godgame which leads gradually Urfe
to deeper self -knowledge and re -birth. Fowles interweaves in the story Greek myths,
psychoanalysis, Nazis, and shifting explanations of the mysteri ous events. Finally, Urfe
break s free from the Conchis power. However, when Fowl es published the revised version
twelve years later, this point is left more ambiguous. The draft title for the book was
originally, The God game . In the novel he acknowledged the influence of psychologist, Carl
Jung, and such literary models as Henry James ’s– The turn of the Screw and Charles
Dickens’ s- Great Expectations : “One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose
to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precis ely the opposite is true -they were
succesfull because they imposed cha os on order. They tore up the c omma ndments; they
denied the super -ego, what you will”35. They said: “You may persecute the minority, you may
kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed with love. They offered humanity all its great
temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted”36.
The Magus was widely hailed by critics in the United States. Described as brilliant
by The New York Times, a work of genius by The St. Louis Dispatch and magnificently written
by The New York Review of Books, it also quickly became a cult novel on American college
campuses. It was described as an astonishing achievement by the listener, Anthony Burges
and immensely seducti ve and brilliantly entertaining by Frederic Raphael, The Sunday Times.
With parallels to S hakespeare ’s The Tempest and Homer’ s Odyssey, The Magus is a
traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom,
hazard and a variety of existential uncertainties. Fowles compared it to a detective story
because the way it teases the reader : “You mislead tthem ideally to lead them into a greater

35 FOWLES, John – The Magus, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004
36 Idem

17
truth… it’ s a trap which I hope will hook the reader”37, he says. In 1968, 20th Century Fox
released a movie adaptation of The Magus, directed by Guy Green, from a screen play by
Fowles, starring Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn and Candice Bergen in one of her first roles,
and Anna Karina. Unfortunately, the film failed to capture the essence of the novel. But “this
near-miss in not withou t many botable virtues. Fowles’ s script sustai ns interest in its
conv olutions, direction is resource ful and sensitive, Caine is far more dynamic than usual and
Quinn and the two femme stars register strongly”38.
Fowles has called the film adaptation of his second novel: “a disaster all the way
down the line”39 and Woody Allen is quoted as saying that if he had his life to live over again,
he would want everything exactly the same with the exception of seeing the film version of
The Magus. Even Michael Caine, who played the role of Nicholas Urfe, once said that the
worst movie he had ever been in was The Magus because “nobody could figure out what it
was about”40.
In the situation of John Fowles, “intertextuality works in a highly replenishi ng
manner, reque sting a fairly sophisticated reader, altough any reader would be bound to learn
enough from the text itself to acced to some of its parodies at last. However, there seems to be
a significant difference in the treatment of the reader in Fowl es’s novel as compared to that in
a novel forerunning postmodernism in many issues, Tristram Shandy. In the 18th century text,
the narrator may indeed verbally manhandle his reader and narrator share a set of values
and an educational background. Aware of there being no such possible common ground any
longer, Fowles works in an open manner towards instructing the reader of his novel”41. Then,
the narrator mentains us the ambiguity of interpretation for his literary masterpieces.
Speaking about intertextualit y, The Magus plays a significant role in this context. For
example, Conchis introduces The Tempest as a direct intertext, which leads the reader to think
that Conchis shares important qualities with Shakespeare’s magician. He is also able to
manipulate the environment.
It is true that the frustration of Nicholas’s hermeneutic strategies to make sense w hat
is happening to him are important for the Conchis’s plan to make Nicholas being aware. It
doesn’t means Conchis doesn’t have a plan, but Nicholas, as we know misconceives the
nature of the plan and this so with Conchis encouragement. After all, the tim e when Nicholas
stays on Conchis domain , finds the poems of Eliot, which comes close with his own situation.

37 A movie adaptation of The Magus, directed by Guy Green, by 20th Century Fox, in 1968
38 From Varie ty Movie 2000, ed. by Derek Elley, 2000
39 Ibid, 2000
40 Ibid, 2000
41 TOMA , Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 174

18
“Fiction are not existence: hence an element of the charlatan exists in the novelist’s own role.
To some extent them, The Magus is concerned with t he familiar obsessions of modernism -with
the hope that beyond the ordinary, contingent, and disillusioned world of real life and time
and therefore can only be a translucent, literary image. But it also very much aware of the
unsatisfactoriness of assertin g simply a formal salvation, hope of redemption through an
aesthetic unity. And Fowles does indeed manage to create the sense that his structures and
obsessions are not berrowed properties but fulfil a logical need to consider how the
imagination now may d esign, shape and give meaning to the world”42.
Intertextuality is almost presented in The Magus and Les infortunes , because both of
them are stories about the process of initiation. The author gives us the mention of how
emotionally realization and material ly can be a life full of vices, while the Sade is criticised
by John Fowles as one of the early literary exponent of the Collector mentality. This means
John Fowles doesn’t stay immune in front of the sickness approaches he is describing.
Thus, Great Expectations, is mentioned for two times in The Magus. It gives a look
into the creative boundaries of Nicholas’s luminously strategies. Miss Havisham is the perfect
exemplar of Conchis’s behavior, this comparison being actually introduced in the Foreword
by John Fowles. He has admitted this assertion the reference of Dickens had been included in
the revised version of The Magus. This process represents the various elements that point to a
potential lack of obvious creativity of Nicholas. Consequently , Nicholas is free to perceive
only those things that he is able to see and feel in this novel, the things that make him
analyses the strange experience he endures.
During the novel, “Nicholas is quilty of more fundamental error: he uses his
misreading o f literature as an excuse for mistreating life as if it were art. In his deliberate
confusion, his movement is one of withdrawal, of refusal to commit himself. The novel is
about the intrusion of two people in Urfe’s selfishly comfortable aesthetic world: First Alison,
the woman capable to love, then Conchis, a teacher, a Prospero, playing the Godgame until
Nicholas completes his initiation and archieves his real freedom. Echoes of the great
tradition, be it Shakespeare or Dickens, obviously break through, in Urfe’s initiatic journey
through painful aesthetic games to final commitment. At another level of reading, the
Godgame represents in microcosm, a terrifying world man can neither control or understand,
advancing the nihilistic doctrine of the absence of any meaning”43.

42 VIANU, Lidia – British Desperadoes At the Turn of Millennium, Ed. All Educational, București, 1999, p. 264
43TOMA , Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 116

19
Linked with the theme of existentialist authenticity we observes the fact that
Conchis’s meta -narrative si that of the Godgame. This argument is similar with one statement,
according to Nietzsche about the death of God. In this work, for Conchis, God is not dead but
is almost hidden.
Nicholas’s destiny is on the a ppreciation of Conchis, even if he doesn’t notice that
fact and this book seems to have the perfect title, in concordance with the power of Maurice
Conchis. Perhaps, Nicholas, “saw himself as a philosopher in an impossible faculty of
ambiguity, a sort of Empson of the event. Nicholas Urfe’s reflections on Conchis – the Magus
of the book of that title and his Godgame are therefore centralizing Questions, which touch on
the relatio n of fiction to reality”44. Like in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the novelist of
The Magus is implicating himself “becoming part of his technical self -questioning and self –
development”45.
For Nicholas, the place on the island becomes mysterious. He falls in love with Julie,
on her real name, Lily, the twin sister of Jane, but the girl confesses she belongs to Conchis
and all their love story must be hidden so Conchis cannot destroy them. When he returns to
Bourani, all things take a turn against him, because of the death of Alison and the
disappearance of July. This is the moment when his death is framed by Conchis. Nicholas
becomes the experiment of a group of scientific researches from 195 3.
In the death game of Alison, Nicholas is a victim like in the Godgame of Conchis.
His love for Alison was different, unexplained, erotic and almost infinitely. He sow with
different eyes, but the same attraction the innocence of July, the mysterious mus e girl. “The
Godgame asserts that for Fowles (just like for Hardy) reality is not banal. The world is alive
and unknowable, therefore invigorating. To accept its unfarthomable mystery one must
become equally unfathomable; one must accept one’ mystery and b ecome a magician”46.
Turning on the main experiment of Conchis with the life of Nicholas, John Fowles
“provides a structure for the comprehension of Urfe’s world, though it is uncertain whether
Urfe does or can accept it. His dark but ultimate wisdom -the wi sdom of serene endurance, the
wisdom of the archaic smile that holds experience complete and stands above it, and which is
vouchsafed to Alison in the final scene -is enachted within the terms of modern experience”47.

44Ibid, p. 261
45 Ibid, p. 262
46 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 200 4, p. 119
47 Ibid, p. 269

20
All things that attend in concordance with the lessons which are given to Nicholas,
are made in order to make the hero being aware of it and all he knows is the fact he is the
master of his own destiny. Nevertheles, he can be destroyed in his own attempt to become
God.
At the end, the reader finds the answer, being conscious that mystery can guide u s to
our own desires and needs and what John Fowles wants to show us is the fact that The Magus
begins in reality, shifts into theatrical mysteries and finally, returns to reality.

21
1.2.The French Lieutenant’ s Woman – A Contemporany Perspective on Victorianism

The most commercially successful of Fowles’ s novels, The French Lieutenant’ s
Woman, appeared in 1969. It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while
pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner. Fowles was inspired
by a dream he had of a woman standing on a quay staring out to sea, a figure that was to
become the title character of the book. It is a portrayal of England in 1867 that accurately
captures various factors of time -social conventions, class struggles -while at the same time
mirroring the style of 19th century prose. Fowles set the novel in Lyme Regis, a small town
located on England’ s southern coast where he had recently begun living. The French
Lieutenant’ s Woman, is the story of Sarah Woodruff, an attractive and mysterious governess
(who has apparently been deserted by a French naval li eutenant following an affair), and
Charles Smithson, a wealthy amateur paleontologist. Followi ng a chance encounter, Charles’ s
interest in piqued by Sarah’ s unusual position as he is already engaged to Ernestina, the
innocent daughter of a businessman. As Charles becomes increasingly involved with Sarah ,
he struggles with his obligation to Ernestina and a growing obsession to disco ver the truth
about Sarah’ s past.
The novel also includes several aut horial intrusions, with omniscient narrator,
Fowles, speaking directly to the reader about the mores of life in Victorian England and
various possible outcomes for his characters. Fowles moved between past and present, added
footnotes, quotations from Darwin, Marx, and the great Victorian poets, and commente d
Victorian politics and costum es. This novel had different endings, one heart -warming,
another, shocking. “In some ways the unhappy endings pleases the novelist. He has set out on
a voyage and announced, I have failed and must set out again. If you create a happy ending,
pleases the novelist. He has set out on a voyage and announced, I have failed and must set out
again. If you create a happy ending, there is somewhat fal se sense of having solved life’ s
problems”48. At he did in The Magus, Fowles uses The F rench Lieutenant’ s Woman to
meditate on the nature of individual freedom and its price. The French Lieutenant’ s Woman
was the seco nd highest selling novel in U.S. in 1970, topped only by Erich Segal’ s, Love story
and is today recognized as one of the semin al works of the later half of the 20th century. Also ,
The French Lieutenant’ s Woman was described as the greatest work of art .

48 Fowles in The New York Times, On the third try, John Fowles Connects, November 10, 1969 , source: internet,
at: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/31/ specials/fowles -french.html , Accessed May 24, 2017

22
In 1981 the novel was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter, Jeremy Irons playing
Charles and Meryl Streep in the title role. “The film’ s frequent mirror shots are not only a
reference to the illusions of the Victorian age, or the way Victorian fiction is mirrored by
events in the modern story. They also relate to Sarah Woodruff as conscious performer, a
woman of imaginati on with a flair for lurid self -dramatization ”.49
The novel’ s dual nature and alternate endings view incorporated by turning the book
into a modern -day movie about the making of a movie set in Victorian England. The resulting
film was extremely successful and recei ved five academy award nominations. Winner of
several awards and made into a well received film starring Maryl Streep in the title r ole, it is
the book that today’ s casual readers seem to most associate with Fowles. In Bradbury work,
Frederick Karl made a judgement about the English novel which tended to become. In view of
the above considerations, it should be clear that the representational strategies employed in
the novel are far from being simple or straightforward. As in other novels of Fowles, some
emphasis is placed on showing how what a character thinks is reality is actually a construct
that can reflect his own prejudices rather than the real state of things.
Being a case of historiographic metafiction, though, the scope of the representational
critique is widened to include questions. In this beautiful work, “Fowles defies everyone, the
previous delimitation included. He offers a plot, but it has to endings. He offers characters,
but in the end we do not know how to understand them, because they have two faces and our
doubts storm. He uses Victorian England as continues time, but jumps into one page ot
another addressing us from our own time. Diabolic recourcefulness is one major feature that
marks a literature desperado.”50 . One of the central qu estions in this respect is how to
represent Victorian society to a 20th century reader – the implicit assumption being that if
such a reader simply read Victorian texts, he might get the picture wrong because he’d be
reading them with a 20th century mind. Let me add here that this also means that the critique
of representation is not only possible because those who represent have certain aims,
convictions, prejudices – we can also argue for a critique of representation because of the
metanarratives that we can attribute to the recipient. As already said above, Fowles makes use
of anachronistic comments in order to get a realistic impression across to the contemporary
reader. But the aim of these comments is not simply to teach the reader about70 Victorian
England; they also exemplify an attitude of both complicity and critique that Hutcheon has
identified as a constituent feature of postmodernist literature. An example might illustrate this

49 SINYARD, Neil – Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation, Vol. 5, source: internet, at:
https://books.google.ro/books?id=kX0AupdvWIUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false , Accessed May
29, 2017
50 VIANU, Lidia – British Desperadoes At the Turn of Millennium, Ed. All Educational, București, 1999, p. 82

23
point. In one of the very first scenes of the novel, as Ernestina an d Charles enjoy a walk at the
Cobb (the landscape against which most of the novel is set).
The author “manages to make us sink into Victorianism with our 20th century minds.
Remarkable debunking of tradition (so -called tradition after all) , which makes us experience
the past with the fresh gusto. This sequel of experiment, this desperado game in and out of
one or another time, is a remarkable discovery, but, once used i cannot be imitated, it grows
old at once”51. This novel brings the Victorian era into po stmodernist society with all its
manners, values, social life, erotic obsessions and puts Sarah in a bad light because of her
behavior.
Moreover we k now that we “are obviously faced with what critics called a Victorian
novel within a novel, Fowles’s re -creating of mid -nineteenth century England by a twentieth
century self -conscious, ironical narrator. At one level this novel sensitively responds to the
commandments of the Victorian novel”52. Again, Sarah’s reputation for sexual immorality is
clear an example of dramatic irony. Sarah is seen as sexually immoral by the whole of
Lyme Regis, and her reputation is ruined because of what everyone believes to be true about
her illicit 'affair' with the French lieutenant. People refer to her as a 'whore', and she inspires
scorn in many, and pity in some – premarital sex is viewed as unacceptable in the society in
which she lives. This is painfully ironic, of course, because Sarah is not sexually immoral, and
is actually a virgin for the majority of the novel. Most people try to cover up nasty secrets
about themselves in order to avoid a bad reputation, and Sarah deliberately courts scandal by
contributing to the creation of a false story about herself. And then, that is the result of
Sarah’s reputation. She is a gi rl from Victorian era with an contemporany behavio r.
The masculin main character, Charles is seen in a situational irony, like a victim of
evolution. The irony is that Charles himself is a victim of a type of social evolution: his social
class is on the b rink of being overtaken by the lower classes, who are 'more fit to survive', and
his fellow independently wealthy, aristocratic London gadabouts will soon become relics of
the past. When Ernestina's father offers to make him a partner in the family busines s, Charles
cannot accept, because he doesn't think that it is fitting for a gentleman to go into commerce –
he is unable to adapt to a changing environment, and so he is a victim of evolution.
In Chapter 23, Charles finally leaves Lyme Regis and goes back to where he grew up. Charles
hasn't lived there for a while; he flitted about during his college years, preferring to travel than
to settle down in the country mansion and learn how to run the estate. In this chapter,

51VIANU, Lidia – British Desperadoes At t he Turn of Millennium, Ed. All Educational, București, 1999, p. 83
52 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 53

24
however, we see a shif t in his attitu de – he feels a call to the throne and is ready to take on the
duty of inheriting and m anaging the house and land .
The irony here is now that Charles finally feels the urge – and a strong urge, too – to
take up his position as lord of the estate, his uncl e is going to deny the fulfillment of this wish.
Charles was certain that Uncle Robert would offer him the great house to move into with
Ernestina, but Uncle Robert has other plans: he is going to remarry and keep the house for
himself.
Thus, Lidia Vianu observes: “The French Lieutenant’s Woman, though womewhat
shorter, is fairly clearly both a formal imitation of a Victorian novel and a very elegant
endeavour at assessing the mental distance that must lie between a modern reader and a
fiction of that short -the result being a complex contrast between the psychosocial set of
consciousness in the England of a hundred years ago, threated through all the major areas of
social, commercial, intelectual, consciously and articulately stands along with h is reader. In
one sense the theme of Fowles’s work is precisely cultural distillation, the task of rendering
the way in which consciousness or structural coherence underlies all the parts of a society
and produces a cultural unity between inner and outer w orlds”53.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman is confusing: it isn't a Victorian novel, although the
first few chapters seem to nod at this genre, and the rest of the novel keeps up some pretense
of belonging to the tradition. James R. Baker has called The French Lieutenant's Woman a
pseudo -historical novel. It seems important to outline a few features of Victorian literature
that Fowles then goes on to adopt, or distort. Victorian novels tend to be quite earnest, and
even didactic: they often come with a clear moral at the end. In tragedies, the characters end
up badly (in most of Hardy's works), and lighter fiction of the period ends with marriages. The
French Lieutenant's Woman breaks with this tradition by providing an ambiguous second
ending, in which the ch aracters are clearly different than they were at the start, and in Sarah's
case happier, but Charles in the second ending is plunged into existential reflection, and there
doesn't seem to be much closure for him – will he end up living happily or not? It w ould be
difficult to come up with a moral for the whole novel; Fowles seems to be commenting on the
Victorian age and the nature of fiction more than offering moral judgments on the characters
and the plot line. “The realistic Victorian mode of the novel, in which Fowles seems capable
of working at hihg intensity, is also represented as authoritarian and contraining; the modern
mode which comports with Sarah’s modernizing consciousness and also opens the door of
formal oportunity, allows for unpredictabilit y and contingency”54.

53 VIANU, Lidia – British Desperadoes At the Turn of Millennium, Ed. All Educationa l, București, 1999, p. 260
54 Ibid, p. 263

25
Victorian fiction tended to be heavily plotted and described in a realistic way, with
plenty of description of the emotional states of the characters as well as the settings and the
time period. The French Lieutenant's Woman has some p lot, but also spends a lot of time in
the various characters' minds – including the narrator's – in a way that doesn't advance the
story very much.
Fowles' novel certainly does describe contemporary society, which was a common
feature of Victorian novels – the Victorians loved reading about themselves. Fowles includes
plenty of details about everyday life in 1867, which was a common feature of fiction written
in that time period. He also deals with some of the biggest issues discussed in fiction at the
time: evolution, industrialism, poverty, and women's rights. The book is also succesed by
impurity.
Visual imagery is a hallmark of Victorian fiction, more so than any type of novels
that had gone before. Victorian novels imitated poetry in this sense, focusing on depicting the
setting of the story in a highly visual way – although the novels tended to use more realistic
detail and a little less figurative language. Fowles uses a lot of imagery in his novel – religious
imagery and natural imagery, to nam e just two types. As Irina Toma notices in her book:
“The French Lieutenant’s Woman openly flaunts anachronism in world -view and ideology
through Sarah, the heroine representing the first glimpses of modern sensibility in Victorian
culture, the historical opening wedge of modernity: (The woman had no face, no particular
degree of sexuality. But she was Victorian; and since i always saw her in the same static long
shot, with her back turned, she represented a reproach on the Victorian age. An outcast i
didn’ t know her crime, but i wish to protect her. That is, i began to fall in love with her, or
with her stance . I didn’t know which”55.
Victorian novels tend to have a crowded cast of charact ers but a clear hero or
heroine, and The French Lieutenant's Woman follows this model to a degree. We have the
main pairing of Sarah and Charles, but side characters play important roles: Ernestina, Mary ,
Sam, Mr. Freeman , Mrs. Poulteney , and others all have a part to play. The main break from
the Victorian novel is the narrative voice in The French Lieutenant's Woman , which is
incredibly postmodern and ironic, and prevents us from taking the novel too seriously.
While Fowles has titled his book The French Lieutenant's Woman, Sarah Woodruff
is not really the central character. She does not change greatly in the novel as it progresses, for
she has already arrived at an awareness that she must go beyond the definition of her
individuality that socie ty has imposed upon her. Because her situation was intolerable, she
was forced to see through it and beyond it in order to find meaning and some sort of

55 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 58

26
happiness in her life. In the early chapters of the novel, she perhaps makes one last effort to
establi sh a life within the norms of Victorian society. She chooses the role of the outcast, the
French lieutenant's whore, and also falls in love with Charles or causes him to fall in love
with her. But even as she draws Charles away from his unquestioning accep tance of his life,
she finds that she does not want to be rescued from her plight. She has already rescued
herself.
The narrator emphasizes how out -of-place in Victorian society Sarah is by using
anachronistic imagery to describe her uncanny traits that distinguish her from her peers – for
example, he says that she has a computer in her heart that allows her to read people's emotions
with incredible precision. Sarah could have been portrayed as a psychic, but Fowles chooses
to use imagery relating to mode rn technology to drive home the point that Sarah is 'modern
woman' and not at all like Ernestina and Mary.
The narrator also uses anachronistic imagery when describing himself – he says he is
as minor a character as a gamma -ray particle . Of course, the Vic torians didn't know about
radioactive particles, and so by referencing this future invention, he reminds us that he is an
outsider, like Sarah is, and that he doesn't belong to the era.
For this point, the most evident paradox in the novel, which is explicitly detailed, is
that of sexuality in the Victorian age. The narrator notes with wryness that to the Victorians,
woman was sacred but you could buy a thirteen -year-old girl for a few pounds – a seeming
paradox, because something which is sacred should also be priceless, or at least worth more
than a few pounds. Other paradoxes related to sexuality in the Victorian period follow: the
abundance of both churches and brothels, the huge output of both very ch aste literature and
salacious pornography. The ability to contain conflicting factors and impulses is an interesting
trait of the Victorians, and perhaps has something to do with the schizophrenia that the
narrator claims is characteristic of the era. He w rites that every Victorian has two minds , and
this might explain how they are able to tolerate what seems like total hypocrisy to us.
Charles and the narrator both often personify nature, often in order to make humans
seem small, stupid, or insignificant i n comparison. For example, in Chapter 18, when Charles
and Sarah are engaged in stilted conversation, unable to express their feelings, the narrator
comments that “a woodpecher laughed in some green recess, mocking those two static bipeds
far below ”56. Simi larly, in Chapter 29, Charles is so paranoid as he searches for Sarah on
Ware Commons that he starts to believe that “the trees, the flowers, even the inanimate things

56 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p . 117

27
around him were watching him. Flowers became eyes, stones and ears, the trunks of the
reproving trees were a numberless Greek chorus ”57.
Charles also personifies duty at one point when he notes that “Duty…was his real
wife”58. This personification serves to show the strength of his dedication to what he views as
his duty – no matter what the duty consists of, he will stick with it.
All in all, The French Lieutenant’s Woman remains a Contemporany Perspective of
Victorianism, because of the power of metafiction and intertextuality which John Fowles has
played.

57 Ibid, p. 192
58 Ibid, p. 1 59

28
1.3.Daniel Martin – The Quest of the Self

Daniel Martin, a long and somewhat a utobiographial novel spanning over 40 years in
the life of a screen writer, appeared in 1977, along with a revised version of The Magus.
These were followed by Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist’ s strugg le with his muse
and A Maggot (1985), an 18th century mistery which combines science, fiction and history.
Daniel Martin is in his own words : “intented as a defence and illustration of an
unfashionable philosophy, humanism and also exploration of what it is to be English ”. With
Daniel Martin, Fowles takes a wide ranging approach to themes relating to friendship, love,
the nature of art and the meaning of life itself. Fowles’ s most mature novel and probably his
most autobiographical a s well, has well rounded characters and long term relationships. But
the work is also full of observations and aestethics, philosophy, cultural history, the difference
between Britain and United States, archeology, mith. Fowles described Daniel Martin as “a
very long novel about Englishness ”. At one point the protagonist compares differences
between written words and films: “Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the
truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience, as if, faced with ruins”.
In conclusion , “Fowles insists upon an existential world, and yet paradoxically the
most obvious theme through out his work, whether spoken or unspoken, is that existentialism
is no more a key to the world than Freudianism or Marxism. Any forma l philosophical
construct or intellectualized approach is misleading because it is always an abstraction…
Fowles sees life always irrational and irregular, always an enigmatic labyrinth: “and just as
man can only experience, it with neither God or any part icular philosophy to help him
understand it, so the artist can only attempt to find metaphors which depict it, metaphors
which convey as Fowles does, both the excitement and the dread of it”59
Fowles claims that he written everything out of experience. S peaking about people
around him, Fowles takes the ornithologist’ s view of human beings, the way Daniel Martin ,
does. He states he likes watching people’ s behaviourism as he watches the behaviorism of
certain birds in his garden. “In spite of his being a suc cess in both his career and love life,
Daniel Martin is far from exempt from existentialist anxieties and even despair. He is put to a
demanding test and brought face to face with an existentialist choice which he makes at a
time when his awareness of deat h is at its most intense. The rising of the contemporary man’s
predicament to an almost tragic status (in the shadow of the tradition) is largely due to the

59 CIOCOI – POP, Dumitru – about Rackham, Ed. Lucian Blaga, University of Sibiu Press, Sibiu, 2002, p. 112

29
projection of this predicament against a significand natural setting and a complex time
scheme”60.
He dislikes general moral pri nciples. His idea is that self -knowledge always brings
you greater happiness although it is painful. He is aware of the inner spiritual needs and he
considers that the means to cure himself are by writing, by using culture. He c onsiders writers
to be condemned to a lonely life, to a lot of loneli ness and he situated himself among them.
He believes in the freedom of spirit, in the ability of one to choose what he wants to be as an
individual. He represents the hero –like figure who wants to turn the world into a better one.
One of the aspects in people that distress him is selfishness. In Daniel Martin “all Fowles’s
ideas about nature are embodied either in Martin himself of in other charaters, with a
significant warning implied in the analogy Martin’s father, an Anglican priest, draws between
horticulture and God wathing over the world…”61.
He had hoped he could have changed the world into a better one but then he gave up
and now he only hopes to change people’ s sensibilities. He writes first in order to please
himself, and this is an important issue: “I basically write what i know is going to please me,
what I am going to enjoy”62.
In his fight with life, Daniel Martin, learns that man cannot live as he wants, o nly in
the present, “as he has tr ied to do with Jenny, to whom the past”63 and finally, the past
becomes meaningful in the moment when it, paradoxically influenced the future and the
present. It is small wonder that Dan with his background as a script -write r intent on writing a
novel finds frequent occasions to comment on the respective qualities of the two media. The
specifically postmodern turn of these comparisons comes out nicely if we see them in
contradistinction to Dan’s ideal of ’whole sight’. First of all, it is obvious that Dan’s
experience with film scripts has been a far more extensive one. On the level of narrative
technique (ignoring the question whether it is Dan or Fowles that’s writing), this is shown by
the fact that Dan frequently uses film terminology or film devices in his narrative. What is of
more interest here are the conflicting ideals that Dan sees behind these forms of
representation. Because his own ideal is that of whole sigh t, we learn at a number of occasions
that one important r eason for which Dan is willing to try a novel is his belief that he might be
able to represent his life more accurately in a novel. This becomes especially obvious in his
numerous talks with or about his acquaintance Barney Dillon, who is a symbol the deca dence

60 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 120
61 Idem
62 VIPOND, L – Dianne – Conversations w ith John Fowles, Ed. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1999, p. 154
63 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 127

30
of the film and TV world – a world that views everything and everybody in terms of the
capitalist concept of profit. This, unsurprisingly, is also one reason why Dan feels inauthentic:
he has subjected his more artistic ambition to the pursuit of mone y, easy living, and a young
girlfriend. While Dan knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the film and TV world,
things are not as easy with the activity of novel -writing. Here, we find quite conflicting views,
because Dan also holds the opposite view.
All his character flaws, adopting the point of view of a bird hiding in the trees might
be more authentic for Dan simply because of the fact that he is English, after all. In
existe ntialist terms, we are witnessing a progress here: while in his earlier life Dan has
presumably fled from his Englishness by going to America and becoming a script -writer, he is
now becoming aware that he can’t simply cross out his Englishness without firs t analysing
what it means and then trying to overcome those characteristics he doesn’t like. We may
explore this link between metafictional comments and existentialist themes even further. If
writing is an activity that relegates persons to the status of o bjects (as is maintained in the
quote above), writing is also an exemplification of what Fowles elsewhere has called the
collector -mentality , a mentality that is characterized by the need to possess something or
somebody in a materialistic sense. Dan exhib its traits of this mentality especially in his
relation with Jenny, and – in a conversation with his daughter Caro – even goes so far as to
excuse his behavio r by pointing out that he is a writer .
On the level of the whole novel, we once again find a mixt ure of complicity and
critique as far as this analysis is concerned. While Dan is ’bad’ in the sense of ’inauthentic’ in
his dealings with Jenny, there is reason to believe that in his attempts to have a relationship
with Jane, he is gradually becoming mor e authentic and true – but since we don’t know if or
how this relationship will turn out, this reason is suspended.
Moreover, speaking about metanarrative, it is small wonder that a novel whose main
character is a writer himself should extend the cr itique of metanarratives in its own realm as
well. Consequently, we find a lot of comments which might be categorized as either
metafictional, as undermining a certain metanarrative, or both. This is best exemplified by the
numerous comments on the principles of writing, some of which we have already discussed in
the previous section. While thinking about the principles of writing, Dan realizes that the
supposedly ’modern’ way of avoiding happy ends has a lready become a dogma in itself.
“Daniel Martin is the one who has a clear sense of his own authenticity, a concept that must
not be accociated only with existentialism. Fowles wants to claim that Matthew Arnold (just
like Charles Smithson) is an existentialist before his time, a writer w hose concern with seeing

31
clearly is one that good writers (or chanonical writers) have dwelt on over the ages”64. The
metanarratives that have structured Dan’s life before he took the decision to write a novel
come out quite clearly in the novel: economic s uccess and a pleasurable life -style ultimately
reducible to hedonistic principles. Biographically speaking, clashes of Dan’s and other
peoples’ metanarratives come rather early in his life, but they are not discussed, but rather
passed over. As early as in his student days, Dan finds his standards of living incompatible
with those of his close friend Anthony, then a student of theology. The clash of the two
persons’ principles materialize in the act of ’adultery’ that Dan and Jane’commit’, but which
for mor e than a decade is not talked about. It is only in the face of Anthony’s death that the
matter is mentioned again.
When John Fowles, brings intertextuality on his work, t here are also a number of
allusions to the bonne vaux or domaine theme, which link the present novel both to Fowles
other novels as well as to texts that feature prominently on Fowles’ intertextual favourites,
most notably Le Grand Meaulnes . But here, it is at best difficult to say what is the lost domain
of Daniel Martin : is it Thorncom be, is it the strange and exotic sites Dan and Jane encounter
on their Nile cruise, or is it the deserted sight of Palmyra, where Dan and Jane are on the brink
of choosing each other? Comparatively more importance is allotted to the quotations of
George Lukasc, which help to question the role of realism in modernist novel writing, and
realism is one of the yardsticks Dan wants his novel to be judged by. Although the text
features a number of intertexts, their role is often less clear than in Fowles’ other n ovels,
where they assume the status of models or even direct influences. While in his other novels,
the reading experience will often contradict it, in Daniel Martin Fowles’ claim seems to be on
the right track.
Irina Toma with indulgence “more than a matter of epistemic osscilation between
subjectivity and the need for impersonal balance, the frequent shifts of viewpoint between two
antithetical worlds , the British and the American one. These who frames of references
between which the hero ascilates al so engender two different approaches to the exploration of
lifes resources, transforming Daniel Martin into the contemporary counterpart of many
Jamesian characters. Once again tradition is resorted to, and the character (just like the
whole novel) becomes polyphonic to a high degree”65.
Through Daniel Martin, John Fowles gives life to a love story that transcends time,
but also makes a thorough analysis of the post -war English man concerned with the
camouflage of true intentions to cover the alienation of himself in a drifting world. More over,

64 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 177
65 Ibid, p. 195

32
by satirizing the academic elite of Oxford, the author also makes a parallel between the
American space, concerned with material things and the achievement of celebrity, and the
English space, concerned with the preservation of traditions and the preservation of
appearances. This novel has woken up in me the nostalgia of the past, when people felt and
thought more, a nd conversations gave you wings in your quest of the self.

33
Chapter II
The Condition of the Reader in John Fowles’ s Novels

The novel is a genre that has always been linked to the concept of reality and
whether it holds to the principle of mimesis (tries to create the illusion of reality) or tries to
undermine this tradition, the reader has been and will remain in the equation, the relationship
between author and reader being of paramount importance.
By drawing attention to its work being an artifact, postmodern fiction opens the
relationship between reality and fiction to question. Hence, the reader gradually participates in
creating the illusion of fictional reality and this coexistence of different worlds, texts, thi s
intertextuality being a well -known characteristic of postmodern fiction. In The French
Lieutenant’ s Woman, the mottoes at the beginning of each chapter help the reader understand
and embrace the realities of the Victorian life, but at the same time they remind him/ her that
this world the author creates is nothing more than a fabricated reality. In fact, this collage of
authentic texts, these bits of reality from the Victorian age help the reader understand that
writing is a process and at the same time they give him/ her the insight to th e historical facts
through his/ her twentieth century consciousness and the reader should be able to sense the
ironic and subversive perspective of the author in presenting the events, at last because he/ she
shares with the author the perspective of a twentieth century person.
In Notes on an Untifished Novel, John Fowles suggests: “You are not trying to write
someth ing one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write; but perhaps something one of them
failed to write. And remember, the etymology of the word novel is something new. It mus t
have relevance to the writer’ s now… so d on’t ever pretend you live in 1867; or make sure the
reader knows it’ s a pretence ”66. In fact, the question that the text poses is the following: how
is it possible to convey a realistic impression of 19th century England to 20th century reader?
The reader is taken to a world he does not know and the author try to translate for
him the Victorian concepts. In The French Lieutenant’ s Woman, the author addresses the
reader directly; for instance when he compares the ways in which both Victorians and
contemporaries might perceive the same phenomenon: “The colo rs of the young ladies’ s
clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident but the world w as then in the first fine
process of the discovery of aniline dyes”67. Fowles constantly juxtaposes worl ds, as he does
when he shows us, Charles Smithson, the main character passing by the British Museum
while in the real 1867, Karl Marx was striving to finish the first volume of Das Kapital,

66 BRADBURY, Malcom – The Novel Today, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, John Fowles, Ed. Manchester
University Press, Fantana, 1977, p 138
67 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p . 107

34
everything being related by a 1967 narrator living his English home: “Needless to say,
Charles knew nothing of the beavers German Jew qui etly working, as it so happened, that
very afternoon in the British Museum Library; and whose work in those somber wall s was a
bear such bright red fruit. Had you described that fruit, or the subsequent effects of its later
indiscriminate consumption, Charles would almost c ertainly not have believed you and
everything, in only six month from this March of 1867, the first v olume of Das Kapital was to
appear in Hamburg”68.
The distinction betwee n the fictional and the real time and worlds is constantly
blurred, as in the scene when the author describes what Sarah had bought for herself before
she finally seduced Charles: “Thos e two purchases had cost Sarah nine pence in an old China
shop, the Toby was cracked, and was to be re -cracked in the course time, as I can testify,
having bought it myself a year or two ago for good deal more than three pennies Sarah was
charged”69.
Fowles is an intrusive author, as we can s ee in the above quotation, the I comes from
the real time, the world of the twentieth c entury author. In fact, Fowles’ s desire to shock the
reader is obvious also in chapter 55, when Charles is going to London, desperat e to find Sarah
and on the way there he bumps into Fowles himself (who becomes a character), who does not
know how to end his novel: “The latecomer muttered a (Pardon me, sir) and made his way to
the far end of the compartment. He set, a man of forty or so , his top hat firmly square, his
hands on his knees, regaining his breath (…). A decidedly unpleasant man, thought Charles,
and so typical of the age and therefore emphatically to be snubbed if he tried to enter into
conversation”70.
We have to agree to Lid ia Vianu when she said that “Fowles will refrain from
nothing to catch our eye”71, and he plays games with the reader, he undermines himself, he
gives the impression that he does not believe in his characters and he does not seem keen on
the reader liking h is heroes: “Now the question I am asking, as I stare at Charles is not quite
the same as the two above. But rather, what the devil am I goin g to do with of leaving him for
eternity on his way to London. But the conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allo wed no
place for the open, the inconclusive ending: and I preached earlier of freedom the characters
must be given ”72. And yet, the author reveals that he is ultimately the creator and this happens
in an exemplary manner when he introduces the third ending by turning back the clock, as we

68 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 18
69 Ibid, p. 268
70 Ibid, pp. 387 -388
71 VIANU, Lidia – British Desperadoes At the Turn of Millennium, Ed. All Educational, București, 1999, p. 87
72 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 389

35
can see in chapter 61, the last chapter in the book: “He t akes a small a djustment to the time. It
seems -though unusual in an instrument from the bench of the greate st of watchmakers -that he
was running a quarter of an hour fast”73. In this last chapter of the novel, the intrusion of the
author who has played with reader’ s ability to put asi de his or her prejudices when reading
this novel again obvious. This time his physical appearance has changed since he got on the
same train with Charles, in chapter 55, and now his “patriarchal beard has been trimmed
down to something rather foppish and F renchified. He looks very much as if he has given up
preaching and gone in for grand opera; and done much better at the latter than the former.
There is, in short, more than a touch of successful impresario about him”74. What had not
changed, the author add s, is the fact that “he very evidently regards the world as his to posses
and use as he likes”75. The reader is faced with the perspective of other ending, no less
plausible than the one presented in chapter 60, and he or she reads again Charles’ s words to
Sarah: “No, it is as I say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have
delighted in twisting it”76. This time, however, Sarah’ s reaction is not of acceptance and
surrender to her passionate love, and Charles understands that he has to go on with his life
without her because she “could give only to possess; and to possess him was not enough”77.
In this final chapter, Fowles restates his “original principle: than there is no intervening god
beyond whatever can be seen, in that way, in the fi rst epigraph to this chapter”78, and that
“the river of life, mysterious laws and mysterious choice, flows past a deserted
embankment”79.
The author, true to his belief in the importance of hazard, tosses a coin in chapter 55,
to dete rmine which of the two endi ngs occurs simultaneously, the Victorian ending is printed
first. Before tossing the coin, the author confesses to the reader how strong the power of
tradition is, and the fact that, although he considers impact and will be seen by the readers as
real. “The only way can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it. That leaves me
with only one problem: I cannot give both versions at once, yet whichever is the second will
seem, so strong is the tyranny of the last chapter…”80. In the same chapter 5 5, Charles meets
the author himself who, after is presented in the third person narrative, turn ed into the “I”
narrative, the voice that declares: “And I will keep up the pretence no longer”81. The reader is

73 Ibid, p. 441
74 Idem
75 Idem
76 Ibid, p. 433
77 Ibid, p. 444
78 Ibid, p. 445
79 Idem
80 Ibid, p. 390
81 Ibid, p. 389

36
always in the author’ s mind and he is often addressed directly: “Perhaps you see very little
link between the Charles of 1867 with all his newfangled French notions of chastity and
chasing after Holy Grails, the Charles of 1867 with his loathing of trade, and the Charles of
today, a computer scientist deaf to screams of the tender humanists wh o begin to discern their
own red undancy… You have just turned down a tempting offer in commercial applied science
in order to continue your academic teaching? Your last ex hibition did not sell as well as the
previous one, but you are determined to keep to your new style? You have just made some
decision in which your personal benefit, your chance of possession, has not been allowed in
which your personal benefit, your chance of possession , has not been allow ed to interfer e?
Then do not dismiss Charles’ s state of min d as a mere conditioning of futi le snobbery. See
him for what he is: a man struggling to overcome history”82.
The author is in permanent dialogue with h is reader, commenting on the de cision his
character make, or tryin g to put himself in the reader’ s shoes, to understand what thi s reader
might think or how he/ she judge the characters: “You may think that she was right: that her
battle for territory was a legitimate uprising of th e invaded against the perennial invader. But
what you must not think is that this is a less plausible ending to their story”83. However, he
never tires to teach the reader or the scold him, whenever he has the occasion: “But this is
preposterous? A characte r is either real or imaginary? if you think that, hypocrate lecte ur, I
can only smile. You did not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild
it or blacken in, censor it, tinker with it… fictionalize it, in a w ord, and put it away on a self –
book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in fight from the real reality”84.
Irina Toma, in her book about postmodernism observes that “the use of the same
generic reader borders on comprehensiveness but at the same time it borders u pon the
dilution of the latter’ s substance as a human being. The reader is als o marked by the same
heterogenei ty, by the same multiplicity a nd endless proliferation that t ouches both narrative
and characters in postmodernist fiction”85.
In The French Lieutenant’ s Woman, the reader is allowed to juggle with possibilities,
which gives him/ her pleasure, but at the same time can be frustrating.
“By the permanent commentary on the nature of narration, by this reflection on itself
the author helps the reader teach himself”86, helps his resist to fixe d ideas, to patterns of
thinking and it opens up his mind. Therefore, for reader becomes an active participator in this

82 Ibid, p. 286
83 Ibid, p. 445
84 Ibid, p. 99
85 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tr adition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 226
86 AUBREY, James R. – A reference Companion, John Fowles, Ed. Greenwood Pub Group, Santa Barbara,
California, U.S.A, 1991, p. 86

37
process of writing. The French Lieutenant’ s Woman aims to produce an evolved reader who,
by virtue of accepting the challenges that the novel offers, develops new perceptual skills and
processes that made him able to read in other than narrative ways. For example, the town of
Lyme Regis is a perfect micro universe , a special metaphor, with its herme tic system or roads,
paths, streets and cart tracks. The reader is made to understand that this served the author to
characterize the universe in which Charles lives and, at the same time, to make the distinction
between the strictness and rule -based Victorian society, on the one hand and the extra –
narrative reality where these rules seem absolute and restrictive to us, on the other hand.
Sarah a lso represents this extra -narrative reality as well as the attempt to become
untold. She is told not to stay but sh e is expected by the reader to somehow come out of the
Victorian reality and behave more like a modern woman, which she finally does. She always
seems to have choices, as the whole narrative does: “she always went for the same afternoon
walk, down steep Po und Street into Broad Street and thence to the Cobb Gate, which is a
square terrace overlooking the sea has nothing to do with the Cobb. These she would stand at
the wall and look out the sea, but generally not for long -no longer than the careful appraisal
a ship’s captain gives when he comes out on the bridge before t urning either down Cocktail
or going in the other direction, westwards, along the half -mile path that runs round a gentle
to bay to the Cobb proper”87. She seeks escape from being writer by thi s architectural syntax
and she decides to lead Charles into this unmapped territory (both literary and figuratively in
the landscape with its wild, engulfing channel waters and its looming, crumbling cliffs, an
expression of all that is unknowable and undo mesticated impulses and desires). Charles is
afraid of the transgression: the road he walked suddenly became “a brink over an abyss, he
felt, something had gone wrong in his reading of the map, but both lost and lured he felt”88,
“based by a maze of crosscurrents and swept hopelessly away from his safe anchorage”89, “a
slip and within a few footnotes would have slithered helplessly over the edge of the bluff
below”90. Sarah’s flight from linear, causal narrative should be seen as a subversive attempt
to evolve beyond the cognitive habits that produce a narrative mentality in human beings,
habits richly displayed by the town’s people of Lyme Regis. Mrs. Poulteney demands the
Sarah match the story elements and meet the narrative shape of the Christian sin and expiation
plot. She is, then ironically presented in an after -death situation, to the delight of the modern
reader. As Lidia Vianu pointed: “Mrs. Poulteney’s end is a great emotional satisfaction to all

87 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 66
88 Ibid, p. 143
89 Ibid, p. 172
90 Ibid, p. 162

38
men who have followed her while she was servants alike”91. However, it is obvious that a
Victorian reader could not have appreciated such a scene, not cloud he have understood it.
This is another example of how important the reader is to the author of this novel.
The author of The French Lieutenant’s Wom an narratives and at the same time
defines narration, he tells the reader where the narration stops and where he or she should
change the way they perceive narrative. Therefore, the reader should accept these challenges
and develop new skills that will ena ble him or her to enrich the reading experience. This is
how The French Lieutenant’s Woman aims to produce an evolved reader, a reader that leaves
his or her prejudices behind, and tries to be open -minded about characters, the narrative
thread, and the intrusion of the author himself. This intrusion, we believe, can be seen from
the beginning, m anifested in the epigraphs and footnotes that parallel the story in each
chapter. The author indirectly tells the reader that “his own shaping of the novel’s world of
experience is directed and determined by narratives he’s internalized, that, in effect, h is
authorship is transindividual. The narrator has read a great deal, and his readings of Maud
and Tess and Alice through the Looking -Glass and to Marguerite, continued, to name but a
few, to determine the way Sarah is multiply presented as Siren, persecut ed daughter of an
ambitious father, fantasy figure, and tragic lost love, respectively. The narrator’s cognitive
processes are identical to those of his characters, and he shows that all telling is first a
listening – to the voices of others stories”92. Sarah, on the other hand, toys with Charles and
she writes and re -writes her own story, the same way the author does for his readers. She has
access to Charles’s mind and heart through narrative, but she constantly charges this narrative,
confusing Charles and making him get out from the linea rity of the narrative. Sarah first lets
everybody see her like the fallen woman, so she deliberately constructs this plot and plays this
role. Then, she gives herself to Charles, demonstrating him that she had fabricated h er story,
and what he believed to be true was nothing but a narrative. Charles had been manipulated,
the way Sarah was by the French vagueness, so she denies Charles the role of the savior, the
catcher of the fallen woman.
Charles struggles to free himself from the narrative; when doctor Grogan tells him
that Sarah is a mad woman, Charles’s reaction is the following: “Even now her face rises
before me, denying all you say”93 . Sarah makes Charles live the story of vaguenes s, so he

91 VIANU, Lidia – British Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millennium , Ed. All Educational, București, 1999, p. 85
92 ACKROYD, Peter – The Trial of Elisabeth Cree, article, source: internet, at:
https://www.enotes.com/topics/trial -elizabeth -cree/in -depth , Accessed June 2, 2017
93 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London , 2004, p. 220

39
must act out the world of t he story in life world. The author sees no reason “for fixing the
fight; he takes both sides in it”94.
Charles tries to reconcile his Victorian attitude with the desire to get to know Sarah
and unveil the mystery around her. When he realizes the Sarah had fabricated her story, he
makes a list of plots in his mind, trying to think of her as the hysterical woman, the power –
hungry woman, the man -hating woman, etc. In this way, the reader has to learn to tolerate
ambiguity an d this self -conscious style helps hi m in deciding his own truth. And so does
Charles, as Susana Onega observes “the novel’s third ending leaves Charles Smithson at a
typical existentialist crossroads, his Victorian faith in the unity and coherence of the self
shattered, pondering doubt -ridde n on the next step to take and incapable of foreseeing his
future, for, although Charles Smithson gives up his collecting activities, his maturation
progress does not bring about as it did for the Prince turned Magician his transcendental
individuation and cosmic integration. Turning from a Victorian into an existentialist, Charles
loses his reassuring belief in a well -ordered, unitary cosmos, immediately accessible to the
subject, and experiences the characteristically Beckettian – agonizing version of the void, as
the world fragm ents and appears unattainable by unmediated perception. He realizes that
chronological time is a human construction, that the only kno wable reality is the reality of
self-perception”95.
Self-perception is also once of the theme of Fo wles other novel, The Magus whose
main character, an English teacher called Nicholas Urfe leaves England for the Greek island
Phraxos in or der to find himself. Nicholas, w ho is also narrator teaches the reader, (after he
learns himself) the same difference between existence and fiction. About this novel, Brian
McHale said that “is a strikingly new kind of novel which, although intends to establish and
absolute level or reality, paradoxically relativi zed reality”96.
The book is, if we want to put it in a nutshell, a god -game whose central protagonist
is Nicholas Urfe, the puppet whose strings are held by Conchis -God/puppeteer. In fact, the
draft title of the novel was The God game. In the preface added to the second ed ition of The
Magus , Fowles explains his intentions: “If these was some central scheme beneath the (more
Irish and Greek) stew of intuitions about the nature of human existence and of fiction it lies
perhaps in the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: The God -game I did
intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks scientific; that is a series of human illusions about
something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power (…) I do not

94 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 390
95 ONEGA, Susana – Self, World and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles , Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42, Ed.
Duke University Press, Spring 1996, p. 42
96 McHA LE, Brian – Postmodernist fiction, Ed. Taylor& Francis e -Library, London and New York, 2004, p. 114

40
defend Conchis’s decision at t he execution, but I defend to reality of the dilemma. God and
freedom are antipathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often
because they are afraid to believe in the other thing”97. This preface demolished the
pretensions of divine p owers and it is consisted with the idea presented by Brian McHale,
who says that “although intends to establish an absolute level of reality, paradoxically
relativizes reality”98. Arriving on the Greek island, the young teacher meets this greek
millionaire residing at Bourani. Nicholas accepts to be experimented on by Conchis who
stages a succession of theatrical situations. Thus, Nicholas, the young apprentice is taught to
plunge at the heart of fiction only to return and reconsider reality. All the journey s into the
possible are parallel by journeys inward, into his own consciousness. In fact, Conchis’ name,
the embodiment of narrative omniscience, and Nicholas’s rational alter -ego is symbolically
pronounced to suggest consciousness: “How do you know who I am, Mr. Conchis? Analyse
my name, I prefer the chi soft. He sipped his tea. If you question Hermes, Zeus will know”99.
It is Nicholas who functions as narrator, but it is really Conchis who manipulates him
into telling his stories. The reader is trapped int o the labyrinth of the stories, the same way
Nicholas is. We can say that Nicholas’s role -playing in Conchis’s theatre is very similar to the
reader’s experience with this novel. The illusion of reality is the perfect way for Fowles to
pinpoint once again the illusory textual representation of this type of literature, and the role
that this has to educate the reader and at the same time to allow him/her a personal
interpretation. However, what Nicholas has to learn, as well as the reader, is that there is a
fine line between fact, reality, on the one hand, and fiction, the game, on the other hand. He
eventually learns how to redefine his notions of self and world, and he does so by being put to
trials and tests which are meant to correct his perception of re ality. This god -game message
incorporated in the novel also makes the reader aware of the fact that Nicholas is not oly
watched, but created by another entity who is the author, John Fowles. Therefore, Fowles’s
lesson for the reader is that, like Nicholas, he/she, too should perceive “the fictional basics of
everything and (…) distinguish between different orders of fiction”100. In the end, Nicholas
becomes more aware of his identity, like Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who
achieves wholeness when he realizes that he, too, exists in the other world that Sarah lives in.
This world is a fictional one that Sarah creates to achieve freedom, to be able to get out of the
stiff Victorian world. The conclusion of the reader shou ld be that any apprehension of what

97 FOWLES, John – The Magus, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 10
98 McHALE, Brian – Postmodernist fiction, Ed. Taylor& Francis e -Library, London and New York, 2004, p. 114
99 FOWLES, John – The Magus, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 80
100 WAUGH, Patricia – Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self – Conscious Fiction, Ed. Taylor& Francis e –
Library, London and New York, 1984, p. 112

41
can be called reality is a construct that reflects the personal point of view of that particular
person. In a series of ri ddles and occult experiences, Maurice Conchis is trying to teach
Nicholas what existential authent icity is about and that the general mystery of this world can
never be captured in a whatever categories we might consider appropriate. The reader is an
position which is very similar to Nicholas because he is able to assess the relevance of
Conchis’s symb ols only as Nicholas tells him/her about it. The conclusion of the reader in that
any apprehension of that can be called reality is a construct that reflects the personal point of
view of that particular person. In The Magus, intertextuality plays a signif icant role, as books
are of central importance to Conchis and it is him who introduces Shakerspeare’s The
Tempest as a direct inter -text for The Magus. Conchis shares important qualities with
Shakespeare’s magician: he is able to manipulate the environment and the facts that take place
on this domain and he has control over some of the actions of the people on that domain. On
the other hand, there are inter -texts directly accessible to the reader, but not to any of the
characters of the novel. Fowles plays a similar game with the reader as Conchis is playing
with Nicholas: he offers him explanations that might prove wrong. In fact, the existentially
authentic individual must construct the world for himself in his own way. The Magus allows
for an identificati on reading and those readers who do not happen to be convinced by the
existential framework of the novel might see a lot other plausible interpretations.
Maurice Conchis makes Nicholas listen to his own life story and to a series of tales
with a moral, one of which being The Tale of the Prince and the Magician , an emblematic
story for the meaning of the novel or, more generally, for the meaning of concepts like reality
and truth. It tells the story of a young prince who is told by his father, the king, that
princesses, island and God do not exist. The prince meets a stranger who presents himself as
God and convinces the prince that his father had lied. He goes back to the king who tells him
that in reality the stranger is only a magician, that all kings and gods are magicians. The
prince is now distressed and wants to die, but when he sees the awful face of death and
remembers “the beautiful but unreal island and the unreal but beautiful princesses”101, he
decides that he can bear the burden of unreality. As soon as he accepts the unreal of magic as
the only reality, the prince starts turning into a magician. This story summarises the idea that
fiction and reality cannot silly be separated and if one acce pts the artist/magician’s
constructed reality, one can enter a magic world and can transform himself into a magician,
having faith in the spiritual capacity of art in general. Susana Onega observes in her article
that “Fowles makes the reader stand in the position of the Prince turned Magician: the
validity of the hero’s as well as of the reader’s numinous experience of transcendence is made

101 FOWLES, John – The Magus, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 552

42
to depend on the individual reader’s capacity to accept this constructed reality as true,
without the help of any rea lism-enhancing mechanisms”102.
As Maurice Conchis discovered as a young man, “that great passive monster,
reality, was no longer dead, easy to handle. It was full of my mysterious vigor, new forms,
new possibilities”103. Only art in its most creative expressio n can reflect this complex,
mysterious and changing kind of reality.
Nicholas Urfe is another character in a quest for his true identity, his true self and
this is what the writer intends to engage the reader into: “What was I after all? Near enough
what Conchis had told: nothing but the net sum of countless wrong turnings (…) all my life I
had tried to turn life into fiction to hold reality away (…). This leechlike variation of the
superego I had created myself, fostered myself, and because of it I had al ways been incapable
of acting freely. It was not my defence, but my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a death too
late. I sat the store and waited for the down to rise on the grey sea, intolerable alone”104.
Fowles compares his novel, The Magus to a receptive story because of the way it teases the
reader and at the same time it fascinates him/her: “You mislead them ideally to lead them into
a greater truth…it’s a trap which I hope will hock the reader”105, he says. The reader is
indeed trapped in this labyrinth of stories, masks and choices, along the main character,
Nicholas Urfe, but as Lidia Vianu noticed, the author of these novels “has flexibility, which as
long as his reader is diligent, willing to go back to his text again and again . Rereadi ng is easy
with his novels. They are intellectually so entertaining, so full of life the mind, that there is no
moment of dull rest”106
In Daniel Martin, probably the most intellectual of Fowles’s novels, and the most
autobiographical, the author directs the reader’s attention to formal aspects of the every novel
he/she is reading. This is a novel about Englishness.
Daniel Martin, the novel, portrays a successful Hollywood playwriting in his early
50’, an Englishman in self -chosen exile, profoundly dissatisf ied with his job, with the
artificiality of the life he has chosen, with himself. He has three tasks to fulfil: to re -establish a
relation with Jane, his college girlfriend, to leave behind the shallow way of by going back to
his roots, in England and last , but not least, to depict his own life realistically in a novel, his

102 ONEGA, Susana – Self, World and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles , Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42, Ed.
Duke University Press, Spring 1996, p. 37
103 FOWLES, John – The Magus, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 309
104 Ibid, p. 539
105 BRADBURY, Malcom – The Novel Today, Notes on an Unfinished Novel, John Fowles, Ed. Manchester
University Press, Fantana 1977, p. 139
106 VIANU, Lidia – British Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millennium, Ed. All Education, București, 1999, p. 87

43
ambitious project. He considers the autobiographical novel to be the right from and he sets
himself a high standard over accuracy: “whole sight, or all the rest is desolation”107
When Dan, the main character, asks Jenny his much too young girlfriend how he
should write the novel, she simply answers: “All you have to do is put down exactly what
we’ve just said”108. The every words of their conversation appear in the novel and they are an
invitation for the reader to actively take part in the making of the novel.
Dan, the playwright is now sick of pretence and facade and writing this novel is his
chance of becoming authentic and more aware of who he is, where he comes from, in a word,
his inner -self. He fled from his Englishness by going to America and now he is trying to do
opposite, to overcome the characteristics that he does not like. “Since we (The English) are so
careful only you reveal our true selves in private, the private from of the re ad text must serve
us better than the publicity of the seen spectacle”109. Dan is willing to try to live up to his
ideal and write a novel in this belief as he feels inauthentic; he has subjected his artistic
ambition to the pursuit of money, easy living and a young girlfriend. This becomes obvious in
his talks with or about Barney Dillon, a symbol of the decadence of the film and tv world.
Daniel Martin is a complex novel and its complexity stems from, first of all, its
oscillation between first and third pe rson narrative, interesting shifts in tense, uses of
flashbacks and second of all from the complicated relationship between author/narrator and
reader. The author is aware of his double statues of his ego -as a narrator and as a subject of
narrative and the se are times when the reader does not know whether the story is narrated by
Dan, by Jenny, by Fowles or by Simon Wolfe, as there are no indications in this respect.
Therefore, there is a chain of narrators, author and characters. Firstly, there is John Fow les, a
writer composing a novel about another writer of his age called Daniel Martin, and in his turn,
Daniel Martin, the fictionalized character writes an autobiographical novel naming his hero,
Simon Wolfe. Daniel Martin’s identity is fragmented and mixe d up with th at of Fowles and
his fictional a lter-ego, Simon Wolf, as he shares with them the role of author, character and
reader. The majority of the novel is constructed in the third person narrative (chapters 1 -3, 5-
6, 36 -46), but there is also person n arrative of Daniel ( chapters 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 25,
27, 29, 31) and Jenny (4, 21, parts of 28, 34) and mixed “I” and “he” narrative (1, 7, 9, 11, 14,
19, 20, 24, 26, 30, 33, 35). In the first chapter (The Harvest) the adult Daniel remembers his
childhood, but at one point, when the character’s hand slips into the pocket of his trousers,
“he” becomes “I”. This is again an example of the author dealing with the issue of the

107 FOWLES, John – Daniel Martin, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 7
108 Ibid, p. 21
109 Ibid, p. 292

44
distinctiveness if the reality and the fiction: “Down, half masked by the le aves. Point of view
of the hidden bird. I feel in his pocket and bring out a clasp knife; plunge the blade gutted;
slit, liver, intestines, stench. He stands and turns and begins to carve his initials on the beech –
tree (…) Adieu my boyhood and my dream”110.
Jenny is another -character in Daniel Martin, as she decides to try her hand at writing
some parts of Daniel’s novel and she sends these texts to Daniel. The reader does not know
whether these sections are really by the character Jenny or whether Daniel rep orts them
accurately. For instance, Jenny’s third condition is an account of a day at Tsankawi but is
followed bt Daniel’s account of the same day the two accounts do not match. In the chapter
(A Third Condition), Jenny writes her erotic experience with St eve, an actor like her. She
writes this narrative to escape her being, as she calls it, “something in Daniel’s script of
figments in his imagination”111. What the reader can draw from here is, again, that there is no
clear boundary between the real, the imaginary, reality and fiction.
Daniel’s initial intention is an impossible task as he just a fictional character in
Fowles’s text, as well as Dan or Simon Wolfe are fictional characters in Daniel’s text.
Moreover, Jenny offers Daniel a new role, that of a reader of her own texts. Therefore,
character and narrator, ontological and fictional, all into each other.
The novel is circular, these seems there is no beginning or end, the first and last
sentences are the sentences of the autobiographical novel that Daniel wishes to write and yet,
this novel has never been written: “That evening in Oxford, leaning beside Jane in her kitchen
while she cooked supper for them, Dan told her with a suitable irony that at least he had
found a last se ntences for the novel h e was never going to write”112. This is an open ending
because it makes the reader go back to the first sentences of the novel and wonder who the
author of those first lines is. It is like a mirror or a book in a mirror, a constructed reality
mirroring anoth er constructed reality, never exactly the same, as when mirrors transform left
into right and right into left. We, the readers can only assume that the first chapter is, in fact
the last chapter of the novel. The reader’s attention is driven to this frame of embedded world
and so and so forth. As Patricia Waugh observes in her work, Fowles “sets out to show that
individuals not only construct their own positions in the world and narrate their own stories,
they are also situated within other’s discourses, t hey are characters in other’s fictions”113.

110 Ibid, p. 16
111 Ibid, p. 495
112 Ibid, p. 704
113 WAUGH, Patricia – Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self – Conscious Fiction, Ed. Taylor& Francis e –
Library, Londo n and New York, 1984, p. 133

45
At the end of this novel the reader is surprised to learn that Daniel has not written his
novel yet and this first sentences in Fowles’s novel , the unwritten ending of the autobiography
of this fictional Dan. Susan a Onega is right when she observes that “Fowles’s novel entitled
Daniel Martin acquires a circular structure in which the real and the imaginary, the written
and the unwritten, the actual, the potential and where the identities of author, narrator,
charact er and also fictional and flesh -and blood readers are revealed as the fragmented
facets of a unique subjects, a kind of Borgesean supra -individual composite subjects, standing
astride the boundaries of fiction and reality. Thus, Daniel Martin, becomes an a ll-enveloping
textual world, a Borgesean Library of Babel, trapping within itself characters, fictional and
flesh -and-blood authors and fictional and flesh -and-blood readers alike”114.
The reader is always addressed directly and invited to take part in the discussion that
Daniel has with Jenny about the possibility of writing a novel and he/she is directed to think
about the principles of the novel -writing. By virtue of their experience with novels, clever
readers and thinking readers are as important part of the creative process as the author
himself/herself; or at last this is what he readers are supposed to understand: “The least
thinking reader will have noted a third solution, but it had not occurred to the writer -to-be
until this moment (…). 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 r eal”115.
The conclusion we can draw is that, especially in the postmodern literature, the
reader is no longer seen as a passive observer and literature is no longer a static, hermetic
world. It begins to interact with the world of the reader and the latter, on the other hand is
made part of process or he is given the power to change the ending ro to choose the ending
that best represents his/her views.

114 ONEGA, Susana – Self, World and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles , Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42, Ed.
Duke University Press, Spring 1996, p. 44
115 FOWLES, John – Daniel Martin, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 431

46
Chapter III
The Condition of the Writer

It is well known that the contemporary view of the novelists, as well as of critics is
that they refuse the old omniscience and the tradition of the omniscient novels and Roland
Barthes proclaimed in a famous essay written in 1968: “the birth of the reader must be
ransomed by the death of the Author”116.
We shall try to demonstrate, however, that John Fowles is serious about the godlife
function performed by creators of fiction and he makes fun of the idea that the author himself
should be ousted from his own fiction. At the same time, because the twentieth century man
no longer sees himself as manipulated by an all -knowing god, the modern novelist must avoid
the appearance that, as a creator can entirely control that world: “The novelist is still god,
since h e creates (and not even the most aleatory avant -garde modern novel has managed to
extirpate its author completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the
Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new technological image, wit h freedom
our first principle, not authority”117. Fowles establishes theoretical freedom of his characters
as “there is only one good definition of God; the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
And I must conform to that definition”118.
As if to emphasis that the modern author does exist and cannot be separated from his
fiction, Fowles returns to the 19th century intrusiveness by footnoting, quoting prose, poetry,
articles from that age and he even writes himself into the plot and this author/
character/narrator discusses his own techniques: “Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has
only to pull the right s trings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner, and produce on
request a though analysis of their motives and intentions (…)”119.
At the beginning of chapter 13, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles br akes
the illusion of the 19th century fictio n: “The story I am telling is all imagination. These
characters I create never existed outside my own mind…if I have pretend ed until now to know
all my character’s minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as a have
assumed some of the vocabulary and voice of) a convention universally accepted at the time
of my story; that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all yet he tries to pretend

116 BARTHE S, Roland – The Death of the Author, essay, source: internet, at:
https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf , Accessed May 5, 2017
117 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 57
118 Ibid, p. 97
119 Ibid, p. 95

47
that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe -Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a
novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the world”120.
What Fowles does is to expose the illusion of omniscience that characterized the
Victorians and to defy at the same time the modern idea of detachment.
Although the author gives his char acters freedom, he tries to convince his readers
that his characters are not less vivid or valid: “I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No,
my characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more real than the one I have just
broken. Fiction i s woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years
ago. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I would have you share my own
sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind, any more that you control –
howe ver hard to try…your children, colleagues, friends or even yourself”121. The author gives
up on authority and adopts the freedom principle, leaving his character on his own, or tossing
a coin to decide the outcome of the story. He exposes his art and its con ventions, and at the
same time he confesses that the world he creates is independent, it has a mind of its own:
“Only one same reason is shared by all of us (novelists, my emphasis): we wish to create
worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We
know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world
must be independent of its creator; a pla nned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is
a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to
live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff -edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme
Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Diary”122. Fowles plays
with the narr ative conventions of the Victorian novel at the beginning, but as Maria -Ana
Tupan observes, “The signs of ontological transgression steal into the very beginning of the
novel, though hints to Henry Moore, the nineteenth and twentieth century communicating
freely in the temporally old fictional frame. In the thirteenth chapter, the breach is completed
by the author’s intrusion into fictional space, exposing it as a construct . Fowles has no
personal identity, he writes from within a system of literary convent ions which delimit
possibilities of experience, apprehension, narration. He shifts from one position within the
text (a typical Victorian novel) as omniscient narrator to that nouveau novelist, developing a
democratic relationship with his character, cons tituted in a cultural manifold”123.

120 Ibid, p. 97
121 Ibid, p. 98
122 Idem
123 TUPAN, Maria -Ana- A Survey Course in British Literature, Ed. Universității din București, București, 2004, p.
271

48
Omniscience enables the writer to enter into his character’s minds and give the
reader insight into personal feelings, translating for him/her, sometimes insisting on the
reader’s understanding not only what a character f eels, thinks, but also why he does so. The
way Fowles accomplishes this is by presenting the reader essay materials, those metatexts,
sometimes compromising an entire chapter (chapter 35), an essay on lower -class, sexual
freedom and the problem of incest i n Thomas Hardy’s life. This chapter is supposed to both
inform the reader and remove all doubt why Mary and Sam were together at the hay barn.
Another example is the 37th chapter, the chapter dealing with the idea of being a
gentleman in the 19th century and explaining Charles’s antipathy to Mr. Freeman’s offer of a
mercantile career. All those interpretations that the author gives his readers make possible his
Victorian irony, which is one of the most interesting and pleasurable characteristic of his
book . Moreover, this sprinkling of his text with documents, stories, letters, (Freeman;s
attorney’s legal paper, doctor Michael Grugan’s case histories, Ernestina’s sentimental novel,
the 18th century account of a London brothel , the written correspondence be tween Charles
and other characters) control the reader’s sympathy for the characters. Maybe this is another
reason why the readers take so much pleasure at, for instance, picturing Mrs. Poulteney going
to Hell. However, there is a character in The French Lieutenant’s Woman in whose mind the
author will not enter and this character is Sarah Woodruff. That is why she remains a mystery,
not only for Charles, but also for the readers. She appears closer in behavior and perspectives
to the modern rea der, she is an cast from beginning, she almost takes pleasure in being one,
and the author constantly strengthens her contemporary qualities. As Robert Huffaker put it
“in the Darwian sense, she is the cultural missing link between centuries more modern th an
the Victorians. By voluntarily his Victorian omniscience in her alone, Fowles adds another
dimension to the evolution theme (…). The narrator’s appearing as character and the
reader’s choosing between multiple endings emphasis concepts of literature, th eological and
social evolution”124.
John Fowles seems to embrace the idea that the writer is the actual figure that has
authority as the creator of a text and at the same time, he tells his readers that what he has
written is an illusion: “I do not know. Thi s 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”125. This I in the passage tells the reader that the

124 HUFFAKER, Robert – Twayne’s English Author s, chapter 4; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Series online,
source: internet, at: https://www.librarything.com/series/Twayne's+English+Authors , Accessed March 15,
2017
125 FOWLES, J ohn- The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p . 97

49
story in the novel is fiction, not an imitation of reality, so if the reader had this illusion that a
Victorian novelist tries to create, now he/she has to make up his/her own interpretation from
the position of a player in the game of fiction -writing. Until this chapter 13 the novel i s a
historical one in a realistic style, but for John Fowles history is a form of literature, history
can be constructed by its authors.
The authorial intrusion, as Irina Toma notes, “actually revive the Victorian
convention, which allows for an oscillatio n between the modes of showing and telling in the
narrative voice, or the intrusion of an authorial voice into the fiction to address the reader
directly. Fowles turns his intervention into an illusion -braking self -reflexiveness, reminding
the reader that the history being presented is just a sample of creative writing. The reader is
definitely taken into the author’s confidence”126. In fact, the postmodernist novelist appears to
be suspicious of his/ her reader and John Fowles is no exception, as we can see in the dialogue
that he has with this : “But this is preposterous? A character is either real or imaginary? If
you think that, Hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You did not even think of your own past as
real; you dress it up, gild it or blacken it, cens or it, tinker it…fictionalize it, in a word, and
put it away on a shelf -your book, your romanced autobiography?”127. Irina Toma states that
“I shall suspect your becomes the hallmark statement of the dialogue between the
postmodernist novelist and his reader; the sensation of confidence has vanished away and the
genius of suspicion has set in”128. She puts this on the fact that the writer and the reader no
longer have values in common, these common values that the 18th century author shared with
his/her r eaders being replaced by “an infinite multiplicity of private significances that
contradict and amazingly enlighten one another”129. Another question that the reader asks
him/herself is the one about the identity of the writer and the relationship to the tex t. This also
becomes a hallmark of postmodernist writing. By extension, this prompts us, the readers to
ask where fiction ands and reality begins. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles
playfully uses the techniques of the Victorian novelist in his so -called Victorian novel to
advance the action and comment from a god -like authorial perspective. At the same time he
breaks the mould of the Victorian form by giving not one absolute ending, but three. In the
first ending, which comes improbably in the middle of the book, Charles makes the right (by
Victorian standards) choice of turning his back on Sarah and marrying Ernestina. In the
typical Victorian novelist’s view, Charles and Ernestina’s life is played out along with the
lives of Dr. Grogan, the servants Sam and Mary, Mrs. Poulteney and others. Having given the

126 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 222
127 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p . 65
128 TOMA, Irina – Uses and Abuses of Tradition in Postmodernist Fiction, Ed. Premier, Ploiești, 2004, p. 225
129 Ibid, p. 225

50
Victorian ending, Fowles then steps into inform the reader that it was a myth. Therefore, he
returns Charles to the moment of choice and tries his second possible ending: he makes
Charles choose to spend the night in Exeter, so he can see Sarah. Charles chooses life, but
then he must learn to deal with hazard or chance, another existentialist idea. When Fowles
introduces the third ending, the intrusive writer reveals, once again that he is ultimatel y the
creator: he turns back the clock 15 minutes, intensifying the illusion that neither has authorial
preference: “He makes a small adjustment to the time. It seems – though unusual in an
instrument from the bench of the greatest of watchmakers – that he w as running a quarter of
an hour fast”130. Also, the so -called omniscient narrator tells his readers that “Perhaps
Charles is myself disguised”131 and he suggests on many occasion a puzzling identity between
the flesh -and blood writer and the fictional narrator . These suggestions aims at undermining
the traditional division between fiction and reality, as well at enhancing the constru ctedness of
the novel.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, as Maria -Ana Tupan also observes, “The
narrator is simply casting himself in various roles – as Victorian novelist, as successful
impresario, as author – characters – disintegrating himself though cycling subject
positions”132. Fowles does not want to decide on a single, unified ending and he forces his
main characters to pla y different roles: that of a typica l Victorian who keeps his honor and
does the right thing, th at of a modern man who follows his heart with the risk of being
rejected by the society. So, “instead of a rational consciousness, fully responsible and aware
of its intentions and motives, we get the whole paradigm of relationships between
author/narrator and character, constituted as functions, not as entities. By failing to select
one word to the exclusion of others, Fowles, problematizes the notion of plot and the
distinction between actual and fictional in narrative”133.
By introducing himself into the text, the writer crosses this between the fictional
world and the real world. As Nicholas Urfe, the main character in The Magus, learns a
valuable lesson at the e nd of the novel, which there is a fine line between fact and fiction, we
can create our own game in other people’s games. In his novel is not a watching writer , but
the reader is aware that Nicholas is created by another entity which, at the book level mu st be
the author, John Fowles.

130 FOWLES, John – The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p p. 362/441
131 Ibid, p. 85
132 TUPAN, Maria -Ana- A Survey Course in British Literature, 1998, Ed. Universității din București, București,
2004, p. 272
133 Ibid, p. 227

51
The same author is provoking the reader in Daniel Martin to work out the criteria of
his work and he is “directing the reader’s attention to the constructedness, the artificiality of
what he is reading”134.
The question: who is the author of the book? is constantly asked by the third person
narrative, selective, omniscience and first person narrative. Critics have seen in the
pseudo nym suggested by Jenny McNeil -S. Wolfe, an anagram of Fowles. The intrusion of the
author is mor e subtle here than in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but more confusing as
this is not signaled. Daniel Martin, in his fragmented roles as author, character or alter -ego of
John Fowles rewrites Descartes: “Cogito, ergo sum” as “I create, I am, all the rest is dream,
though concrete and executed”135. As Susana Onega put it, “Daniel Martin is advocating 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 beyo nd the mat erial world. For
Daniel Martin -as well as for the other artists/ magicians and for Fowles himself -art, not
reason, is still the superior form of knowledge capable of conferring meaning on human
existence and making man godlike, conscious though he may be that there is no metaphysical
reality beyond or beneath the textual reality created by art”136.

134 LOVEDAY, Simon – The Romances of John Fowles, Ed. Macmillan Publishers Limited, UK, 1985, p. 92
135 FOWLES, John – Daniel Martin, Ed. Vintage, London, 2004, p. 236
136 ONEGA, Susana – Self, World and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles , Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 42, Ed.
Duke University Press, Spring 1996, p. 44

52
Chapter IV
Conclusions

I chose this one special themes of John Fowles, Versions of Postmodernism in the
work of John Fowles , because i read two years ago his masterpiece: The Magus . On that time i
became fascinated on his beaut iful work and about his philoso phy of life.
As a conclusion i can draw about my license research is the fact that in this work i
tried to elaborate prec isely the best novels of Fowles in: John Fowles and Postmodernism ,
because we need to know the author is an postmodernist canonical literature’s representant;
Historical elements in John Fowles’s Novels , just to remind the biggest elements that
describes h is work: metafiction, metanarrative, intertextuality, parody and irony.
Next, i was focused on his three masterpieces: The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s
Woman and Daniel Martin. I chose them in chronological order, to debate and to criticize
their metafi ction and intertextuality.
In The Magus or the Godgame , all things that attend in concordance with the lessons
which are given to Nicholas, are made in order to make the hero being aware of it and all he
knows is the fact he is the master of his own desti ny. Nevertheles, he can be destroyed in his
own attempt to become God. At the end, the reader finds the answer, being conscious that
mystery can guide us to our own desires and needs and what John Fowles wants to show us is
the fact that The Magus begins i n reality, shifts into theatrical mysteries and finally, returns to
reality.
The second one, The French Lieutenant’s Woman – a Contemporany Perspective on
Victorianism, gives us the belief that Victorianism and class are mentioned paradoxical in an
Postmod ernist world, showing us the relation between two charachers who come from
different class, with different behaviour and principles of life and enduring love.
On the third novel of Fowles, Daniel Martin – The Quest of the Self, this gives life to
a love story that transcends time, but also makes a thorough analysis of the post -war English
man concerned with the camouflage of true intentions to cover the alienation of himself in a
drifting world. Moreover, by satirizing the academic el ite of Oxford, the author also makes a
parallel between the American space, concerned with material things and the achievement of
celebrity, and the English space, concerned with the preservation of traditions and the
preservation of appearances. This nove l has woken up in me the nostalgia of the past, when
people felt and thought more, a nd conversations gave you wings in your quest of the self.

53
Further, in the following chapters: The Condition of the Reader and The Condition of
the Writer, i talked about the nar rative perspectives, the way that reader sees these novel and
the way the writer makes all his efforts in wr iting these beautiful creations, being helped by
his character s, themes, motives and almost by the moments of the subject with their
mysterio us chapters.

54

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Limited, UK, 1985

55
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