LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/6. JOHN FOWLES (31 March 1926-2005)

Some of the features that make Fowles a Desperado are:

● The all-invading use of irony in all the novels. His irony is directed at the heroes, the reader and the author himself, at the very craft of novel-writing.

● The use of a variety of story-telling tricks, such as the luminous core of Miranda’s diary in The Collector.

● The creation of baffling characters, such as Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The mystery of the heroes is enhanced by the tantalizing plot, ending in a tough choice for the readers. The initiator of this answerless mode was Henry James, but Fowles upgrades the model and tops all expectations. The reader is persuaded to give up asking, and provide his own answers, recreating the novelist in his mind, so we have as many John Fowles’s as readers.

● The novelist is never ashamed to speak in the first person, just like Dickens, but adds to his composite of all tricks the flavour of humour, which Victorians never imagined could be used. The reader is subtly challenged to defy the author’s smile.

● Surprise, defiance of previous narrative manners were characteristic of the stream of consciousness, which smashed plot, chronology, characters. Fowles, in his turn, defies the defiers. He offers a plot, but he gives more than one ending and never makes up his mind which to choose. He hates encapsulating his audience within his intelligence. His characters have at least two faces, and the reader’s doubts storm. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, his chronology is allegedly placed in the Victorian age, but he often addresses us from our own time, even makes us cross paths with the novelist in person, claiming, ‘How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot’ (Fowles). On the whole, Fowles is disconcerting – and utterly irresistible because of that – because he has a diabolic resourcefulness.

● While allowing his heroes a large share of ambiguity, Fowles holds the reader’s hand, he claims solidarity with whoever chooses to follow him. The novelist secretly states, ‘I am on your side’, so the reader can hardly object to the mystery. Any baffled irritation or resisting mood is annihilated by the writer’s (false) confession of innocence.

● A wonderful professor of literature, Fowles mixes teaching with novel-writing. He chooses the Victorian quotations most apt to stir the student’s interest in Victorian fiction, essay and poetry-writers. The mottos are a perfect guide to choosing quotations.

● Since Joyce might have killed the novel if he had written a third word-focussed opus, Fowles realizes the return to the story is imperative. He goes back with ostentation, handling suspense irreverently, exaggerating it beyond all expectation. The reader’s breathlessness could cause a heart attack of his intellect. Take away the reader’s cooperation and Fowles’ novels die. His unwillingness to commit himself to a single, unambiguous story requires readers willing to live with his Jamesian, secretive mood.

● Unlike the stream of consciousness writers, who relied on an atmosphere of the mind, Fowles takes great pains to create a real atmosphere, very true-to-life heroes, all credible, interesting and rich in suggestion. He recomposes not only the story, but also the heroes, although ambiguity still keeps heroes and plot in the shade.

● Psychological analysis, bequeathed by the stream of consciousness in its direct, obvious manner, is exciting, refined and highly intellectual. Fowles recreates the character, but it is not Dickens’ untouchable destiny that he imagines, but a long line of debunked masters of their fate, with whom the readers can play at will.

● The source of a Desperado reader’s pleasure while reading is the author’s mind, therefore it is entirely intellectual, although Desperadoes sleep on emotions, so to say. The charm of Fowles’ thoughts mesmerizes, overthrows and ‘ravishes’ the reader’s much battered heart, as it happens in John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV. The earnest thoughts bathe in overtly humorous interludes, such as the scene of Mrs. Poulteney’s descent to Hell, after high hopes of Heaven. First-hand irony joins hands with affectionate treatment of all heroes, in a composite, contrasting attitude, which hardly knows its own mind, thus subscribing to the Desperado confusion of moods and tricks.

● The Desperado author wants to eat his cake and have it: he wants to gratify the reader’s taste for romance (see the first ending suggested for The French Lieutenant’s Woman), but at the same time he mocks at the same reader fond of cheap happy ends. The only way out of this is to push the reader over the precipice, apparently offering him a choice, actually confronting him with a baffled consummation of bliss. Happy ends are shameful for Desperadoes. They flee for their life whenever the sense of closure threatens to mortify a plot.

● A Desperado obsession is that of other texts, other literary minds. Intertextuality became legal with Joyce and mainly Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land, but, just as the stream of thoughts, of associations, interference with other writers is also a Desperado tradition. Fowles places his Sarah in the house of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and leaves her there, compelling our imagination to linger on the man’s surroundings.

● Desperadoes have a science-fiction inclination. They choose devices, atmosphere, moods that defamiliarize, threaten with alienation. The novels provide maximum pleasure while they are read, but tend to wane when the final curtain falls, if they pronounce and end (see Lawrence Durrell). Fowles manages to keep up suspense even after the last page of the plot has been read. He breathes suspense, an impatience of the mind, which is his major achievement in the novel.

● Another inheritance from the stream of consciousness, the hybridization of literary genres is a major device, used now with less earnestness, with irony, as a game, but a very challenging one. Fowles mixes fiction with drama, lyricism and essay. He starts with a constant dialogue with his reader, as a prank, continues with lyrical outbursts of emotion (he will never be divested of the heart of fiction, which is shared emotion, after all), and often ends in the form of a concentrated essay on a new type of creation. He does not define the novelty, but definitely aims at it. One of the ways towards innovation is the fact that borders between literary genres vanish, and the novel becomes a recycle bin.

● If Joyce flirted with the idea of literature becoming a game of words, a concentrated lyrical history of mankind, Fowles’ novels are games that toy with the idea of game, which is pure Desperado inventivity. The work has a delightful flexibility that compels rereading. Once the act of reading stops, we remember the author’s mind, the flow of our intellectual reactions, our pleasure of the mind or of the soul, but not so much the incidents that led to it. The solid Victorian plot is replaced by an intriguing web of minds and somersaults.