Bad Faith in "The French Lieutenant's Woman"

Abstract

Probably two leading writers to emerge in English since World War II are Vladimir Nabokov and John Fowles. Although they have entirely different backgrounds and neither is a member of any fashionable literary movement, they share some remarkable and important characteristics. For one thing they are both elitists who disdain political, religious, and psychological (especially Freudian) dogmas of twentieth century. The man who wrote Bend Sinister would endorse Fowles's pronouncement: I have . .. a violent hatred of leaders, organizers, bosses: of anyone who thinks it good to have arbitrary power over other people.' Fowles's parody of Freudian gobbledygook in The Magus is as damning as that in Lolita, and neither writer has much respect for traditional institutions of Christianity. However, a major difference is that Fowles is explicitly doctrinaire in his commitment to existentialism and greatly admires contemporary French authors; whereas Nabokov says, the French New Novel does not exist apart from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole.2 Fowles feels committed to use literature as a method of propagating my view of life;3 but Nabokov declared, I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit.4 Nevertheless, it can be said of Nabokov what Olshen said of Fowles, that heterosexual love and nature of freedom are