“Loquacious with an Obstinate Silence”

Abstract

John Fowles’s A Maggot traces the processes of detection and interrogation through which an investigative lawyer seeks to define, and subsequently contain or silence, the absent, or discursively resistant otherness, of a female “mystic.” Sigmund Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora), constitutes an account of the remarkably similar processes employed by the psychoanalyst in his efforts to diagnose, and subsequently silence through his “talking cure” the unspeakable discourse of his female “hysteric.” This article argues that, whilst Dora constitutes an example of a discursive construction of female subjectivity that, at one level, is exposed and critiqued in A Maggot, when these two texts are read alongside one another, Dora in turn sheds light on some of the ways in which A Maggot constructs some very limiting and deterministic representations of its own. In this respect, A Maggot can be read not only as an instance of the representation of law in literature, but also as one of law as literature, in that the legal impulse to achieve the closure of conviction within the narrative parallels the literary impulse to achieve closure of the narrative itself.