Self, World, and Art in the Fiction of John Fowles

Abstract

John Fowles came to public notice on American literary scene earlier than in Britain, and was sooner appreciated by popular reviewers than by academic circles. As Jeff Rackham has pointed out, Fowles was generally dismissed as a teller of yarns and suspense and while even earliest reviewers praise[d] his craftsmanship, most [found] no need to search for symbolic echoes (89). In Britain, it was only after publication of French Lieutenant's Woman in 1969 that academic critics started paying systematic - although always sympathetic - attention to Fowles's work. Walter Allen (64) singles our Ian Watt as decisive British critic to stamp seal of academic approval on French Lieutenant's Woman, while Bernard Bergonzi's Volte face in Preface to Penguin edition of Situation of Novel has been pointed out by Ronald Binns as not untypical (318) of British critical scene. According to Malcolm Bradbury, reason why critics virtually ignored John Fowles in Britain was that 1960s were characterized by a general diminution in critical discourse and by lack of mythology and sociology about nature of and art [while] Fowles' emphases and concerns were very much of a piece with aesthetic speculation in elsewhere, especially in American novel (259). Though Fowles's work drew more critical attention in 1970s, much of it was shallow (and pejorative) criticism as late as 1977. For example, in an article entitled The English Sickness, Pearl K. Bell laments absence of any major contemporary British writers worth adding to Leavisite canon(2), and chooses Fowles's Daniel Martin (1977) - with Margaret Drabble's Ice Age (1977) - as a pointed example of a dominated by passionate intensity of the worst (80), an indictment that curiously contrasts, for example, with John B. Humma's contention that John Fowles's fictions are a good example of the signally evident continuation of 'great tradition' in English fiction (80). Bell's and Humma's contradictory opinions are by no means a rare phenomenon in critical assessment of Fowles's work. Indeed, sometimes even same critic seems to be able to hold contrary opinions simultaneously, as Fowles amusedly pointed out to James Campbell in course of an interview: Are you saying I'm an experimentalist? moment ago you were saying I was a traditionalist (Campbell 462). In fact, one of most striking characteristics of critics' reactions to Fowles's novels and short stories is precisely their often contradictory nature. Another is wide range of critical and generic perspectives from which each has been approached: French existentialism, romance in its gothic, sentimental, and medieval varieties, pastoral, detective and science fiction, Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, Sade and pornography, Zen Buddhism, Campbellian and Frazerian myth, classic realism, nouveau roman, post-structuralist and deconstructive theories, historicism, apprentice novel, music and plastic arts, Tarot, New Physics, Johan Huizinga's theory of play and Apocryphal Tobias and Sarah story are among most significant. Contradictory reactions and a wealth of different critical positions are traits that point to complexity of Fowles's and, consequently, to difficulty of pinning down his literary achievement in simple terms. If we are to properly assess Fowles's contribution to contemporary British writing we should first attempt to place his work within larger context of crisis in Weltanschauung that took place in 1960s - decade that saw publication of Aristos (1964), originally subtitled A Self-Portrait in Ideas, and of his first three novels, Collector (1963), Magus (1966) and French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) - and ensuing effects of this crisis on theory of art and literature. …