Somewhere Else in the Forest

Abstract

fragments of a life which was once complete, disturbing fragments, close to us, ours for one moment, and then mysterious and unapproachable as the lines of a stone licked smooth by the wave of a shell in the sea's depths Giorgos Seferides, Delphi Et puis je vois tres bien ce qui va arriver, s'ecria Laura: dans ce romancier, vous ne pourrez faire autrement que de vous peindre. Andre Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs Daniel Martin is a long and winding road toward its own first sentence: Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation. novel describes the process by which its eponymous hero reaches that insight; at the same time it claims to be Dan's future reconstruction of that very process, so that the last two sentences in the book refer both backwards and forwards to the first sentence: That evening . . . Dan told [Jane] with a suitable irony that at least he had found a last sentence for the novel he was never going to write. She laughed at such flagrant Irishry; which is perhaps why, in the end, and in the knowledge that Dan's novel can never be read, lies eternally in the future, his ill-concealed ghost has made that impossible last his own impossible first. (668) At the center of Daniel Martin, says Kerry McSweeney, a man who is placed in a of stress through which he becomes aware of a deprivation, senses an inauthenticity and lack of freedom in his present existence . . . and is moved in the direction of the dark, existential unknown (31). This description would serve equally well for many a male protagonist in the Fowlesian universe: Nicholas in Magus, Charles in French Lieutenant's Woman and David in The Ebony Tower all undergo a similar process. Like them, Dan goes on a quest for his own self. most obvious differences between him and his predecessors are his age and a greater awareness of his predicament, but he is as unable as they are to do anything constructive about it on his own. As with the other male protagonists, the outcome of Dan's quest is dependent on a woman who seems to embody an existential challenge and who can act as his guide and muse towards whole sight. Sometimes in Fowles's fiction - in the cases of Alison, Sarah, and Isobel - the woman manages to lead the man to a new understanding of himself, of his limitations as well as his potentiality; and it is immaterial whether Nicholas, Charles and Michael actually get the girl at the end: the open endings of Magus, French Lieutenant's Woman and The Enigma all point to a new beginning. On other occasions - one thinks of Miranda, Diana, and Catherine - the woman's failure is due to some flaw in the man: Clegg learns nothing at all; David does learn something, but is incapable of acting on his knowledge; Peter seems doomed to look for new playthings in plastic playlets; and the allegedly open endings of Collector, The Ebony Tower and The Cloud are open only in the sense that a desert is open.(1) Jane's task in Daniel Martin is similar to that of the earlier heroines: to be the catalyst of the situation of stress, to open the man's eyes to the false allurements of his inauthentic existence and to inspire and embody creativity. But just as Dan is older than the earlier male protagonists, so Jane is a more mature woman than the previous incarnations of the muse in Fowles's fiction. One of the consequences of this is that the challenge she sets Dan is much less erotically charged than, say, the one Sarah presents for Charles; the sexual attraction which plays so large a part for earlier questers in Fowles's fiction is virtually non-existent in Jane. Consider, for example, the difference between the explosive, and for Charles literally stunning, sexual climax in chapter 46 of French Lieutenant's Woman and Dan's disappointed, yet sober, reaction after his and Jane's love-making in the paraffin-reeking room of Hotel Zenobia in Palmyra: it did not take place as he had dreamed, did not reach that non-physical climax he wanted, fused melting of all further doubt. …