The French Lieutenant's Woman and the Evolution of Narrative

Abstract

writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is . . . what he will know. Annie Dillard, Writing Life It has always seemed to me that French Lieutenant's Woman is Fowles's most enigmatic novel and that its power to disturb arises from its experiments with narrative limits. I am proposing that this novel is an anatomy of the relationship between human cognition and narrative, and that it naturally implicates itself in this relationship as well. stories within the novel dramatize the ways in which human subjects make experience intelligible through storytelling processes, activities mirrored by the narrator in his struggle to bring the novel as whole into being as narrative edifice. Yet at the same time the novel communicates mood of despair about the fact that our narrative habits leave behind or eclipse unnarratable reality - all the Deleuzean Desires, all the affects, aporias, and imponderables that cannot speak and become real because they cannot fit the trajectories, protocols, and causal clockwork of narrative logic. novel moves well beyond lament, though, because while it both narrates and defines the limits of narration, it simultaneously aims to produce, through its exertions, an evolved reader. This reader, by virtue of accepting the radical cognitive challenges the novel offers, develops new perceptual skills and processes that enable him or her to read in other than narrative ways, in other than institutionally conferred ways that take their being from narrative practice in the first place. town of Lyme Regis is perfect microverse, brilliant spatial metaphor that displays the way that humans impose narrative order on nonnarrative experience, with its hermetic system of roads, paths, streets, and cart tracks. It is an impress on landscape - with its wild, engulfing channel waters and its looming, crumbling cliffs, repositories of inscrutable geologic and cosmic mysteries - that is the expression of all that is unknowable and which is coextensive with our being itself, with our undomesticated impulses, desires, and appetites. Sarah, who always represents this extra-narrative reality as well as the attempt to become unstoried, is set by those in power among the paths of Lyme - the same conduits all the inhabitants use - and told not to stray. A long paragraph details how the paths splay outward, like narrative, into series of binary choices that progress to familiar, approved destinations. She can either turn down Cockmoil or go along the half-mile path to the Cobb (62). She seeks escape from being written by this architectural syntax in her bonne vaux poised in the sky (166), an eyrie, place suggesting flight, the trope of desire and aleatory movement. She leads Charles into this unmapped territory, and he is afraid of the transgression: The road he walked suddenly became a brink over an abyss; he felt something had gone wrong with his reading of the map, but he felt both lost and lured (145). He feels beset by maze of crosscurrents . . . swept hopelessly away from his safe anchorage (176); a slip and within few feet one would have slithered hopelessly over the edge (166). Sarah's flight from linear, causal narrative must be seen as subversive attempt to evolve beyond the cognitive habits that produce narrative mentality in human beings, habits richly displayed by the townspeople of Lyme. They call Sarah Tragedy or Whore, names that net her unruly being in canonical narratives. Mrs. Poulteney demands that Sarah match the story elements and meet the narrative shape of the Christian sin-and-expiation plot. Vicar, speaking of Sarah, sighs, That's long story, (33) and assembles tale that meets his listener's expectations. Charles, when he realizes he's forced virgin, tries madly to reconcile this stunning and disruptive narrateme, against list of plots in his mental files: the hysterical woman, the power-hungry woman, the man-hating woman, and so on. …