What We Have Instead of God: Sexuality, Textuality and Infinity in "The French Lieutenant's Woman"

Abstract

They order, says Laurence Sterne's Parson Yorick in the beginning of A Sentimental Journey, matter better in France. Yorick never fully clarifies the nature of matter, but Richard Howard suggests that it is a question of sexuality and ways of expressing it in language (v). I think he is right. Though Sterne was writing over two hundred years ago, his comment would be even more apt today. In the last few decades, French thinkers such as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida have repeatedly reminded us of the intimate and inextricable links that exist between sexuality and language. It seems highly appropriate, then, that John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman is one of the recent literary texts that has most openly and directly explored these same links. Sexuality, textuality, and the links between the two are central issues in Fowles' novel. In particular, this novel provides some striking dramatizations of the ways in which both sexuality and textuality lead to irreducible ambiguities of interpretation, since neither concept can be circumscribed within a univocal structure of totalized meaning. Because of the resultant impossibility of finalized interpretation, both sexuality and textuality lead directly to a confrontation with infinity, hence the vertiginous force of both concepts. Infinity is the most staggering concept with which modem man has had to come to grips. Not that infinity has not always been with us-it has. However, throughout most of Western intellectual history, the idea of infinity has been circumscribed and contained within the comforting concept of an omnipotent God. Descartes, for example, considered the very fact that we can even conceive of the infinite as proof of God's existence-from where else could such a concept arise? Beginning with the secularization of the sublime that M. H. Abrams notes in relation to the romantics, though, and especially commencing with the death of God announced by that late romantic Friedrich Nietzsche, we have lost that easy way out.' Infinity is now within the purview of humanity, and now we must face it head-on. Wallace Stevens, in his poem The American