SOURCE: "History, Fiction, and the Dialogic Imagination: John Fowles's A Maggot," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 229-43.

[In the following essay, Holmes examines Fowles's treatment of history, mystery, and rationalism in A Maggot, as well as the novel's narrative structure.]

Although all of John Fowles's works of fiction grapple with common themes, each new volume has seemed to be the fresh creation of an experimental writer determined not to repeat himself. To a degree, however, his latest novel, A Maggot (1985), seems to revert to the narrative method of what is widely regarded as his finest work, The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). Both are unconventional historical novels which bring an explicitly modern authorial consciousness to bear on the past rather than pretending to be of the historical period during which the action takes place. This strategy makes it possible for both novels to examine history critically as a humanly constructed discourse rather than simply to present history dramatically as though it had an objective, unproblematic ontological status. Both novels are examples of what Linda Hutcheon calls [in "Beginning to Theorize Post-modernism," Textual Practice (1987)] "historiographic metafiction": "novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet lay claim to historical events and personages." Such works are inherently paradoxical in creating the illusion of bringing the reader into contact with independently existing historical events only to expose that experience as a fabrication. The implication of this procedure is one that most modern historians would accept: not that history is unreal but that it consists of fallible, provisional, relative sets of interpretations of a past to which we have no unmediated, complete access.

A Maggot foregrounds the textual nature of history by presenting itself as a heterogeneous mixture of various kinds of documents. It flaunts the media through which the story is transmitted rather than effacing them. Like The French Lieutenant's Woman, A Maggot features both segments of narrative in the manner of a realistic novel (this time set in the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century) and the discursive reflections of a self-consciously literary narrator. Unlike the earlier novel, though, it also incorporates other kinds of documents, some of which Fowles has taken from authentic, eighteenth-century sources and some of which he has composed to masquerade as eighteenth-century texts. In the former category are excerpts from the "Historical Chronicle" for 1736 of the Gentleman's Magazine and a satire, culled from the same periodical, titled "Pretty Miss's Catechism." In the latter group are a newspaper report of the death of one of the novel's characters; personal letters; and transcripts in question and answer form of the sworn testimony which the barrister Henry Ayscough elicits from several characters in the process of investigating the disappearance of his employer's son, an unnamed young lord who has adopted the pseudonym Mr. Bartholomew. The sum total of this medley of texts is a novel which is itself a mixture of genres well described by the dust jacket blurb: "Part detective story, part science fiction, part gothic horror tale, part history of dissent, A Maggot is a contemporary novel, yet also in its way a true tale of Defoe's time." In this essay I want to examine in more detail the relationship between this hybrid narrative structure and the wideranging implications of the novel's treatment of history. In Mikhail Bakhtin's well-known terms, the book is dialogic or polyphonic, an agglomeration of different discourses, voices, dialects, and points of view. As such, it relativizes history by offering a variety of perspectives on how the past should be interpreted. Of the many perspectives, two conflicting ones are particularly important: those embodied by Henry Ayscough and Rebecca Lee. Ayscough's scientific quest for certitude is at variance with the view of history that Fowles wishes to endorse and that Lee's mystical orientation gives rise to. Fowles associates each of these characters' approaches to truth, somewhat arbitrarily, it must be confessed, with a broad range of attitudes about politics, religion, and life in general. Ayscough is rational, empirical, legalistic, authoritarian, conservative, and misogynistic, whereas Lee is intuitive, imaginative, artistic, visionary, democratic, feminist, and revolutionary. Ayscough is obviously meant to be seen as a representative early-eighteenth-century man of reason and neoclassical tradition, whereas Lee, as the novel's epilogue makes clear, anticipates romantic individualism and reliance on feeling and intuition.

Fowles's far-from-neutral treatment of the conflict between what Ayscough and Lee represent easily expands to encompass a reworking of some of the novelist's favorite themes. As do his earlier novels and stories, A Maggot reveals his preoccupation with individual freedom and self-transformation. Lee and her aristocratic mentor Bartholomew prove equal to what Ayscough fears and avoids—vitalizing psychological change brought on by imaginative encounters with the mystery and hazard of existence. Whereas Lee and Bartholomew resist the received historical patterns, prefabricated identities, and iniquitous class distinctions which their society imposes on individuals, Ayscough is an agent of its tyranny. As Fowles has often done in the past, in A Maggot he stresses the relationship between freedom and creative imagination, and, by casting his protagonists in the role of surrogate novelists, he celebrates the novel as a vehicle for the imagination's transforming power. His remarks in the prologue on one of the meanings of the book's title leave no doubt that A Maggot itself is meant to serve as a paradigm of such metamorphosis: "A maggot is the larval stage of a winged creature; as is the written text, at least in the writer's hope."

The novel focuses attention on history not only because it is set in the eighteenth century but also because one strand of the plot involves Ayscough's attempt to reconstruct the past. The bulk of the novel consists of an inquiry into the disappearance of Bartholomew following a strange journey to a cavern in Devonshire, where an enigmatic series of events takes place. This setting recalls E. M. Forster's famous Marabar cave, but the ambiguity about what happens there to Adela Quested is mild compared to the radical uncertainty about what causes Bartholomew to vanish and his servant, Thurlow, to kill himself. Fowles declines to dramatize directly the events which take place in the cave. The only available report of the extraordinary affair is the unreliable testimony of Rebecca Lee, the lone eyewitness. What breeds doubt about the veracity of her account is not only the fantastic nature of her tale of visiting a heavenly city in a flying saucer or "maggot" but also the fact that she had earlier told David Jones an entirely different, contradictory version of the story in which she unwillingly participated in a Satanic orgy. Rather than supplying definitive answers about the real nature of Lee's experience in the cave and Bartholomew's fate, Ayscough's inquiry only raises questions. The reader is free to interpret Lee's testimony as evidence of an intent to deceive, a hallucination, a mystical vision, or an encounter with beings from another planet. None of these interpretations receives sufficient corroboration to become authoritative, however. Even the archempiricist Ayscough is ultimately forced to admit that the cloud of obscurity surrounding the events in the cave cannot be cleared away.

Fowles's decision not to dramatize the climactic episode in the cave objectively and unambiguously renders the novel's structure ironic since, as some of the reviewers noticed, much of the book is written as a kind of detective story, the whole point of which is to unearth a truth which stays obstinately buried. In the terms of Russian formalism, the effect of Fowles's refusal to introduce a solution is to thwart the reader's ability to deduce the whole of A Maggot's fabula or story from its sjuzet or plot. The fabula, according to Seymour Chatman [in his Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, 1978], is the "basic story stuff, the sum total of events to be related in the narrative," whereas the sjuzet is "the story as actually told by linking the events together." Or, in Tzvetan Todorov's simpler formulation [in his The Poetics of Prose, 1977], "the story is what has happened in life, the plot is the way the author presents it to us." in A Maggot, however, the stories "as actually told" by the narrator and by the characters who testify before Ayscough do not add up to one uniform "sum total of events" or reflect clearly "what has happened in life." The problem is not just insufficient information, for even if one is willing to accept on faith the truth of what Lee says as the inspired utterance of a visionary, one still cannot easily choose between her two versions of what took place in the cave. Although she repudiates the tale which she had told Jones, her sworn testimony does not cancel or replace that first account in the reader's consciousness but stands in addition to it. The effect of this duality is to place A Maggot in the category of texts which Chatman calls "antinarratives" because "what they call into question is, precisely, narrative logic, that one thing leads to one and only one other, the second to a third and so on to the finale."

Because Fowles's narrative is unconventional in the way that Chatman describes, it actually subverts the concept of fabula and corroborates Peter Brooks's assertion [in his Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, 1984] that "the apparent priority of fabula to sjuzet is in the nature of a mimetic illusion, in that the fabula—'what really happened'—is in fact a mental construction that the reader derives from the sjuzet, which is all that he ever directly knows." What Brooks appears to mean is that, since the events of narrative fictions are at least in part the authors' fabrications, there is no anterior reality to which the sjuzet at every point corresponds. But, as Todorov has shown, detective fiction has traditionally created a powerful illusion of the independent reality of the fabula, the crime which has already occurred and which must be reconstructed in the sjuzet by the detective in order to be solved. Todorov argues that the second order of story, the detective's inquest, "has no importance in itself" but "serves only as mediator between the reader and the story of the crime." Fowles destroys this hierarchy, however. Because his detective fails, because the details of the "crime" cannot be determined with empirical accuracy, only the sjuzet, the second order of story, can have intrinsic importance. What I mean is that, despite Fowles's care to set the novel in a specific and detailed historical context, his strategy focuses attention on the fictional properties of the narrative as imaginative creation. His method forces us finally to assess the novel according to criteria other than mimetic adequacy or correspondence to historical fact. What must be judged is not the literal truth of Lee's stories but their imaginative richness as metaphors for psychological conditions.

The reader cannot contemplate those metaphors in isolation, though, but is forced to encounter them in the adversarial judicial context set up by Ayscough, whose only interest is in the literal truth of testimony. This conflict is a central aspect of what I have already referred to as the book's dialogic nature. Fowles's novel is polyphonic in mixing different kinds of discourses and in establishing "a special relationship with extraliterary genres of everyday life" [M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 1981] such as letters and transcripts of legal proceedings. Bakhtin thought that the raw materials out of which novels were formed endowed them with "an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality." We have already seen that A Maggot resists unambiguous interpretation and closure. Like the majority of Fowles's fictions, it suggests that to impose finality on narratives is to falsify the existential uncertainty which is an inescapable part of being alive. Though A Maggot is set in the eighteenth century, it is intent on demonstrating the presentness as well as the pastness of that era. As in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles attempts to show that history is not safely complete and that it has a vital connection with the contemporary world of the reader.

A Maggot's open-ended, dialogic nature supports its obvious thematic bias in favor of the egalitarian political subtext of religious dissent. "You would talk in religious terms in the 1700's and 1600's," Fowles has said, "but you were really talking politics." The clash of voices and points of view in A Maggot serves explicitly what Bakhtin perceived to be the implicitly pluralistic and democratic tendencies of all novels. As David Lodge says [in "The Novel Now: Theories and Practices," Novel: A Forum on Fiction (1988)], there "is an indissoluble link between the linguistic variety of prose fiction, which [Bakhtin] called heteroglossia, and its cultural function as the continuous critique of all repressive, authoritarian, one-eyed ideologies." In the case of A Maggot, the despotic ideology in question is the vestige of feudalism, with its tenet that all social change is evil, fiercely defended by Ayscough. But it is not merely the overt opposition of Lee and her sect which prevents the monologic discourse of aristocracy from holding uncontested sway. A challenge to its dominance is mounted by the mere existence within the novel of heteroglossia. A Maggot presents us with the regional dialects of Devon and Wales, the writing and speaking styles of the aristocracy, the deferential speech patterns of those who serve them, the languages of the legal system and the stage, the specialized, tendentious vocabulary of Protestant dissent, and even the modern argot of a twentieth-century narrator who is trying to understand and explain the eighteenth-century world which his characters take for granted.

Rebecca Lee is herself aware that her religious and political conflict with established authority is in part a clash of "languages" and of the different mental worlds which they body forth. She more than once correlates her disagreements with Ayscough with what she terms their separate and opposed "alphabets." For example, after she has testified that Bartholomew was transported from the cavern to heaven in the "maggot," the following exchange takes place between her and Ayscough:

Q. Can you deny that he may have left some otherwise than in your engine?

A. I cannot, in thy alphabet; in mine I can, and do.

Q. You say, he was brought to your June Eternal?

A. Not brought, he is returned.

What Lee means is that their different vocabularies and ways of speaking reflect conflicting mind-sets and methods of apprehending truth.

Although as an artist Fowles clearly values the visionary/imaginative mode of Lee more than the rational/scientific one of Ayscough, his handling of the conflict is truly dialogic in that the narrator of A Maggot refuses to silence the very formidable opposition or to resolve the debate in favor of Lee. While the narrator does at times editorialize against Ayscough's bullying tactics and reactionary nature, he declines to usurp the barrister's dominant position in the text, the bulk of which is structured in the question and answer format which he imposes and to a large extent controls. The narrator speaks only in those briefer sections which are composed in the manner of a conventional novel, and even there his is just one of several limited perspectives. Fowles does not grant his narrator psychological and spatial omniscience but restricts his proximity to the characters. For example, the narrator is as much in the dark as the reader concerning the enigmatic motives and character of Bartholomew, and, as I have already said, the narrator is also ignorant of the crucially important happenings in the cave.

The point to be stressed is that Fowles is as wary of imposing in monologic fashion his own world view on the reader as he is vigilant to incorporate into the novel alternatives to Ayscough's repressive ideology. Moreover, as Fowles shows in The Aristos, he is not so naive as to believe that any idea or belief can exist without its opposite or counterpole, on which that idea or belief paradoxically depends for definition and energetic support. A Maggot endorses Fowles's view that "we exist mentally in a world of opposites, converses, negatives" (Aristos). Man is counterbalanced by woman, reason by imagination, the desire to preserve the status quo by the urge to transform society, and so on. Fowles also juxtaposes sections written in the present and past tenses because he believes that visionaries and artists such as himself "tend to live and wander in a hugely extended now, treating both past and future as present, instead of keeping them in control and order, firmly separated" (Maggot), whereas realists such as Ayscough reify the present by treating it as though it were completed in order to control experience intellectually and practically.

What A Maggot implies about Ayscough's rational empiricism is not that it has no place in life but that there are areas of experience which it is powerless to illuminate, and that an overreliance on this faculty is psychologically destructive. It is not merely the failure of Ayscough's method to get to the bottom of Bartholomew's disappearance that discredits it in the particular context that Fowles has set up. Readers are used to approving the motives behind the investigations of detective fiction, but Ayscough's deeds are sparked by nothing nobler than a reactionary fear of behavior not sanctioned by the existing social order and a toadying regard for one of the aristocrats on whom his practice depends. The barrister does have a passionate need to uncover the truth, but that need is itself the object of Fowles's disapproval. The novel shows that Ayscough is so intent to discover the objective facts of the case that he is blind to other dimensions of experience which are ethically and existentially important.

Ayscough is, in fact, the most recent example of a recognizable type in Fowles's fiction, characters who are afflicted with what William Palmer has dubbed [in his The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood, 1974] "collector-consciousness," the need to possess, to control, to understand totally. The counterpole of the vital incompleteness which Bakhtin exalted as the particular glory of the novel, a deadening preference for what is already finished, for the product over the process, is the hallmark of "collector-consciousness." Such a desire is evident in Ayscough's attempts to impose an investigative order on his witnesses and thereby cut short the natural, organic growth of their narratives in order to arrive more quickly at the only thing he values—the end result, the solution to the mystery. In her testimony, Lee consistently resists this sort of coercion and refuses to let the barrister dictate the structure and compromise the integrity and power of her story.

Ayscough's relentless application of the scientific method bespeaks an inability to accept uncertainty, the flux and hazard of existence which Fowles believes to be necessary for biological evolution and psychological growth (Aristos). This lack of what Keats called "negative capability" is therefore life-denying, as Fowles demonstrates most graphically in The Collector, in which Frederick Clegg literally kills Miranda Grey in a demented attempt to possess her with complete certainty. Ayscough's impatience with the unknown and the ungovernable is a product of his arrogant assumption that no approach other than the scientific can lead to genuine knowledge. Of course, as a respectable man of his time he assents notionally to the authority of the Church of England, but his true allegiance is to the monologic ideology of science. In The Enigma of Stonehenge Fowles identifies science as the most powerful of "all of the reifying and self-imprisoning systems" condemned by Keats's romantic predecessor William Blake for cutting humans off from the divinity of immediate experience. Fowles celebrates Stonehenge precisely because "there are not yet enough facts about it to bury it in certainty, in a scientific final solution to all its questions. Its great present virtue is … that something so concrete, so sui generis, so individualized, should still evoke so much imprecision of feeling and thought." It is no accident that Stonehenge figures prominently as one of the settings for the rituals enacted by Bartholomew and his minions, the rituals which culminate in the hidden occurrence at the heart of the novel. For the events in the cave are analogous in their effect to that with which Fowles credits Stonehenge—the "power to challenge the imagination of its beholders" (Stonehenge). What ultimately poses the challenge and stimulates the imagination is mystery. "Mystery, or unknowing, is energy," Fowles states in The Aristos. "As soon as a mystery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy."

There seems little doubt that Lee's two conflicting accounts of what happened at Stonehenge and in the cave are meant to be embodiments of the vital energy which Fowles speaks of, not definitive explanations which drain it. In other words, however she conceives of them, Lee's narratives are intended by Fowles to be metaphoric expressions of the potent effect on her psyche of a mystery not to be understood rationally, not literally accurate descriptions of the sort which Ayscough craves. The ineradicable ambiguities of Lee's testimony in relation to an external standard of truth do not so much undermine as fuel the imaginative power of her stories. Fowles's point is not that scientific criteria are without validity but that there are aspects of life which are richer for being impervious to scientific investigation. He holds that what is not scientifically verifiable is not necessarily untrue. In The Aristos he glorifies art, for example, as "the expression of truths too complex for science to express."

It is as art, finally, as literature, that Lee's narratives, for all their religious content, are to be judged. If they seem less plausible than Ayscough's own narrative account of what happened—his flat, debunking speculation that Bartholomew duped Lee, committed suicide after failing in his dark experiments, and thus precipitated the suicide of his devoted servant—Lee's stories are more richly textured, suspenseful, and thematically suggestive. In short, they are aesthetically superior as narrative literature. They certainly perform the function which Northrop Frye thinks characteristic of literature: as evocations of damnation and salvation, they map the limits of our deepest fears and desires. For this reason, the primary significance of her stories as literature might well be psychological. It is possible to interpret them symbolically as the record of a psychological battle for growth and freedom in a social and political context hostile to these aspirations. Such an interpretation need not violate the text's dialogic open-endedness, the inexhaustible qualities for which good literature has traditionally been valued. A symbolic reading is merely one way to account for the power of the narratives, not the critical equivalent of a "scientific final solution" which saps their mystery and closes off other possibilities.

One advantage of a psychological perspective is that it allows us to see that the two versions of what happened do not so much contradict as complement one another as opposite but integral stages of one unified process. This is the belief of Walter Miller, Jr., who [in his review in The New York Times Book Review (September 8, 1985)] adopts a Jungian vantage point. Miller notices that each account features a "numinous female triad linked to a mysterious fourth—three witches and Satan (the lord transformed), or a female Holy Trinity joined by a harlot." Miller concludes that the "equivalence of the infernal and celestial versions of the scene in the cave conforms to Jung's psychology, and both versions of the cave scene are true."

Because Lee's narratives, as evocations of a struggle for freedom, serve what Fowles believes to be the basic function of art, which is "essentially a liberating activity" (Aristos), they constitute a paradigm of Fowles's goals for the novel which contains them. As I mentioned earlier, like most of Fowles's novels and stories, A Maggot is a metafiction which lays bare the problematics and exalts the possibilities of its own medium. Like The Magus's Maurice Conchis and The French Lieutenant's Woman's Sarah Woodruff, Lee is a storytelling substitute for Fowles within the fictional world of the book. By explicitly performing a facsimile of the novelist's task, by unfolding stories which tantalize us even as they trouble us with their indeterminate ontological status, Lee makes us more conscious of what is at stake in our engagement with the book and with the other narratives that inform and shape our lives. That Fowles intends Lee to act as his surrogate is made clear in the epilogue in his comments on the Shakers, the religious movement foreshadowed in Lee's visionary experience and founded by the real historical figure Ann Lee, whom Fowles imagines to be the daughter of his entirely fictional character Rebecca: "Something in Shaker thought and theology … has always seemed to me to adumbrate the relation of fiction to reality. We novelists also demand a far-fetched faith, quite often seemingly absurd in relation to normal reality; we too need a bewildering degree of metaphorical understanding from our readers before the truths behind our tropes can be conveyed."

The activities of the shadowy figure Bartholomew may also be seen as a self-reflexive image of those of Fowles himself as a novelist. Like The Magus's Conchis, Bartholomew is a surrogate author who does within the world of the novel what a postmodernist writer such as Fowles does with words: he creates various fictional scenarios to be acted out and in the process proliferates artifice and uncertainty about what is real. He is like Conchis in being a morally ambiguous character with Satanic associations who deceives and manipulates others but whose ultimate intention seems to be the benign one of bestowing freedom. And, again like Conchis, in absconding without warning or explanation, he performs the equivalent of what Fowles does in leaving his plot without a denouement and thus inviting readers to become more creatively involved with the text. In this regard, Bartholomew is also reminiscent of "The Enigma"'s John Fielding, the character whose unexplained disappearance activates the imaginations of the story's protagonists and, Fowles hopes, of its readers. Like the Fielding of Isobel Dodgson's speculation (Ebony Tower), Bartholomew is a member of the ruling elite who views the mores and behavior patterns of his class as a confining script which denies him the freedom to forge a meaningful identity. Those scripts are analogous to the conventional plots of narrative fiction which Fowles believes to be equally constraining and which he violates in not accounting for the disappearances of his characters. In vanishing, both become what Dwight Eddins calls [in "John Fowles: Existence as Authorship," Contemporary Literature (1976)] "existentialist authors of their own lives."

However opaque some of Bartholomew's motives might be, then, Fowles seems to expect us to associate the actions leading to his disappearance with his desire for liberating, radical change. Once again, a character's ambition mirrors that of the self-conscious novel which incarnates him. His recipe for transformation contains some of the ingredients which Kerry McSweeney has identified as recurring features of Fowles's previous works of fiction. The cave constitutes the by-now-familiar secret world into which his male protagonists penetrate by means of the vitalizing powers of sex and imagination. What is new in A Maggot is that Bartholomew is impotent and that, in one version of the story, transcendence follows not from the awakening of his sexual powers but from practicing an abstinence which conforms to the tenets of Lee's severe faith. Bartholomew's own "far-fetched faith," equally a metaphor for that of the novelist who has created him, is a peculiar, only vaguely presented blend of pagan and Christian elements. It seems to be derived in part from the religious life of the Celtic druids, who, according to the now-discredited eighteenth-century theory of William Stukely endorsed enthusiastically by Bartholomew, built Stonehenge and practiced "the purest form of primitive Christianity" (Stonehenge). While Bartholomew assumes the form of Satan in the first version of Lee's story, in the second she certainly presents him as a veritable emanation of the spirit of Christ, and she glosses the strangely close relationship between the aristocrat and his servant in the following allegorical fashion: "And now do I see they were as one in truth, Dick of the carnal and imperfect body, his Lordship of the spirit…. And as Jesus Christ's body must die upon the Cross, so must this latter-day earthly self, poor unregenerate Dick, die so the other half be saved."

Thurlow's death, and his earlier sexual couplings with Lee, can also be given a pagan interpretation, in relation to a widespread fertility rite which featured, in the words of Fowles, "the real or symbolic mating of a potent young man and a female representative of the earth-goddess, sometimes associated with the subsequent ritual sacrifice of one or both" (Stonehenge). Viewing Thurlow as a dying god figure in the tradition of pre-Christian vegetation cults makes even more sense when we remember that violets were found in his mouth by those who discovered his corpse.

The mythic and religious particulars of the novel, however, do not form a coherent whole which serves as a key to unlock the novel's mysteries. As I have already intimated, these details seem less important in their own right than the metaphoric resonances which they generate. However dialogic his method, it is difficult to forget that Fowles is himself an atheist who has rejected Christianity (Maggot) and consigned to the "lunatic fringe" the modern-day Bartholomews who would review pagan rites at Stonehenge (Stonehenge). What Fowles will not repudiate, though, is an urge which underlies most religions and motivates artists such as himself: the desire to overcome time. Fowles has said quite directly that "art best conquers time" (Aristos), and the attempts of his proxies within the fictional world to achieve states of timelessness can be seen to reflect his own preoccupations as creator of A Maggot. Lee's "June Eternal," as the very name suggests, is a condition of arrested time. And Bartholomew's absorption in the problem of defeating time is shown in his fascination with Stonehenge, whose builders, he holds, "had pierced some part of the mystery of time." Stonehenge itself, according to Fowles, overwhelms visitors with "the presentness of its past" (Stonehenge) and manifests "an obsession with defying time and death" (Stonehenge).

Considerations of the novel's treatment of time lead back to the topic with which I began, the peculiar status of A Maggot as an unorthodox historical novel, and suggest some conclusions about the nature of Fowles's intentions and achievements. What he would like to do, in a sense, is to abolish history, to remove the two-hundred-and-fifty-year gap between his characters and his readers and to institute an eternal world, that "hugely extended now" which he claims artists and mystics have the capacity to inhabit (Maggot). Ideally, the best art "constitutes that timeless world of the full intellect … where each artefact is contemporary, and as nearly immortal as an object in a cosmos without immortality can be" (Aristos). But this accomplishment requires the full imaginative involvement of both author and readers, which in turn depends upon what Fowles calls "the inmost characteristic of art—mystery. For what good science tries to eliminate, good art seeks to provoke—mystery, which is lethal to the one and vital to the other" (Aristos). Accordingly, Fowles envelops his eighteenth-century subject matter in a haze of uncertainty. The cost is a loss of scientific clarity and objective understanding. What Fowles hopes to gain is the freshness and immediacy of "that weird tense grammar does not allow, the imaginary present" (Maggot).

The novel implies that eliminating the pastness of the past has another salutary effect, that of destroying its deterministic power over the present and of thereby freeing the individual to fashion his or her own identity, as Bartholomew hopes to do by refusing the fixed part written for him by his own past, by his aristocratic origins. This existentialist goal, however, is incompatible with a knowledge of historical forces. "Choosing not to know," says Fowles, "in an increasingly 'known,' structured, ordained, predictable world, becomes almost a freedom, a last refuge of the self" (Stonehenge). One might object that such a sense of freedom is delusive since it is possible to be shaped by factors of which one is ignorant. It is worth asking, too, how one can choose not to know if one in fact already does know. This is a difficulty recognized by Bartholomew, who, as the actor Lacy testifies, contrasted the wise unknowing of the builders of Stonehenge with the constraining awareness of people of his own era:

They knew they knew nothing…. We moderns are corrupted by our past, our learning, our historians; and the more we know of what happened, the less we know of what will happen; for as I say, we are like the personages of a tale, fixed it must seem by another intention, to be good or evil, happy or unhappy, as it falls. Yet they who set and dressed these stones lived before the tale began, Lacy, in a present that had no past.

What follows from Bartholomew's train of thought is the realization that it is not wholly possible to obliterate the past or to avoid being conditioned by it. History might well be the imperfect construction of human beings, and not the objective truth, but it has an undeniable reality which Fowles acknowledges. As Lacy reports, Bartholomew finally concluded that one's freedom is relative and limited: "he answered that we may choose in many small things as I may choose how I play a part … but yet must at the end, in greater matters, obey that part and portray its greater fate, as its author creates." Changing the vehicle of the metaphor from authorship to imprisonment, the narrator of A Maggot expresses the matter succinctly when he states that most of us are "equal victims in the debtors' prison of History, and equally unable to leave it."

The foregoing admission accounts for qualities of A Maggot which are not consistent with an intention to blur historical differences between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and in the process to make a bygone age come to life for the contemporary reader. Fowles's narrator is often concerned to keep the past neatly separated and very remote from the present. As Pat Rogers correctly observes [in "Left Lobe and Right," Times Literary Supplement (September 20, 1985)], "Fowles leaves no room for sentimental identification with the past: he snaps down the alienation effect with a brisk, no-nonsense finality." Compared to The French Lieutenant's Woman, A Maggot is an austere, uncompromising book which is not easy of access for the casual reader. Despite The French Lieutenant's Woman's postmodernist pyrotechnics, its Victorian milieu has a coziness and charm that the more distant and foreign eighteenth century lacks. Fowles's learned explanations of various facets of eighteenth-century life are designed to measure the distance between then and now, not to eliminate it. It is to his credit that he will not dishonestly deny the otherness of history in order to give his maggot wings.