SOURCE: "When Worlds Collide: Freedom, Freud, and Jung in John Fowles's Daniel Martin," in University of Hartford Studies in Literature, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1990, pp. 31-44.

[In the essay below, Costello examines the interplay of Freudian and Jungian concepts in Daniel Martin.]

Like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Gide's The Counterfeiters, Nabokov's Pale Fire, or Borges's Labyrinths, John Fowles's Daniel Martin presents a protagonist who is also its author and implied reader, thus reminding us of the fictions that order our worlds by overtly linking fiction and life through the novel itself. Fowles analyzes the ways in which fiction can restrict or expand our ideas, our relationships, and our beings as he explores the extent to which one can write and revise one's life. His juxtaposition of the then and now, the real and reported, the narrator's first and third persons, discovers a realm in which fiction and reality, author and character, past, present, and future are no longer limited by clear distinctions. The title character is a middle-aged British playwright involved in Hollywood movie scripts and an affair with a young actress, Jenny McNeill. Called back to England at the behest of Anthony Mallory, an estranged Oxford friend who is dying of cancer, Dan finds himself scrutinizing past and present, thereby altering his future. Most important, Dan discovers commitments he has long resisted as his buried love for Anthony's widow, Jane, reemerges.

Within this floating world of introspection is a deeply rooted preoccupation with philosophical concerns, and Fowles has remarked that he would rather be "a sound philosopher" than "a good novelist." Indeed, a variety of ideologies coexist—and sometimes collide—in the Fowlesian universe, none more discordantly than the inherently incompatible systems of Freud and Jung. On the one hand, the novel frequently invokes Freud and derives both meaning and structure from a predominantly psychoanalytic foundation. Yet even as Daniel Martin rehearses the Freudian concept that art is a surrogate for an unsatisfactory reality (an idea flatly rejected by Jung), certain pivotal insights credited to Dan spring directly from Jungian constructs. For example, Dan contends that writers are traditionally poor at relationships "because we can always imagine better ones" and, echoing Freud, because "you create out of what you lack. Not what you have." Moreover, "a perfect world would have no room for writers."

In fact, the view of psychical temporality and causality that informs Daniel Martin is best understood through Freud's theory of nachträglichkeit, variously translated as belatedness, deferred action, or secondary revision. Belatedness describes the manner in which experiences, impressions, and memory traces are revised at later dates to accommodate subsequent experience of new stages of development, and "it is this revision which invests them with significance and even with efficacity or pathogenic force" [J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 1973]. A clear privileging of belatedness is evident from the start as we witness Dan's reconstruction of characters and events. The novel opens with an overview of a field from Dan's boyhood and quickly focuses more closely, signalled by a switch from past to present tense: "There are four figures in the field." We see them working before the narrator centers on "the boy," who remains nameless for several pages. With the boy, we hear "the crackle of the stubble, the shock of the stood sheaves"; taste the "illicit scalded cream, its deep yellow crust folded into the voluptuous white"; smell the sweat; see a rabbit caught in the reaper's blades.

Here and elsewhere, images from the past recur in the future to become invested with new meaning in Dan's present. The boy, finally individualized when he is called "Danny," is "nursing his solitude, his terrible Oedipal secret; already at the crossroads every son must pass." The "quick and tortuous ancestral voices" of the boy's Devon become "All the ghosts," which "get you in the end" for the man. The Oedipal implications of his relationship with Jenny reverberate when he says "parentally" that she should be asleep, and "an unskilled adolescent in him still prizes the thousand-times-seen view" of her naked skin. The final paragraph of "The Harvest" introduces a new narrative voice, that of the first person, which will continue to interrupt the third ("Point of view of the hidden bird"):

I feel in his pocket and bring out a clasp-knife; plunge the blade in the red earth to clean it of the filth of the two rabbits he has gutted; slit; liver; intestines; stench. He stands and turns and begins to carve his initials on the beech-tree. Deep incisions in the bark, peeling the gray skin away to the sappy green of the living stem. Adieu, my boyhood and my dream.

D.H.M.

And underneath: 21 Aug. 42.

Through this representation, we see how the self is narrated by multiple voices. The first person in the foregoing passage is Dan as author; the character called "Dan" is clearly distinct. Throughout the novel, a hierarchy of narrative voices bridges past, present, and future: the authorial voice of the older Dan recreates the characters of his past selves, while an author in another guise comments on the Dan of the present, who is—de facto—in the past as well. Whether cast as character, author, or super author, Dan is interpreting—and thereby altering—personality and experience, self-consciously developing a persona, writing and being written. As both Freud and an epigraph taken from George Seferis's "Man" point out, memory is inherently subjective; like the novel, it selects, re-orders, and interprets those events that enable it to signify: "What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little less than is necessary, it goes out; if it remembers a little more than is necessary, it goes out. If only it could teach us, while it burns, to remember correctly."

Dan's attempt "to remember correctly," to appropriate his own history by rendering it in language much as the psychoanalytic patient does, takes the form of the novel we are reading. Along the way, he uncovers myths he has betrayed and been betrayed by and comes to see the authorial roles of history, background, and culture in the shaping of a self. This connection between fiction and reality—for "All writing, private and mental, or public and literal, is an attempt to escape from the conditioned past and future"—is foregrounded as Dan realizes that his "true Oedipus complex" is among the authors of his life, manifested not only in the incestuous subtext of his affair with Jenny but also in his brief romance with Jane many years ago. Indeed, the very notion of the Oedipus complex (so vigorously renounced by Jung) writes Fowles's own imagery here. Jane was engaged to Anthony and Dan would eventually marry her sister Nell, but it was Jane he loved, and his marriage "was broken long before that day" he and Jane made love. Dan "felt an inherent poison in the situation (…) an almost Jacobean claustrophobia, incest," and although "his sense of guilt ought to have been attached to Nell (…) it was much more oriented toward Anthony." Like Dan's father, a Church of England minister, Anthony is rigid and deeply religious. In retrospect, "he was a kind of father-substitute (…) The idea would have outraged me at the time, and killed the friendship, as I believed I had consciously 'killed' the spirit of my father and his antiquated world." Just as Dan had rebelled against his father, so he rebelled against Anthony, first by sleeping with Jane and later by attacking him in the play that caused their estrangement. Years later, as Dan reflects on his relationship with his daughter Caro, he comments: "I half sensed what could drive fathers and daughters to incest (…) that need to purge the spoken of the unspoken," while Caro's affair with her father's Oxford schoolmate is surely sexual transference. And of her current lover, formerly Anthony's student, Jane says "there's always been that Oedipal undertone. The Jocasta thing."

Appealing directly to another Freudian motif, Fowles goes out of his way to show that narcissism, a phenomenon largely ignored by Jung yet crucial to the evolution of psychoanalytic thought, is a powerful agent in Dan's various poses and relationships. In fact, one of Freud's purposes in "On Narcissism: An Introduction" was to establish the concept of narcissism as a corrective to Jung's notion of libido as generalized psychic energy rather than specifically sexual energy. Freud observes that narcissism is the initial human condition; the infant seeks and believes all pleasure to be obtainable. This primary state is a pure narcissism because the child has no comprehension of boundaries between self and other, and any source of pleasure is presumed to belong to the self solely to produce pleasure. In normal development, narcissistic tendencies diminish as the child learns to invest in love objects outside of the self. Arrested maturation or regression results in secondary narcissism, in which the libido is directed toward aspects of the self and others are valued solely for what they give to the self.

Dan's narcissism is most patently manifest in the various postures he assumes to maintain emotional distance between self and other. Even conversation is one-sided: "He divides conversation into two categories: when you speak and when you listen to yourself speak. Of late, his has been too much the second. Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one's uniqueness, one falls in love with one's complexity." Jenny describes him as "something in transit, hardly ever altogether with you," like "a good suitcase in an airport lounge, neatly locked, waiting to be taken somewhere else, with a destination label you can't read." He is "deeply divorced (…) homeless, permanently mid-Atlantic," yet clings to "his Visit-Britain self." Her account of their first meeting discloses how derivative his poses are: "I think I thought he was rather pathetic, really. Like some character out of Hemingway. Or the man in Under the Volcano. You can see I'm tough and wise and virile and literary and lost and totally above all this because I'm drunk." Dan describes love as a sickness of his generation and attributes the barricade between Jenny and him to "a great chasm in twentieth-century history" in which time jumped forward three decades in one, leaving his generation "permanently out of gear," encumbered with "ridiculous decors of the heart." But scenes from Dan's past indicate that the "decors" of his heart have long been contrived. A description of his undergraduate lodgings points to a characteristic reliance on appearances in his pursuit of a self: "The most striking effect was of a highly evolved (if not painfully out-of-hand) narcissism, since the room had at least fifteen mirrors on its walls." Predictably, Dan's persona is the logical outgrowth of his milieu, a "callow attempt at a personal decor [that] existed against—or because of—a background of austerity, rationing, and universal conformity."

At various junctures, the Dan of the implied future tense—the "author" of Daniel Martin—steps in to comment on the Dan of the novel's present. In one such instance he speculates on the homosexual implications of Dan's relationships with women: Dan "liked looking for women who would interest him, for new specimens," much as he enjoys searching for new botanical finds. Along with the explicit egocentricity of this pattern (for "he was arguably not even looking for women in all this, but collecting mirrors still; surfaces before which he could make himself naked (…) and see himself reflected"), there is the self-serving prophecy that "his mistress was not loss so much as that he expected the loss of all his mistresses," which precludes both intimacy and rejection. While renewing his acquaintance with Jane, Dan realizes that he is looking for her "old self" as if it were a reality deliberately withheld, exposing a "retardation (…) a quasi-Freudian searching for the eternally lost, his vanished mother." Another pattern emerges: his relationships with women have all been variations on this theme and "broke down precisely because they could not support what his unconscious demanded of them," a "repetition compulsion" that accounts for his difficulties with Jane.

Here we see Dan rehearsing the myth of Freud "as the discoverer, the overcomer of his own resistances, the hero of an autobiographical as well as an analytic odyssey" [Perry Meisel, "Introduction. Freud as Literature," in Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Perry Meisel, 1981]. Recalling Stanley Edgar Hyman's reading of the analytic quest, Daniel Martin assumes the moral shape of the epic romance as it replays the protagonist's return to domesticity, community, and culture after travel and trial, after quelling id and confronting neurosis. As Steven Marcus observes [in "Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History," in Meisel's Freud] coherent narrative is not simply Freud's trope for mental health, it is mental health, and his exegesis of Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905), the case of Dora, applies equally well to Daniel Martin: "Everything," Marcus writes, "is transformed into literature, into reading and writing." Like Dora, Dan "does not merely provide the text, he also is the text, the writing to be read, the language to be interpreted." Returning to England at Anthony's request, Dan is "an I in the hands of fate, Isherwood's camera, not unhappily reduced to watching himself, as if he were indeed a fiction, a paper person in someone else's script." The possibility that a love of mirrors "can also be symbolic of an attempt to see oneself as others see one—to escape the first person, and become one's own third" not only suggests that we are all characters in novels, our own and those of others, but exactly describes Fowles's narrative technique here.

Indeed, Dan's assorted personae seem crafted by the psychic determinism of Freudian theory, calling into question the very notion of human freedom. Even his incompatibility with Nell "was at least as much a matter of history as of personal psychologies":

If I had been born into an earlier world, where society punished the heretic, I should probably never have betrayed Nell—or at any rate I should have concealed the betrayal much better. But I was what the Victorians banned from their arts: a dramatist (…) The novel, print, is very English; the theater (despite Shakespeare) is not. I was always conscious of this paradox, of my all-hiding private self and my lying public one; my unwritten Sonnets and my all too written plays.

But can there be another way? A free way? Fowles is of two minds here and finally lets us see it. Dan appears to be entirely the product of forces acting on him—family, history, culture. Even his choice of medium is ascribed to his age, intimating that every text emerges from those that precede it, social, historical, and artistic. At the same time, it is Dan's belated recognition of these determinations that leads to the redefining idea of writing a novel. Initially he fears the last chapter has somehow been written, "What I've become," again yoking fiction and reality through the novel itself. Jenny insists this is the first chapter, that something will happen, "like a window opening (…) Like a door in a wall." Scanning the phone book for a suitable name for Dan's protagonist, she lights on "S. Wolfe," an anagram for Fowles and another link between author and character, novel and life.

As Dan wrestles with his incipient novel, he considers giving "Simon Wolfe" disadvantages he does not have, cancer perhaps, and then considers a character less self-conscious than himself. A third solution suddenly emerges: "To hell with cultural fashion; to hell with elitist guilt; to hell with existentialist nausea; and above all, to hell with the imagined that does not say, not only in, but behind the images, the real." Although this seems to dismiss existentialism, it also reiterates a central confusion in Fowles's work: some images equal "the real," and some do not. Because language, like all genres of signification, is by definition symbolic, description of "the real" is a contradiction of Fowles's own contention [in "Notes on an Unfinished Novel," in Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels, edited by Thomas McCormack, 1969] that "All human modes of description (…) are metaphorical." Yet Dan speculates that the Victorians banned theater "because they knew the stage is a long step nearer an indecent reality than the novel." At different junctures, reality is "the immense forest constituted by the imagined" and "that ultimate ambiguous fiction of the enacted past." But at another moment, "the mode of recollection usurps the reality of the recalled," which implies that one's sense of reality exists somewhere outside of recollection—an assumption antithetical to the belatedness on which the novel is structured. Here and elsewhere, an existential rhetoric clashes with what is actually an inquiry into the systems that structure art and life. This dissonant insistence on an undefined real reality, presumably a realm unsullied by the network of signs, codes, and relationships that produce self and culture, unwittingly pits existentialism and the concept of authenticity against their opposites.

Dan's quest for "the real history of what I am," based as it is on language and memory, is similarly misguided, and his comparison of cinematic and prose images uncovers a kindred conflict of philosophies:

Images are inherently fascistic because they overstamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archaeologists. The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect. What I was trying to tell Jenny in Hollywood was that I would murder my past if I tried to evoke it on camera; and it is precisely because I can't really evoke it in words, can only hope to awaken some analogous experience in other memories and sensitivities, that it must be written [my italics].

Here we confront the novel's—and Fowles's general—bifurcated notion of fiction and reality. The novel strives for verisimilitude, poses as a paradigm for reality, pretends to create—and reflect—a "real world" that is itself a network of representations to which we all come belatedly. Furthermore, this third-hand reality is contingent upon the devices of fiction-making, a blatant contradiction. Thus, while purporting to convey some sort of truth about the human condition, the novel remains subjective, at best a portrait of its author's deferred perceptions of reality, themselves tardy fictions. Although Fowles frequently addresses the problematic of "reality" inside and outside of fiction proper, he manifests its symptoms as well: sometimes he believes in "truth," sometimes not.

Similarly, we find a certain chaos in the vocabularies employed to describe Jane. On the one hand, she is sui generis, "unique in not mirroring him [Dan] clearly"; her "spirit remained not quite like that of any other woman he had ever known (…) there are some people one can't dismiss, place, reify (…) who set riddles one ignores at one's cost." But crossing these descriptions of Jane as unique in an existential sense, distinct from any system or structure, is the assertion that she, like the novel, cannot be approached in the terms of Dan's métier, "terms of visual symbolisms, of sets, locations, movements, gestures; of the seen actor and actress." She (and the novel) belongs to "another art, another system, the one he was trying to enter." Yet both existentialism and the unique find their meaning apart from any system, which, by definition, would compromise their "authenticity."

Concurrent with such ambiguities is what may be called the heightening of the Freud/Jung conflict, unavoidable in the novel's final section, which takes Dan and Jane to Egypt, Syria, and home again. Dan's analysis of past and present points to the power of the unconscious, and he gradually experiences what Freud calls "the return of the repressed." He feels "not master of his own destiny at all" and wonders if he has "been formed in his father's image," recalling "the old man's flight into stasis, unchangingness, immemorial ritual and safe tradition." Dan has sought safety in movement, replacing his father's religious loyalties with non-attachment. So he decides nothing can be done about his relationship with Jane, for "the scenario was already written, by their past, by their present, by Anthony's ghost, by their family relationships and responsibilities; and Dan was a great believer in keeping to agreed lines in scripts." His admission that he is "profoundly English" is fundamental to "this peculiarly structured imagination, so dependent on undisclosed memories, undisclosed real feelings" for "we are above all the race that lives in flashback." This recognition is one impetus for Daniel Martin itself, a quest for "something dense, interweaving, treating time as horizontal, like a skyline, not cramped, linear and progressive (…) thereby creating a kind of equivalency of memories and feelings."

But counter to these fundamentally Freudian discoveries is the baffling refuge in mysticism that the novel sometimes seeks. A number of Dan's epiphanies appear clearly indebted to Jung, and that these revelations supposedly liberate him from "the false freedoms of the past" indicates a common misreading of Jungian mythology. In fact, the conditions deemed necessary for the elusive Jungian goal of individuation, "the realization of self-hood," negate any notion of personal freedom. Jung explains [in The Essential Jung, edited by Anthony Storr, 1983] that "many are called, but few are chosen (…) for the development of personality is at once a charisma and a curse." Moreover, one who is chosen has no choice in the matter:

What is it (…) that induces a man to rise out of unconscious identity?(…) Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise. What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favor of the extra-ordinary?

It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself (…) Vocation acts as a law of God from which there is no escape (…) One who has a vocation (…) must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon.

Edward Glover observes [in Freud or Jung, 1950] that "while objecting to Freudian concepts of psychic determination" Jung "is evidently prepared to preach predestination," and points out that bestimmung, translated above as vocation, has also been translated as destiny. "The meaning Jung gives to 'vocation' is closer to 'destiny' in the sense of fate (Geschick) than to 'calling' in the sense of beruf." Jung himself explains that "the original meaning of 'to have a vocation' is 'to be addressed by a voice," which is most clearly exemplified in the "avowals of the Old Testament prophets," thus underwriting Glover's contentions.

Replaying Jung's complementary archetypes in the "soul images" of male and female, Dan identifies his sense of incompleteness with the ancient Egyptian concept of ka and ba, regarding himself as ka, "a would-be ambition," and Jane as ba, "a would-be selflessness," "both equally insufficient." Together these concepts "are ways of seeing man first as an individual (…) and then as one." Indeed, Jung cites these very concepts to explain a "synchronistic" event in the life of a patient's wife. Along similar lines, an Egyptologist excuses the pharaohs for the formality and rigid control of their art because time, "the source of all human illusion," is to blame. He recounts a transcendental experience in which he became part of a universal system beyond the confines of time, body, and ego, and once again we collide head-on with Jung:

For a little interval time does not seem to exist. One is neither the original painter nor one's own self, a modern archaeologist. If one is anything (…) one is the painting. One exists, but it is somehow not in time. In a greater reality, behind the illusion we call time. One was always there. There is no past or future (…) This is not to do with mysticism. It is almost physical, something hidden in the nature of things. I once had a similar experience, also after many hours of work, with a difficult papyrus. I became the papyrus, I was beyond time. Yet it did not help me decipher it at all. So. It was not in that sense that I was the papyrus. Perhaps I was the river. For a few moments whatever in the river does not pass. That river between.

Jung tells us that our concepts of space and time become "fixed only in the course of [human] mental development, thanks largely to the introduction of measurement. In themselves space and time consist of nothing. They are hypostatized concepts born of the discriminating activity of the conscious mind" [The Collected Works of Carl Jung, 1959].

Thus, the psychoanalytic narrative that informs Daniel Martin, based as it is on psychic causality, temporality, and belatedness, is tainted by a concurrent Jungian yearning for the eternal, first hinted at when Dan experiences "an unchangingness, behind all the outward shifts of circumstance. Time lay quiescent, if not defeated." He is deeply affected by Tsankawi in New Mexico, which "transcended all place and frontier (…) defeated time, all deaths." Time as "the mother of metaphors" is reinforced by the cruise down the Nile, whose "waters seemed to reach not merely back into the heart of Africa, but into that of time itself." Its effect is only partly a result of the ancient sites that frame it, for "its origin lay in something deeper, to do with transience and agelessness, which in turn reflected their own heightened sense of personal past and personal present." The river "was the Heraclitean same and not the same. It was the river of existence."

Along the same contrary lines is the "WHOLE SIGHT; OR ALL THE REST IS DESOLATION" to which the novel is addressed (its opening statement and implied conclusion), a variant of Anthony's claim that the devil is "Not seeing whole" and a borrowing of E.M. Forster's "wittingly Arnoldian refrain" [Meisel] of seeing things "steadily" and seeing them "whole" (Howards End). "Whole sight" presumes the possibility of total consciousness posited by Jung, which is, of course, categorically opposed to Freudian theory. Moreover, Dan credits the natives of Tsankawi in New Mexico with "a totality of consciousness that fragmented modern man has completely lost." Such eclecticism attempts an impossible marriage, yet Dan's "integration" at novel's end appears to be just that—a banishment of the unconscious itself. And all of this despite the psychoanalytic premises on which the novel and its principals are structured.

Further contaminating the Freudian foundation of the novel are certain coincidences. Too often, thinking about something precipitates miraculous materialization, calling up Jung's theory of synchronicity. Shortly after Jenny tells Dan that something will happen, like a door opening into his past, he receives the phone call from Jane that summons him back to England. Even more dramatic is the sudden appearance of Barney Dillon, a former schoolmate, on Dan's flight to London, which directly follows Dan's reverie about the day he and Jane had made love in his Oxford room. Barney's footsteps outside the door alarmed them, but shortly afterwards Dan "found (…) the chutzpah to go up and see Barney Dillon." In fact, Barney now echoes Dan's word of a few hours before, "Ghosts." Synchronicity, insofar as it can be understood, denies the scientific sense of causality in certain "chance" situations. Instead, it invests the coincidence of a psychic state in the observer and the occurrence of a simultaneous external event with mystical meaning. According to Jung, synchronicity confirms that "the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche."

Still another instance of Jungian synchronicity not only enables Dan to understand the enigmatic "right feeling" to which Jane is privileged (reminiscent of the essentially emotional nature of Jung's anima archetype) but also to overcome "her obsession with solitary independence." Jung observes that synchronistic events "almost invariably accompany the crucial phases of individuation." After Dan and Jane finally sleep together, Dan finds roles reversed, "he Eve, she recalcitrant Adam." A fortuitous walk across a barren Syrian plain produces two young puppies, and the couple notices a mangy bitch some distance away. When Jane is suddenly overcome, Dan divines that "gods take strange shapes; find strange times and stranger climates for their truths":

Beneath all her faults, her wrong dogmas, her self-obsessions, her evasions, there lay, as there had always lain—in some analogue of that vague entity the Marxists call totality, full consciousness of both essence and phenomenon—a profound, and profoundly unintellectual, sense of natural orientation … that mysterious sense he had always thought of as right feeling. But he had always thought of it as something static and unchanging—and conscious, even if hidden; when of course it had always really been living, mobile, shifting and quivering, even veering wildly, like a magnetic needle … so easily distorted, shaken out of true by mind, emotion, circumstance, environment. It had never meant that she could see deeper … It was simply that she felt deeper.

Jane projects her despair onto the seemingly deserted puppies and tells Dan that their night together was "a sort of madness. A blindness to all the realities." But the dog is simply exhibiting distraction behavior, offering herself as a trade and luring the interlopers away from her young. In contrast, Jane's instincts have been thwarted by a narcissistic withdrawal into self, which she intellectualizes as a quest for autonomy. In "the oldest male gesture in the world," Dan wipes Jane's tears away, as the novel pursues the oldest pattern of all, separation and reunion, courtship and marriage.

In another discordant intrusion, one of the novel's culminant images seems predicated on Jung's "humanist psychology" as well. Standing before the late Rembrandt self-portrait, Dan sees "a presentness beyond all time, fashion, language; a puffed face, a pair of rheumy eyes, and a profound and unassuageable vision," which, like his lament for Tsankawi, exposes a Jungian yearning for the eternal as well as a "crucial myth of the modern (…) that thought and feeling are now disjoined compared to their former oneness in a happier age whose primacy we have lost" [Meisel]:

He could see only one consolation in those remorseless and aloof Dutch eyes. It is not finally a matter of skill, of knowledge, of intellect; of good luck or bad; but of choosing and learning to feel. Dan began at last to detect it behind the surface of the painting; behind the sternness lay the declaration of the one true marriage in the mind mankind is allowed, the ultimate citadel of humanism. No true compassion without will, no true will without compassion.

Despite the distractions created by Jungian suppositions imposed on a Freudian edifice, Fowles does attain some resolution of the primary problems Daniel Martin addresses as he refines the relationship between fiction and reality, self and culture. Here even the concept of self, the idea of characters isolated in their own bodies and minds, like actions confined to a single place and time, is fundamentally fictive. Here individuals are inseparable from society, art, and language: in fiction and in life we achieve what freedom is possible within the contexts of these systems, through the recognition—and celebration—of communality. Like language, we acquire meaning through oppositions, interactions, varied frames of reference.

Dan's inquiry into the self he has become discovers an inertia that has dominated his life and craft, belying his insistence that "he needed freedom" and pointing to his immersion in the mythologies of his milieu. He feels "both artistically and really, in the age-old humanist trap: of being allowed (as by some unearned privilege) to enjoy life too much to make a convincing case for any real despair of dissatisfaction" and "dense with forebodings of a rich and happy year ahead … as if he were condemned to comedy in an age without it." This contemporary conviction—that the happy ending is inauthentic and only tragedy real—has informed each of Dan's scripts: "all through his writing life (…) he had avoided the happy ending, as if it were somehow in bad taste," a convention that both Dan's life and Fowles's earlier novels have largely observed. But Dan "was not wholly to blame" because no one "had ever suggested anything different for the close." They were "all equally brainwashed, victims of the dominant and historically understandable heresy (…) It had become offensive, in an intellectually privileged caste, to suggest publicly that anything might turn out well in this world."

Most important, Dan's facade of freedom betrays a profound anxiety about the freedom to which artists are privileged: although not "genetically, environmentally, or technically free; imprisoned inside whatever gifts they have, whatever past and present experience," even their limited freedom is considerable "because of the immense forest constituted by the imagined, because of the permission Western society grants them to roam in it (…) That is the one reality." If the one reality is imagination and freedom springs from exploring its potential, both freedom and reality are equally grounded in fiction. Indeed, it is imagination that produces and interprets self, society, and art all alike, mediates between world and psyche. Dan, however, has chosen imitation over invention, craft over art. Most damaging has been his retreat from imagination, and "that was the horror of landing that drove the bird endlessly on: the risk of the real ground."

Like the Egyptians who "had used art, instead of letting art use them," Dan has allowed neither art nor life to happen. His past, his Englishness, and his defenses have indeed made him a character in someone else's script. Perceiving that Jane's "real lack of freedom" lies "in the inability to compromise" and the belief that "all was determined, predestined," Dan concludes that "the only true and real field in which one could test personal freedom was present possibility (…) One could so clearly only move and act from today, this present and flawed world." He begins revising when he realizes that "Love might be a prison" but "also a profound freedom" and proposes to Jane that they extend their holiday with a visit to Lebanon and Syria, a preliminary to a far more important proposal. Here we see that Jane, like other Fowlesian heroines, is redemptive, the agent of the male protagonist's return to domesticity, community, and culture:

It was not a wanting to possess, even uxoriously, but a wanting to know one could always reach out a hand and (…) that shadow of the other shared voyage, into the night. She was also some kind of emblem of redemption from a life devoted to heterogamy and adultery, the modern errant ploughman's final reward; and Dan saw, or felt, abruptly for the first time in his life, the true difference between Eros and Agape.

The contradictions uncovered in Fowles's work point to dualities inherent in the genre of the novel, to the fictions of realism and the impossibility of an uncontaminated text. Fowles yearns for a comprehensive myth that somehow transcends self while also assuring its primacy, at once acknowledging the self as a social construct and affirming its autonomy. Despite the imposition of existential and Jungian rhetoric, Daniel Martin takes its inspiration from Freud, showing that we have been shaped by culture even as we are set against it, equally immersed in civilization and its discontents.