SOURCE: "John Fowles and the Fiction of Freedom," in The British and Irish Novel since 1960, edited by James Acheson, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, 1991, pp. 62-77.

[Butler is an educator, editor, and critic. In the essay below, he discusses Fowles's focus on freedom, Existentialism, Poststructuralism, and intertextuality in his novels.]

Fowles is an engima in broad daylight. He is exceptionally open about his feelings and opinions, yet it is hard to be absolutely certain that one has understood his work or his position in post-1960s fiction. He is an erudite novelist who is at the same time immensely popular. He is obsessional about freedom and at the same time critical of the uses to which it has been put. Much of his work seems to have a left wing or feminist bias, yet he can also be seen as crypto-fascist and sexist. He is a self-proclaimed atheist whose most recent novel, A Maggot, presents a bigoted fanaticism of the eighteenth century as a necessary step towards freedom. He says that he has 'little interest' in the historical novel, yet he is an expert at the evocation of the past and at convincing period dialogue. The catalogue of enigmas could be continued almost indefinitely, but the daylight, the accessibility and the 'readerly' character of his work remains.

Some ways of approaching Fowles the novelist seem to hold more promise than others. [In The Romances of John Fowles, 1985] Simon Loveday, for instance, proposes the chivalric romance, a genre studied by Fowles at university and explicitly present in The Ebony Tower, as a clue. Like Chrétien de Troyes and the other authors of the late medieval romance, Fowles is interested in the traditional quest in which the hero will prove himself in ambiguous competition with some belle dame, often sans merci, and he toys with the quasi-magical environment of the enchanted castle (the 'domaine') with its wizard-wiseman. Loveday's book is convincing when it deals with some of the fiction (The Collector, The Magus, most of the stories in The Ebony Tower), but it begins to break down when its thesis is applied to The French Lieutenant's Woman, Daniel Martin and A Maggot.

Fowles himself has taken a psychoanalytic approach to his novels in a fascinating essay, 'Hardy and the Hag' [published in Thomas Hardy After Fifty Years, edited by Lance St John Butler, 1977], in which he explores the source of fictional creativity in (male) novelists with the help of an analysis of The French Lieutenant's Woman undertaken by Gilbert Rose, an American psychiatrist. Here we feel close to the intimate springs of Fowles's work, but we are not, in the end, led to any very clear interpretations. While it seems probable that we would learn more about how writing occurs if we were to familiarise ourselves with, say, Melanie Klein's Love, Guilt and Reparation, this will not lead us to anything like a complete account of a ludic piece such as The French Lieutenant's Woman or a work as baffling as A Maggot.

For the purpose of this essay I would like to attempt a less partial account (not that I would deny the Romance element or the probability of Fowles's version of the psychic generation of fiction) and offer a picture of a novelist coming to terms with freedom, both in the Existentialist sense, which would require that freedom be an indispensable absolute (which I think Fowles believes, at least as far as the indispensability is concerned), and in the more recent Poststructuralist sense, which would require freedom to be a chimera, an endlessly deferred goal (which I think is what Fowles now also believes).

In this way Fowles is the novelist par excellence of the period since 1960, in Britain at least. He belongs to the generation most profoundly influenced by Existentialism, and his development has followed the same course as developments that have in part sprung from Existentialism. This may help to explain some of the enigma—the early interest in the freedom of the individual consciousness thrown into the world later becomes the more limited Barthesian freedom of the author playing with the text. The 'pleasure of the text', Barthes' explicit connection of the play of fiction with the play of sexual encounter, becomes in Fowles an elaborate erotics of fiction that takes us well beyond the search for authenticity. The author's self, always closely bound up with that of his hero-surrogates in Fowles, seems to be exploring Existentialist choices in an early work such as The Magus, but by the time we reach Daniel Martin, that self has itself come to seem part of the problem of fictional creation. We are not dealing with self-obsession but rather with the position of the Postmodern/Poststructuralist author for whom the problem of writing is that he is at once all-powerful (the ludic God, the magus) and indeterminable (the blank space, the 'Urfe'—private code, as Fowles has indicated, for 'earth').

Fowles's first novel, The Magus, drafted in the 1950s, is in some essential ways an alternative L'Etranger, the work of an English Camus. The themes of personal choice, freedom and responsibility, are at the heart of this novel, and the debts to the Romance tradition and to the 'domaine' of Alain-Fournier are, as it were, only scenery, the mechanism needed to put Nicholas Urfe through his Existentialist paces. Urfe is an outsider in the attitudes he demonstrates in London, just as he is the suicidal Camusian on his Greek island who, deeply in love with nature, nonetheless cannot escape the absurd.

In the later novels, however, the elusive goddess Eleutheria is pursued in ways that have become familiar to us in the 1970s and 1980s, rather than in the parabolic manner of Camus and Sartre. Instead of offering himself as the Authority or Origin that announces the Era of Freedom ex cathedra, Fowles enacts freedom in his later fiction at the same time as discussing it directly. The most obvious example of this lies in the famous 'double' (actually triple) ending of The French Lieutenant's Woman in which the novelist tries to put the reader into the same position as (a) the hero, Charles Smithson, and (b) the novelist, John Fowles. By the late 1960s, in other words, Fowles is no longer in the relatively innocent world of Camus, a world where heroic young men whose authenticity is guaranteed by their relationship with nature can defy Necessity and assert the freedom offered to them by Absurdity. We have instead been taken into the world of Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, where all assertion is textual, provisional and rhetorical. For Sartre and early Fowles man is condemned to freedom; for Barthes and later Fowles man is condemned to free play. Authenticity proves to be unavailable, so the later freedom settles for inauthentic 'play' (acting).

Fowles himself is quite open about the centrality of freedom to his work. He told Daniel Halpern in 1971: 'Freedom … That obsesses me. All my books are about that. The question is, is there really free will? Can we choose freely? Can we act freely? Can we choose? How do we do it?' ['A Sort of Exile in Lyme Regis,' London Magazine (March 1971)]. In his study of Fowles [John Fowles, 1978], Barry Olshen comments that 'The novels are predicated on the supposition of individual free will and the ideal of self-realisation'. Similarly, Peter Conradi [in his John Fowles, 1982] sees the novels as 'quests for personal authenticity'. But Conradi, writing with the advantage of four more years of Fowles's output to consider, is able to add what seems to me to be the necessary gloss: 'Each of his novels can best be read as in pursuit of the peculiar integrity of its own incompleteness, which is to say as braving a new kind of fictional logic by which to foreground, however inconclusively, its necessary inauthenticities'. This captures more exactly the move from Existentialism to Poststructuralism than a simple insistence on freedom per se as the dominant motif in Fowles. It is no longer a frustrated search for possible authenticity, as in The Magus; rather, it is a matter of Fowles playing with the inauthenticity to which we are all (and none more clearly than the novelist) condemned.

Fowles would, I think, have stopped writing or would in any case have faded from view if it were only true that, as Olshen says, his fiction is 'adolescent' in its 'exclusive fixation on the vision of the individual ego asserting itself in the world'. Fowles uses adolescent Absurdism as a spring-board from which he is well able to launch himself into the unfathomable waves of Derridean arbitrariness. Who else, after all, is better able to defer the resolutions of his novels? Who is better able to postpone the closure that brings meaning? Fowles may have set out to write the fiction that celebrated or explored freedom, but he has stayed to demonstrate the other sense of the expression 'the fiction of freedom'.

Fowles's short novel Mantissa (1982) should be compulsory reading for those who wish to undertake a study of Fowles. It is an unusually neat parable about artistic creation, and it involves the reader to just the necessary degree. In it Fowles achieves the level of realism of which he is so easy a master, yet he throws it away—it wasn't reality at all that those opening paragraphs were related to—no, of course, they were just lines in an author's head, and, lo and behold, Mantissa is set in just that—a head. What does one find in an author's head, then, when creation is taking place? A Muse, of course, specifically Erato, the teasing Muse of lyric poetry, and for some reason that she is inclined to regret, of fiction, too.

The personification of the Muse is ready-made and to hand: she is female, Greek, attractive, musical. But Fowles has to demonstrate allegorically how she operates. In 'Hardy and the Hag' he has indicated his preferences in this matter: the novelist, he says, 'longs to be possessed by the continuous underlying myth he entertains of himself' (We notice that the yearning for the lost mother-stage is cast in literary terms: the longing is for a myth). This 'possession' would be the modern equivalent of the divine inspiration of the poet, and so is itself that which the Muse brings. It has to operate over time, and here is the Postmodern rub: the Muse is, in her original Greek form, relatively static—she stands for what she stands for. But what is it like for a writer to be possessed for the duration of a long novel? Fowles comments that the possession is 'a state that withdraws … as the text nears consummation'. Given the final noun here it is evident that something very like sexual teasing is involved, and Fowles makes this explicit a few pages later in 'Hardy and the Hag' when, having written of Hardy's 'violent distaste for resolution, or consummation', he says that 'the endlessly repeated luring-denying nature of [Hardy's] heroines is not too far removed from what our more vulgar age calls the cock-tease'.

So in Mantissa the Muse takes on a complete sexualallegorical persona. In her first incarnation as Dr Delfie, whose job it is to bring the amnesiac Miles Green back to reality by means of sex therapy, she points out, bearing in mind that Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses, that 'the memory nerve-centre in the brain is closely associated with the one controlling gonadic activity'. When Dr Delfie persuades Miles to make love as part of his cure, her orgasm coincides with the words 'last syllable', and the result of their love-passage is a child of sorts, in fact a work of literature, Mantissa. Delfie/Erato explains to Miles/Fowles that when he is writing he does not know what he is doing; it is unplanned. Like Nicholas Urfe, perhaps, she would like to be in a position of 'eternally awaiting climax', and she looks forward to a Beckettian moment where she would be able to communicate entirely by sensation in a 'text without words' in which, she tells Miles, 'we could both be our real selves at last'. This Lacanian hopeless yearning for the lost paradise is at once, and most appropriately, verbal and sexual, the fusion is as complete as metaphor and allegory can make it. Erato, suggesting sexual variations, says 'there are all sorts of … narrative alternatives we haven't fully explored'; towards the end of the novel she refers to 'a tactile centimetre (or syllable)'.

Even in the revised version, The Magus is incomplete in Fowles's view, and this incompleteness stems from the same inability to close—to offer us anything other than possible narrative alternatives—that we see more violently exposed at the end of The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Maggot. It is emphatically not a matter of Fowles's not being able to bring off an ending. His skill as a fictional craftsman is beyond dispute, and he could have pursued a career as a writer of thrillers, erotica, historical novels or almost any of the other sub-genres of fiction. There is no satisfying ending because Fowles does not believe such a thing to be possible. Urfe does finally rediscover Alison, but she is utterly changed and may no longer want a relationship with him. No reconciliation is made, and the novelist steps in, playing his own godgame: 'She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense'. A resolution is whisked away from under the reader's nose. Fowles's interest in sexual teasing and postponement may be read as a symbol of this inability to make the final statement that will bring closure. However, in the first version of The Magus Fowles did partially yield to the temptation to close (the sentence quoted, with its reference to the present tense, belongs only to the revised version), and this shows why The Magus and Daniel Martin are problematic for the Fowles critic. The problem so stunningly solved in The French Lieutenant's Woman and satisfactorily kept at arm's length in The Ebony Tower and A Maggot is balked at in these two novels. In the revised Magus the balking is alleviated by the arrival of the novelist as deus ex machina, telling us that we will never know what happens to Urfe and Alison because he is going to stop writing now. The move from Existentialism to Poststructuralist play is rather obvious here.

In the Foreword to the revised edition of The Magus we learn that 'loss is essential for the novelist'. In 'Hardy and the Hag' we find Fowles concurring with the psychoanalytic thesis that novelists are marked more deeply than other people by the traumatic separation from the mother and from the omnipotence that characterises the earliest phase of human development. The novelist, on this account, is always trying to staunch the psychic wound created by this separation by inventing surrogate worlds in which omnipotence is once again available, and in which author-surrogates can be rewarded by full possession of the mother-surrogate. This is the 'loss' that is so vital to fictional creativity, and in the case of Fowles it seems to explain why he so consistently tantalises his heroes: he needs to exercise his power as creator. Were he to stop, in this case to allow Urfe an explanation or a 'happy ending', the game (very much the 'godgame'—Fowles's original title for The Magus, as he tells us in the Foreword) would come to an end. The process must at all costs be kept going; closure, although it seems to bring the reward of the mother, necessarily also brings about the end of the game that was providing the satisfactions of omnipotence and freedom. Hence the great length of the two novels in which Fowles has failed to square this circle: it is as if he has to keep talking to postpone the moment when his lack of an exit-line will become apparent. Once again, this is not a matter of a lack of technical skill.

The giveaway in The Magus and Daniel Martin can be found in what might be called their pseudo-Bildungsroman status. In both novels there is a suggestion that the hero has developed, has learnt a moral truth, has moved to a better view of his own life and, in particular, of the responsibilities of personal relationships. The hero in Thomas Mann or Lawrence (one thinks of Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, for example) has in some crucial way grown up, and this is the template that we unconsciously lay down beneath our reading of the two Fowles novels in question. But this reading of them is untenable. Nicholas Urfe does not grow up at all, or at least the thrust of the novel has little interest in this possibility. To the very end he remains committed to himself (rather than learning, say, that he should no longer be a cad). His long ordeal on Phraxos leaves him bitter and baffled rather than wiser and purer. The 'lesson', if there is one, is the non-lesson that 'the maze has no centre', and that all action is a form of theatre. Even Alison, who on the Bildungsroman reading would have to be a touchstone, a signal of the lesson having been learnt, a reward for having grown up, is explicitly described in theatrical terms. She is merely 'cast' as Reality' (my italics), and the circumstances of her final ambiguous meeting with Urfe are stagey in the extreme. The only lesson is that there is nobody watching the performance any more. This is usually taken to mean that Conchis and his helpers are no longer operating their 'metatheatre', but it clearly has death-of-God overtones too. And yet Urfe knew at the very beginning that there was no God, and that he was alone; his suicide attempt (or pantomime) makes his nihilism quite clear.

All through The Magus we could echo Nicholas's question to Mrs De Seitas at the end: 'But why the colossal performance just to tell one miserable moral bankrupt what he is?'. Why indeed? Fowles toys with trying to convince us that Nicholas has changed. There are hints, for instance, that were he now to resume his affair with Alison, he would do so with greater understanding of some kind; but this is mere froth compared with what is happening underneath. 'In reality all is fiction', says Mrs De Seitas, and Fowles concurs. This lesson (that all is fiction) may rub off on Nicholas, but it is not, as it were, a lesson internal to the story which we might choose to apply to our own lives. Rather, it is a lesson that is entirely public, already something that belongs to the nature of writing novels, an open secret between Fowles and the reader. For if all is fiction, then fiction is all, including the 'real lives' to which we might more traditionally try to apply the lesson of 'fiction'. We are all in this fiction together, including the reader: the meaning of the novel, says Fowles in the Foreword, is 'whatever reaction it provokes in the reader'.

The Magus is a deeply anti-Romantic novel. Fowles is not as clear about this as he will be in later works: there is a ghost of a desire for God in the apparently omnipotent 'magus' Conchis, and a yearning for romanticised nature and a romantic view of the self that will be far less evident in The French Lieutenant's Woman. Conchis tries a little romanticism in his story of his visit to Norway; Henrik, the mad brother of his host in the remote north, teaches Conchis something by way of his extraordinary eremitic existence and his rare but overwhelming meetings with the 'pillar of fire' that is God. Conchis summarises: '… in a flash all our explanations, all our classifications and derivations, our aetiologies, suddenly appeared to me like a thin net. That great passive monster, reality, was no longer dead, easy to handle … The net was nothing, reality burst through it'. The romantic notion that reality is a powerful beast, a Frankenstein's monster to be trammelled only with the greatest humility, cannot, however, stand up to the force of the godgame. Fowles may yearn for the primal unity and seem to glimpse it in nature (here and in several memorable scenes, not surprisingly, of Daniel Martin), but the nets are in fact a good deal stronger than 'reality'. Henrik, after all, has to be insane and completely alone in a cabin in a remote part of Norway where the only access is by river, and even that for only part of the year; he is blind and has spoken to no one for twelve years. Very occasionally, after absolute concentration of the will upon this one end, he is vouchsafed the insight or vision of the pillar of fire. Clearly the price paid for a glimpse of reality is immensely high and, far from 'bursting through', 'reality' is practically a closed book. What we find in nature, then, is not the personification of the god or the contact with the elemental that Romanticism sought. For Fowles, nature too is part of the game: the mountain is Parnassus or it is no mountain; the Muses are the inhabitants of the natural; Alison is recruited into the godgame without explanation and without objection in a way that utterly subverts her status as 'reality'.

The Magus was Fowles's first novel, and The Collector (1963) his first published novel. The Collector's theme is the relationship between inarticulate power and articulate intelligence, between body and mind, between imprisonment and freedom, between Caliban and Ariel, and more literally, between Ferdinand and Miranda. Clegg/Caliban is imprisoned in inarticulacy and the commonplace; in revenge he imprisons Miranda in a converted cellar. The twist is that Clegg is unable successfully to fulfil his role: where Shakespeare's Caliban has at least a healthy lust, Clegg is effectively impotent, a supplementary theme of Fowles's being the inadequacy of certain sorts of Englishness. [In an endnote, the critic adds: 'Fowles has always been interested in this two-sided, articulate and inarticulate, Caliban-and-Ariel bifurcation of human nature. We think of Julie and June in The Magus, or of Henrik and his brother. But it is most fully confirmed in A Maggot. There "Mr Bartholomew" and his rather too-obviouslynamed servant, Dick, form two sides of a single personality. Dick is a deaf mute of great strength who, though gentle, is highly sexed. His master and alter ego is highly intellectual and apparently frigid. Faced with the revelations of the end of the novel Dick hangs himself while "Mr Bartholomew" vanishes into the future. Their relationship to the heroine Rebecca is simple: Dick loves her dumbly and physically while his master leads her to a view of an intellectual reality that will liberate her from the prison of the brothel in which she works.']

The Collector would be a very different sort of novel were it not for the Shakespearean intertext with which Fowles explicitly provides it. The thinker who dominated the French literary scene during the 1950s and 1960s when it was having such a profound impact on John Fowles was, after all, Roland Barthes, the father of intertextuality. Without this element The Collector would be a psychological novel, a brilliant study of a warped mind—brilliant because of Fowles's ability to write an English that catches so exactly the limitations and banalities of Clegg's mind; or it would be an allegory, perhaps, about the fear of the 'nasty' (the libido) deeply ingrained in a certain kind of English mind. Additionally it would be a study of Miranda's slightly contrived Existentialist tenets: she 'loves being to the full' and is in 'despair', and so must 'act' to obtain her 'freedom' and so on. Fowles signals his interest in the author's enactment of freedom by contriving 'play' between The Tempest and his own novel rather than merely endorsing 'realistically' these propositions about freedom. It is therefore not surprising that he has not remained merely 1950s or merely Existentialist. Like modern thought itself he has come on into the Postmodern and Poststructuralist world where intertextuality reigns.

In The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) the intertextual is signalled in the first paragraph. It is not all Jane Austen, but without Jane Austen it would not read as it does:

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay—Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched south-western leg—and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

The narrator presents us with two voices here, one slightly humorous and knowing, a voice interested in bitten legs, and the other the voice of that other author who set a crucial part of Persuasion in Lyme Regis on the Cobb. But then The French Lieutenant's Woman is in one sense nothing but intertext.

Not only is the novel thick with epigraphs and quotations of all sorts, but it keeps up a running fire of literary references, both explicit and concealed. Ernestina has an 'imperceptible hint of a Becky Sharp', Sam Farrow's name 'evokes immediately the immortal Weller'—these two are unmissable, but other details take some unearthing. Sarah Woodruff's father goes to the dogs partly on account of his obsession with his gentlemanly ancestry; Sarah herself becomes déclassée by being sent away to be educated above her station in life. The first of these cannot be unconnected with the fatal snobbery implanted in Tess Durbeyfield's father in Hardy's Tess, and the second echoes the return of Grace Melbury to Little Hintock in The Woodlanders. The Fallen Woman Sarah Woodruff is first approached at the end of the Cobb in the memorable opening scene in a way curiously reminiscent of a scene in The Moonstone where the Fallen Woman Rosanna is approached as she looks out to sea near the village of Cobb's Hole.

The list could be extended almost indefinitely. Fowles has made his novel out of Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Darwin, Marx, in a way that emphasises the paradox of the writer: playing around among texts, he can do precisely as he chooses; yet it really does seem as if it is not Fowles who is writing language, but language (more broadly, culture) that is writing Fowles. We have here moved beyond the Existentialist fear of the inauthenticity that might result from the domination of the 'They' (Heidegger's Das Man, Sartre's On, what in The Aristos Fowles calls the Many), and into the Lacanian resignation to our absolute inability to achieve any authentic voice or selfhood. Fowles has abandoned the quest for authenticity in The French Lieutenant's Woman and is enjoying his new-found freedom to play. [In an endnote, the critic adds: 'In "Notes on an Unfinished Novel", Fowles says that while writing The French Lieutenant's Woman he was "trying to show an [E]xistentialist awareness before it was chronologically possible". But the novel as written shows a greater gap between author and hero than was evident in The Magus. Nicholas Urfe is a Fowles-surrogate working out Existentialist themes, Charles Smithson is a plaything of the author's; we are never allowed to forget that the real freedom is not his but his creator's. It is as if the whole of The French Lieutenant's Woman is written in the spirit that inspired the authorially self-conscious changes made to the ending of The Magus when it was revised. Significantly, fifteen years after noting his attempt to show Existentialist awareness in The French Lieutenant's Woman, Fowles said in an interview: "I now think of Existentialism as a kind of literary metaphor, a wish fulfilment. I long ago began to doubt whether it had any true philosophical value in many of its assertions about freedom" (Quoted in The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, ed. Heide Ziegler and Christopher Bigsby, 1982).']

Daniel Martin, we have seen, is less ludic in appearance, more committed to the impossible old Magus project of bringing its hero through to some sort of authenticity or wisdom; but even here Fowles has not forgotten the Poststructuralist lessons he has learnt. The novel is, for one thing, far less an example of conventional realism and full of far more tricks than might at first appear. It is, for instance, a novel about Dan learning to write a novel; in the early pages he answers the suggestion that he write a novel with 'I wouldn't know where to begin', just as he (or rather, John Fowles) is beginning Daniel Martin. The hero of Dan's novel is to be one 'S. Wolfe', an anagram of 'Fowles'; Fowles's own life looms inescapably, too: Devon, the time spent at Oxford, the involvement with film, the similar age of the protagonist. His deliberate shifting from first- to third-person narration and back again means that, every time it happens, the reader is obliged to rethink his suspension of disbelief. And again the point at which this partially-concealed playfulness becomes apparent is when we realise how deeply intertextual Daniel Martin is.

We feel the ghostly presence, behind Daniel Martin, of, for instance, Jude the Obscure. In Chapters 7 and 8 of the first part of that novel the scholarly Jude becomes attracted to the pig-breeder's daughter Arabella, who is a 'complete and substantial female animal'. She lures him into making love to her (something that he is strongly drawn towards in spite of his educational ambitions), but turns out to be hopelessly unsuited to him and eventually becomes a pub landlady. Similarly, in Daniel Martin, young Dan, working on a Devon farm, becomes attracted to a sexually-arousing girl of about Arabella's age, and in spite of class and educational differences, they begin a somewhat immature but extremely passionate liaison. Exactly as in Hardy Dan feels 'irresistibly drawn' to this casual encounter with Nancy. The affair is brought to an abrupt halt by parental intervention, and many years later, Nancy reappears at Dan's house, a middle-aged woman who has become very like the Arabella of later years: 'I hardly recognised her, she'd got so heavy-limbed and stout, her tinted hair done back and up in a kind of bouffant style, like a pub landlady in a last pathetic attempt at attractiveness' (my italics). This could be fleshed out in much greater detail, but the important thing is the structural intertextuality at work; it is clinched by the next phase of Dan's adolescent life. Just as Jude transfers his affections from the earthy Arabella to his intellectual and spiritually-minded cousin Sue Bridehead, so Dan transfers his from Nancy to his cousin Barbara. Sue is too fastidious about sexual relations to be a satisfactory mate for Jude, and is deeply affected by high church Anglicanism. Here is Fowles on Barbara:

Her shyness and niceness in the flesh proved far stronger than a certain veiled emotion that had flavoured … some of her letters. Five years later she was to cause a great family to-do by 'turning' Catholic … and soon after becoming a nun. Her distaste for the flesh was already apparent.

The similarities between these two West Country novelists (both profoundly interested in the flesh and its opposites) are too great to be coincidental.

Besides Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d'Urbervilles is an intertext for Daniel Martin. The early scene in Fowles's novel, for instance, where the Devonshire harvesters massacre the rabbits trapped in the ever-shrinking area of wheat cannot possibly exist independently of the almost identical scene in Tess where Dorsetshire harvesters perform the same grisly ritual. Equally, the attentive reader will pick up all sorts of details from Dylan Thomas ('the scene had a deep humanity, a green fuse'), Conrad (of the Nile: 'Its waters seemed to reach not merely back into the heart of Africa, but into that of time itself') or Keats ('Some hidden warbler bubbled an out-of-season song. It was delicious … a profound and liquid, green and eternal peace'.) This is all quite apart from the echoes of Alain-Fournier, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Langland and D. H. Lawrence.

In A Maggot intertextuality is given a new and extraordinary form. The novel is studded with facsimile reproductions of pages from The Gentleman's Magazine and The Historical Chronicle for 1736 (the date in which the novel is set). These have almost no direct bearing on the text of the novel, and are hard to read, appearing in very small print. But nearly all of the facsimile pages contain some reference to the Porteous riots of 1736. Now the Porteous affair forms the core of Scott's Heart of Midlothian, so we are offered a sort of palimpsest involving 1985 (A Maggot), 1818 (Heart of Midlothian) and 1736 (twice: the Porteous narrative written in the magazines of that year and the narrative concerning the characters in A Maggot.)

A Maggot involves time-travellers from the future bringing an indication of what history holds for mankind to the mid-eighteenth century. Its hero is taken away in a spaceship while its heroine is confirmed in her extreme form of Protestant Dissent and becomes the mother of a (historical) prophetess. This alarming plot appears quite alien to everything that Fowles has done hitherto (Daniel Martin was also greeted with surprise), but in truth we are in the same world as before. The freedom of the fiction writer is absolute, and his greatest interest is in exploring the implications of freedom for the human species, though in the end that becomes an exploration of his own freedom as a writer. Thus Rebecca in A Maggot becomes the most completely free thing she can, granted her sex, date and status; she frees herself from money, men and convention (as well as from the brothel), while her creator takes the liberty of the text as he sees fit. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, after all, he travelled in time, too. But the relativity of freedom is made clear here: in the political conditions of the early eighteenth century, the best way for Rebecca to assert herself may very well have been to join a tiny sect of religious extremists among whom she is able to be not her herself but at least different from the norms enforced by the dominant social ideology. Freedom in A Maggot (a deliberate echo of 'Magus', if that word is pronounced correctly) has been reduced to the freedom to assert one inauthenticity rather than another. The 'authentic' is no longer available.

At the beginning and end of Daniel Martin Fowles tries to proclaim the wisdom of something he calls 'whole sight', but this is not a piece of goods that he is able to deliver. He has tried very hard to find it, but this is no longer the century (it was the nineteenth) in which it can be found. Matthew Arnold of course felt that it had only been possible in Sophocles' day to see life steadily and 'whole', but from our perspective the great nineteenth-century novelists were much less fragmented in their view than we are. Fowles is perhaps a great realist born out of his time, but he has accepted his fate and now, having tried to write the fiction that proclaims freedom, he contents himself with the freedom that is the fictional play with texts.