SOURCE: "Fowles's Allegory of Literary Invention: Mantissa and Contemporary Theory," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 61-72.

[In the following essay, Wilson interprets Fowles's novel Mantissa as an allegorical attack on poststructuralist theory.]

[Interviewer]: (with reference to post-structuralists): "You seem to make fun of them in Mantissa."

[Fowles]: "Well, I did in Mantissa because I think they've been granted altogether too powerful a position on the intellectual side." [John Fowles with Carol M. Barnum, "An Interview with John Fowles," in Modern Fiction Studies (Spring 1985)]

An allegory of the creative process structures John Fowles's Mantissa, an allegory that proceeds by means of, and within, a parody of contemporary theoretical ideas on that same creative process. Within his parody, Fowles takes hold of the post-structuralist sexual metaphor of texts and transforms it into a unique image of the creative process—the remerging of the public/logical self with the secret/intuitive self in literary creation. Drawing primarily from Roland Barthes but also from Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, Fowles ridicules the sexual theory of the text while simultaneously transforming it into an interesting and plausible allegorical expression of the creative process. In the allegory, Miles and Erato, the traditional Muse of love poetry (who, in Fowles's novel, has been "stuck" with the whole of fiction as well), are parts of one person. Miles, in his amnesia, has remembered only his social "presentation" self, his logic, and his masculine vanity; all of his forgotten "frivolous," feminine, creative aspects, he sees as another person, Erato. As long as the two remain characters, the closest they can come to union is the sexual act; the impossible full recovery from amnesia would mean the remerging of the characters into one person. That this person is John Fowles emerges slowly because the reader does not at first recognize that this novel is transpiring within a skull. The delay leads to refutation; together the two principles of delay and refutation form a paradigm for the mechanism of Fowles's sexual allegory, of literary invention in Mantissa.

In providing the parodic vehicle for the allegory, Mantissa's existence proclaims that John Fowles has decided to take the post-structuralist theorists at their word and produce a text that conforms to their explanations. Such parodic writing may take place in each age. For example, [in his Inventions, 1982] Gerald Bruns, interpreting Hugh Kenner, notes that "Joyce shares with Swift and the Swift-like Pope of The Dunciad a common point of departure: What would happen if things actually were as our Modern Philosophers represent them to be?" What, for example, would happen "if things were as naturalism represents them to be? Answer: they would be as they are in Dubliners," says Bruns, and he continues: "Swift was no Lockean, but he understood how by parodying Locke one could produce Gulliver, whose mental failures are so many descriptions of how the Lockean mind is supposed to work." Bruns makes the same point about Locke in reference to Pope. Similarly, we may ask: What would a novel look like if the post-structuralists are right? John Fowles's answer: If they are right a novel will look like Mantissa. However, without recognition of the allegorical dimension, Fowles's novel will likely strike the reader as an absurd "mantissa," an unimportant, trivial addition to Fowles's discourse. The allegory exists within a context of this parody of contemporary theory.

Fowles's familiarity with contemporary academic schools of theory is undeniable. In an interview with Carlin Romano ["A Conversation with John Fowles," in Boulevard: Journal of Contemporary Writing (Spring 1987)], Fowles discusses his unsympathetic responses in his reading of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. More generally, Fowles's work radiates an overall feel that could lead Philip Thody, for example, in his introduction to the English translation of Roland Barthes' Criticism and Truth, to say that "contemporary novelists such as John Fowles … clearly owe a debt to the style of thinking about prose fiction which Barthes was one of the first to develop." And the books are sprinkled with specific references. Catherine, in Fowles's story "The Cloud," which ends The Ebony Tower, decides that she hates a man named Peter when he responds unintelligently to her explanation of a book by Roland Barthes (possibly Mythologies), the translation of which she has been editing. Daniel Martin, in the novel of that name, develops his relationship with Jane, the main female character of the book, through their discussion of the writings of the Marxist theorists Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci; Gramsci's words even provide Fowles with the opening epigraph for Daniel Martin. The primary transformation of character in the novel comes from Daniel's writing a novel, and his writing develops in response to Lukacs' and Gramsci's ideas, as Daniel interprets them during his conversations with Jane.

Within Mantissa itself, Fowles's character, Miles Green, tells Erato that "I feel sure we have one thing in common": resentment of the neglect she has suffered from "the campus faculty factories." In case anyone should wonder what, specifically, he attacks in Mantissa, Fowles has his character list the targets: "the structuralists and deconstructivists … the semiologists" and "the marxists." Miles adds "academic Uncle Tom Cobbleigh" to these, referring to an old Devon ballad; and since, according to a standard reference work, Old Tom was the "last named of the seven village worthies who borrowed Tom Pearce's grey mare on which to ride to 'Widecombe Fair,'" Fowles probably means to depict practitioners of all the schools as crowding comically on the back of the single overloaded mare of fiction.

Fowles, is, thus, almost certainly ridiculing contemporary theory in Mantissa, and yet he transforms a post-structuralist sexual theory of texts into his own allegory of the creative process. While limiting its action to the inside of a skull, the allegory performs a gamboling, comic commentary on the creative process and a hilarious debate—with structuralist and post-structuralist theorists—over the artist's position in the process of artistic creation. In an admitted pun, Fowles plays with words by naming one of Erato's avatars Dr. A. Delphie [The critic adds in a footnote: "Adelphi is a comedy by the Latin writer Terence, based on a lost Greek model, in which the son of a wealthy man falls in love with a slave dancing girl, possibly a model for Fowles's Erato…. Delphi, of course, is the city on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, home of Apollo and the Muses: the cave-shrine there was called 'the novel of the world.'"] Clinically and scientifically, she says "we can offer most" of the sexual positions "in the Kama Sutra," words which might be a direct parody of Roland Barthes' definition of writing [in The Pleasure of the Text, 1978] as a treatise of "the science of various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra." Mantissa may be an individual text of bliss that provides a critical entrance into the text of bliss as a category. Such an interpretation sees Mantissa as a novel that also functions as criticism, providing an insight into what Roland Barthes called the "text of bliss," which is "outside of criticism, unless it is reached through another text of bliss."

Fowles transforms this into allegory when Erato and Miles identify storytelling with sexual intercourse, and she attaches a different sexual position to each letter of the alphabet which may be Fowles's deft analogy to the alphabetical arrangement of The Pleasure of the Text. The huge number of sexual positions they have tried, and that they plan to try, represents the infinite variety of narrative courses open to the author as he or she faces the terror of the blank page: "You know, it can be constant, even rather frightening, because you write every word, you have a hundred—or at least three—choices, anyway," says Fowles in the Romano interview. At the height of their union, the walls of the hospital room become transparent and people outside, in the position of readers looking into the author's head, can see the moment when the author's "presentation self" is grappling with his "inspiration"—as private and, in the post-structuralist parlance, as sexual a moment as Miles and Erato's mutual orgasm.

Most importantly, the creative self dominates. When Miles discovers that Erato is the author of The Odyssey, a work he can never hope to equal, he concedes her complete artistic ascendancy. And despite Miles's claim to be cured, she simply knocks him into a syncope with a blow to the jaw, or eludes his lunge so that he knocks himself out; she resumes her shape as Dr. A. Delphie, and continues her sexual "treatment" of his amnesia. Within the sexual rhythm between Miles and Erato, each time Miles relapses into unconsciousness, Fowles says that Miles drops into a "syncope," a word which has a medical and a grammatical meaning. Medically, the word indicates a break in consciousness caused by the failure of the heart's action; grammatically it means a break, a cutting short, an abbreviation, contraction, or sudden cessation or interruption. Fowles may again be absurdly fitting Mantissa to Barthes who [in The Pleasure of the Text] connects the "physics of bliss" to "the groove, the inscription, the syncope." In the syncopes, Miles does not cede his autonomy to an entity outside himself called language, but to Erato, who is, ultimately, a forgotten part of himself—and this is the point of Fowles's allegory, the workings of which we can understand through the paradigm that has two parts: delay and refutation.

The allegorical impact of Mantissa has a delayed effect in the book because Fowles has established the apparent setting as a hospital room, but the room's domed shaped and bumpy padding reveal its allegorical location as the inside of a writer's skull. This is an appropriate place for an allegory of the process of invention, as its analogy with Samuel Beckett's Endgame suggests. In Beckett's play, two high windows suggest the interior of a skull and the action revolves around a story that is always nearing its end but never does reach a conclusion. The room in Mantissa is lined with gray corrugations that Miles eventually identifies as standing for the gray matter of the human brain. Present from the beginning as the reader sees in retrospect, the skull/brain context is a fecund cavity for an allegory on the creative process.

The allegorical implications of the skull setting emerge in an aesthetic context when Miles tries, unsuccessfully, to walk out on Erato, whom he considers "essentially a mere call girl." In the episode Erato says, "You can't walk out of your own brain." First she makes the door and his clothes disappear, and when the door reappears, "All stands as in a mirror, or a Magritte." He can only respond, "Ridiculous." "Magritte's strategy," says yet another post-structuralist theorist, Michel Foucault, in This Is Not a Pipe, is to deploy "largely familiar images, but images whose recognizability is immediately subverted and rendered moot by 'impossible,' 'irrational,' or 'senseless' conjunctions." The scene in Mantissa reverses this process; the reader's shock comes from realizing that the items so gradually introduced by Fowles—a man in "a borrowed woman's purple bathrobe that is too small for him," a naked woman who is supposed to be a minor Greek deity, and a cuckoo clock with a pseudo-Grecian garment hanging ludicrously from it—are actually in improbable juxtaposition, "like in a Magritte." As with the painter, Fowles's shock induces a laugh, followed by an independent seeing. The laugh is partly on post-structuralist theory, a laugh that is the essence of the allegory's comic contradiction of contemporary theory; and by delaying recognition, Fowles makes it a laugh of insight.

The delay allows Fowles to establish a dialogue with contemporary criticism before the refutational implications of the allegory become clear. To be like Roland Barthes' writer, Miles Green would have to be "the blind spot of systems, adrift"; for Barthes, the writer "is the joker in the pack, the mana, a degree zero, the dummy in the bridge game." Just such a writer is Miles Green. In Part One of Mantissa, Miles Green—who is being treated for amnesia—stares uncomprehendingly at a nurse's cradling arms; she shows him a manuscript the way a maternity ward nurse shows a newborn infant to its mother who has been unconscious at its birth. When the nurse reads a few words, the "baby" turns out to be Mantissa, the writing of which, in line with contemporary theories that assign the author little or no importance, Miles has forgotten. Miles Green's total lack of memory of anything before this "birth" connects to a passage in Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" [in his Image—Music—Text, 1977] in which Barthes claims that "the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text," and is "in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing," and the author "is not the subject with the book as predicate." The birth scene works better if the reader is still ignorant of the skull location; Fowles creates an enigma that the reader solves with dawning recognition of the allegorical location.

A similar delayed reaction also characterizes the dialectic structure of Fowles's argument with theory; Mantissa's characters first state a position about the source of literary creativity equivalent to the contemporary critic's; this statement is then refuted by an aspect of the novel's structure or by a second statement that carries the logic to the next step, reveals its absurdity, and so discredits it. For example, "At a certain level," says Miles Green, in what Harold Fawkner calls [in his The Timescapes of John Fowles, 1984] a "crypto-Derridean" comment, "there is in any case no connection between author and text…. The deconstructivists have proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt." While a wide variety of quotes from Jacques Derrida could be brought forward as examples to illustrate Miles's statement, the following from Writing and Difference might be accepted as typical:

Furtiveness—in Latin—is the manner of the thief, who must act very quickly in order to steal from me the words which I have found … must purloin them before I have even found them, I am certain that I have always already been divested of them…. As soon as I speak, the words I have found (as soon as they are words) no longer belong to me.

Miles continues that the author "has no more significant status than the bookshop assistant or the librarian who hands the text qua object to the reader."

The delayed reaction works like an actor's double take; in his second statement, Miles goes beyond what Derrida says, but Miles's statement expresses the next logical stage of Derrida's argument. And in fact Derrida does quote Antonin Artaud on the necessity to renounce "the theatrical superstition of the text and the dictatorship of the writer" in a context that implies Derrida's approval. Embedding the conversation literally within a skull and figuratively within the allegorical structure, Fowles demonstrates the absurdity of his character's words in the novel's concrete context. When he makes this concept concrete, Fowles not only demonstrates its absurdity but also its inconsequentiality, which may account for his title, and for his waiting until near the end of the book to define it.

In delaying the definition of his title, Fowles hints that Mantissa is a novelist's reductio ad absurdum reply to contemporary critics who reduce the author's role in creating the text to an inconsequentiality. Fowles overtly defines "mantissa" as "an addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse," but the reader receives this information only after forming a similar opinion of Mantissa. The allegorical insight opens a second possibility. While Fowles quotes the obsolete sense of the word "mantissa" from the Oxford English Dictionary in a footnote, he omits that same source's entry for the word's operative meaning: the decimal point in a mathematical logarithm.

The first definition expresses the insignificant role in which contemporary critical theory casts the author. Miles says that contemporary theorists have proved that the author's role is purely "fortuitous and agential," in possible parody of the way Barthes entertains the possibility that the author is the "full subject" of the act of writing, but then, citing Jacques Lacan, concludes that "structural analysis is unwilling to accept such an assumption: who speaks (in the narrative) is not who writes (in real life) and who writes is not who is" [Barthes, Image—Music—Text]. "Who speaks?" In Écrits, Jacques Lacan says that "truth" alone answers "I speak," and Lacan says that there is "no speech that is not language." Like Fowles and his character, Jane Gallop interprets Lacan here [in her Reading Lacan, 1985] to mean that "only language speaks." In developing Lacan's idea, Barthes is more radical even than Tzvetan Todorov, who says, "The I in the novel is not the I of discourse, that is, the subject of the speech act" [The Poetics of Prose, 1971].

The result is a conditional proposition that only gradually assumes importance to the reader: if the author does not exist, then it would make no sense to say that one book by this author is more (or less) significant than any other. Thus Fowles cleverly makes the reader's own initial sense of Mantissa as a mantissa into an argument against the post-structuralist dissolving of the author. This theory of the author, in making a human being completely disappear, has created an absurdity. For Barthes, in the conscious mind, the writer is "a creature of language … never anything but a plaything" of "the language that constitutes him" [The Pleasure of the Text]. The "unconscious," says Lacan [in his 1988 Seminars], "is the discourse of the other…. It is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links." If the writer is made up of consciousness and the unconscious, then the entire creature, the writer, is language. Significantly, Barthes accepts Jacques Lacan's notion that the unconscious is a system of writing, and thus has the structure of human language. Barthes says [in The Pleasure of the Text], "As institution, the author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared." Todorov expresses the idea only a bit less radically: "Man has constituted himself out of language, as the philosophers of our century have so often observed, and we are likely to discover its schema in all our social activity."

The discourse-oriented definition of mantissa implies a light, comic addition to the continuing discourse that is Fowles's work, of little importance compared to his major novels. In its mathematical sense, the title suggests Fowles's regret at the increasing transfer of creative energy from art to rational theorizing about art; the work of fiction looks unimportant, just as the decimal looks small compared to the numerals in a logarithm, but its position gives it complete leverage over the meaning of the expression, which is exactly what happens with allegory in this novel. These lines of thought from Barthes, Lacan, and Todorov fit, but fit absurdly, with Miles Green's sneers to Erato.

Mr. Green's contemptuous, condescending tone becomes part of the second half of the allegorical paradigm: refutation. When Erato asks why, then, "writers still put their names on the title page," the author-character written by John Fowles replies, "because most of them are like you. Quite incredibly behind the times. And hair-raisingly vain. Most of them are still under the positively medieval illusion that they write their own books." Miles's openly unfair tone fits with Barthes' ridicule of the author who thinks he must "delay and indefinitely 'polish' his form": "Having buried the Author," the modern "scriptor" can thus no longer believe "the pathetic view of their predecessors," that the hand that writes "is too slow for his thought or passion." And later in "The Death of the Author," Barthes insists that what occurs is "a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression)," which "traces a field without origin," or which at least, "has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins." And incidentally, for Barthes [in his 1970 S/Z], the same is true of the reader, and hence of the critic: "This 'I' which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)." In parallel, Fowles's Erato raises the issue of the origin of Miles Green, putative author of Mantissa, bringing us to the discrepancies.

The allegorical dimension of his characters' dialogue continues the refutation aspect of the allegorical paradigm; by this dialogue, Fowles demonstrates that an element is missing in the interpretation of Miles Green as an author, an omission that further parodically demonstrates the absurdity of post-structuralist theory in Fowles's allegory. After complaining of her helplessness as a character in Miles's book, the Muse Erato challenges Miles: "To say nothing of your character. I notice there is not a word about his exceedingly dubious status. I wonder who's pulling his strings?" Rather than saying language is, Miles, the writer born simultaneously with the text, replies, "I am. I'm me. Don't be ridiculous." But he cannot answer Erato's smiling questions: "Then why's he being referred to as 'he' throughout? What are you trying to hide?" The answer, "John Fowles," necessarily supplied by the reader, is the punch line of Fowles's allegorical joke.

A similar discrepancy reveals how Fowles's allegorical action contradicts contemporary theory when the characters speak directly about it. Lording his intelligence over Erato, Miles says, "You'll be telling me next you've never heard of Todorov," and he asks in rhetorical exasperation, "how can one possibly discuss theory with you when you haven't even read the basic texts?" Offering to explain "in simple laymen's terms," he continues with a statement that includes "hypostatic and epiphanic facies, of the diegetic process" and especially, he says, "in terms of the anagnorosis." Knowing the post-structuralist vocabularies gives Miles an apparent advantage over Erato, who supposedly relies on enthusiasm—for both sexuality and fiction; but Miles's advantage is only an apparent one.

That the theoretician has only an illusory advantage over the artist is further confirmed by the refutation side of the paradigm of the allegorical strategy of Mantissa: allegorical action refutes the words of Miles, the spokesman of contemporary theory. Miles looks foolish when Erato applies the term "anagnorosis" correctly to the reversal point in the plot in Mantissa, supporting her earlier claim that the role-playing is all over now, "the pretending I haven't even heard of Tzvetan Todorov and hermeneutics and diegesis and deconstructivism." Miles had not mentioned Todorov's first name, so we can conclude that the Muse does know theory, but chooses intuitive inspiration.

By comic discrepancy, Mantissa also contradicts Barthes, who said that the text of bliss "could not be written." On page 183, Miles calls Mantissa "what would have been, if this wasn't an unwritable non-text, one hundred and eighty-three pages at least." The reader's reaction to Miles's "would-have-been" epitomizes the second half of the allegorical paradigm—Fowles's strategy of contradicting theory by narrative allegory—for the reader holds the supposedly unwritable, non-text book in her or his hands, demonstrating the absurdity of any such concept. Instead, a written text actually exists: the product of a process that Fowles depicts allegorically as the sexual union of Miles and Erato, the union of the creative artist's public and secret selves.

In total effect, the narrative depiction of an Erato as a lively, animated, but essentially brainless young woman is contradicted by the allegory in which she is not only an essential element of literary creation but the dominant partner. To Erato's mother Mnemosyne (memory) "is ascribed the art of reasoning and giving suitable names to everything, so we can describe them, and converse about them without seeing them," as Fowles reminds us by his epigram from Lemprière. While accepting Mnemosyne's traits as valuable, Fowles's allegorical structure in Mantissa allows him to demonstrate two points—that these traits are neither the only valuable human attributes, nor are they sufficient in themselves to generate literary invention. Thus, when Fowles parodies our modern philosophers in Mantissa, he transcends parody by re-crafting the post-structuralist sexual theory of the text into his own demonstrated sexual allegory of the creative process; by so doing, John Fowles has fashioned a text that is more than a mantissa.