SOURCE: "Narrative Voice and Focalization: The Presentation of the Different Selves in John Fowles' The Collector," in Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, edited by Philip Shaw and Peter Stock-well, Pinter Publishers, 1991, pp. 113-20.

In 1963 the publication of The Collector initiated John Fowles' career as a full-time writer. In [this] first novel the story of Frederick Clegg, an emotionally disturbed young man from an unhappy lower middle-class family, and of Miranda Grey, an attractive art student from an upper-class family, is recounted to us in a most distinctive manner.

The aim of this paper is to examine Fowles' use of two specific narrative devices—voice and focalization—in order to present in a realistic way two fundamentally different selves, Clegg's and Miranda's; one static and destructive, the other striving for self-knowledge and improvement, each representative of two distinct social groups: 'the Few' and 'the Many'. For this analysis I shall use the concepts and terminology introduced by the French theorist Gérard Genette in his major work Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980).

The main plot of the novel may be conveyed in a few words. Having unexpectedly won a football pool, Clegg prepares to fulfil his secret aspiration of possessing Miranda with whom he is deeply obsessed. Letting his fantasies dominate his life, he kidnaps the young girl using chloroform as he does for his butterflies. Being a collector he keeps her for a long period in the cellar, especially prepared for her imprisonment in the old cottage he has recently bought, until she dies. Throughout the novel it is the strange relationship that develops between these characters—Clegg, the imprisoner and Miranda, the imprisoned—which unfolds dramatically in front of the reader's eyes.

The Collector opens with Clegg's account of the events which precede Miranda's kidnapping, followed by those during her captivity in the cellar, halting abruptly at a crucial moment during her illness, within a few days of the girl's death. In fact, having arrived almost at the middle of the novel, Part Two suddenly starts not with Clegg's continuation of the events but, instead, with Miranda's account of the events her captor has already described. The main difference is that events are now seen by her and recounted from her own perspective, and I quite agree with Perry Nodelman who [in 'John Fowles' Variations in The Collector', Contemporary Literature (1987)] considers that 'it is this surprising switch of perspective in medias res that forms readers' attitudes to both Clegg and Miranda'. Fowles' selection of two distinct, traditionally called, 'first-person' voices and sharply contrastive focalizations on the same events—a selection that allows Clegg and Miranda to narrate the story of their relationship in their own manner with their own words—is, as will be seen, crucial to the presentation of these characters. By inserting in Part Two Miranda's narrative voice within, rather than before or after, Clegg's narrative sections, together with the juxtaposition of their contrastive voices, the author shows the narrators' differing, clashing viewpoints on the situation enhancing their different selves, and simultaneously causes the form of the novel to mirror the content. Miranda's story becomes entrapped in Clegg's, paralleling in this way her personal entrapment by him. These two sections of The Collector, in which Clegg's and Miranda's voices show their personal views on the situation, form the bulk of the novel and are followed by two shorter ones in which Clegg, taking up the narrative once more, unfolds in Part Three a chilling account of Miranda's last moments, finally ending in Part Four with the disclosure of his plans for his next victim.

By permitting direct access to his protagonists' narratives, Fowles removes himself from his novel leaving the reader to pass judgment alone. With the absence of the authorial voice the illusion that the characters themselves shape their own text is effective. While authenticity and credibility are thus achieved by having two 'surrogate authors'—Clegg and Miranda—provide their own narratives, their different selves become apparent to the reader.

I now want to look in more detail at the narrative voice which provides the frame of the novel, Clegg's. In the opening sentence of the novel we are at once confronted with the occurrence of two personal pronouns lacking any antecedent:

When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe (my emphasis).

The 'I' of this 'etic opening'—ie one characterized by the absence of narrative preliminaries with predominance of personal pronouns without references—can here only indicate the narrator, a narrator whom the traditional theoretical studies on perspective generally and confusingly name a 'first-person narrator' failing, as Genette points out, to distinguish between mode (Who sees?) and voice (Who speaks?). As the opening sentence shows, this narrator is present as a character within the world of fictional events. He is what Genette calls a 'homodiegetic narrator' and, because he functions as the protagonist in the story he is narrating, he is also 'autodiegetic'—ie what is traditionally called a 'protagonist-narrator'.

Genette's crucial separation of mode and voice—distinguishing between the question 'Who sees?' (focalization) and the question 'Who talks? (narration)—is of great value here since a differentiation between Clegg the protagonist, whose perception orients the narrative perspective (the focus), and Clegg the narrator, who presents the events (the voice), is essential for the way in which Clegg's narrative is recounted and for the way the reader perceives his self. Basing their argument on Genette's concept of focalization, two later theorists, Mieke Bal [in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 1985] and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan [in Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 1983], call such an agent the 'focalizer'; he is the vehicle of focalization 'through whose spatial, temporal and/or psychological position the textual events are perceived' [S. S. Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction, 1987]. What the focalizer perceives—all that is related to himself, Miranda and her captivity—is named the 'focalized object'. The relationship between focalizer (Clegg) and focalized object (Miranda) is offered from an 'internal focalization' since it is, as the following example reveals, through Clegg's thoughts, feelings and perceptions that the story is presented:

Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, going up to it very careful, heart-in-mouth as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that (my emphasis).

In his narrative then, Clegg plays a double role. He is at the same time a character within the story he is telling—the protagonist who underwent the experience in the past, the focus through which all is seen—and also the one who narrates it in the present, the narrating voice. Genette posits that these two identities—the narrating focus and the narrating voice—though found within the same character, are quite different in function as well as in the degree of their knowledge. He considers the following:

The narrator almost always 'knows' more than the hero, even if he himself is the hero, and therefore for the narrator focalization through the hero is a restriction of field just as artificial in the first person as in the third. (Genette)

Because of the 'restriction of field' and especially because of the duality of focus-narration, the reader rapidly senses Clegg's unreliability as a narrator. Knowing, in fact, before the beginning of his narration what the end of Miranda's captivity will be, Clegg colours his treatment of the events from the very beginning and distorts reality to his advantage.

The reader also rapidly becomes aware that in Clegg's presentation of Miranda's captivity, certain terms and expressions are used to conceal his faults and to make him feel less guilty about her condition. For instance, he never directly refers to her as his prisoner but calls her his 'guest'. Furthermore, a similar process, a process of self-deceit by which Clegg distorts reality in his own favour in order to justify his actions and eliminate any responsibility, is frequently used, as the following example illustrates:

About what I did, undressing her, when I thought after, I saw it wasn't so bad; not many would have kept control of themselves … it was almost a point in my favour (my emphasis).

Other negative aspects of Clegg's self, such as his obsession with collecting, quickly become noticeable in the novel. First, Miranda's name is revealingly marked in his entomological observations diary and throughout his narrative she is frequently compared to butterflies, as in 'It was like catching the Mazarine Blue again or a Queen of Spain Fritillary'. On one occasion Fowles explicitly draws our attention to his protagonist's obsession by making him refer to Miranda as 'it' instead of 'she': 'For a moment I thought her, it looked so different (my emphasis). This obsession is characterized in him by a need of possession. 'Having her', declares Clegg, 'was Nothing needed doing: I just wanted to have her'. As with his butterflies, he is interested in her image not in her self, as Miranda rightly observes:

The sheer joy of having me under his power, of being able to spend all and every day staring at me. He doesn't care what I say or how I feel—my feelings are meaningless to him—it's the fact that he's got me … It's me he wants, my look, my outside; not my emotions or my mind or my soul or even my body. Not anything human. He's a collector. That's the great dead thing in him.

The writer's choice of the girl's name—Miranda, the Latin gerundive of miror, referring to 'she who ought to be wondered at'—clearly enhances this.

From the beginning of his narrative Clegg's language shows certain distinctive features. His personal way of narrating the events in a matter-of-fact, colloquial style, using banal expressions, emphasizes his low social background and poor level of education. The type of language and tone used by the narrator is frequently inappropriate to, and clashes with, the events that are being narrated. In his analysis of one of the most dramatic passages of the novel, when Clegg coldly describes Miranda lying dead in her bed, [G. Ronberg notes in 'Literature and the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language at University Level', Triangle (1985)] that 'the language does not accord with the field of discourse', a conflict arising from 'form not matching function'. This observation can be applied to other passages of the novel and it is also through such a device that Clegg's emotional, psychological, sexual and social inadequacies are revealed. Language is thus primarily used by the author as a means of revealing the deficiencies of his narrator's intellect and education, and exposing his emotional stuntedness and moral blindness. At the end of his narrative, Fowles shows how little Clegg has learned by letting us witness how, without any sense of guilt, he is prepared to repeat what he has done. The only difference is that this time he will catch an 'ordinary common shop-girl'—his previous mistake, he tells us, having been that of 'aiming too high'.

By means of such narrative Fowles lets his reader see how Clegg's disturbed mind works, how his obsession rules his and Miranda's lives. According to Clegg, his failure with Miranda has been caused by class difference: 'There was always class between us' he says. His resentment and sense of inferiority are quite evident when, in an outburst, he tells his prisoner:

If you ask me, London's all arranged for the people who can act like public schoolboys, and you don't get anywhere if you don't have the manner born and the right la-di-da voice—I mean rich people's London, the West End, of course.

Miranda's views of her captor indicate that she sees him as, to some extent, a victim himself, as when, for example, she writes: 'I know he's a victim of a miserable nonconformist suburban world and a miserable social class, the horrid timid copycatting genteel in-between class'. Clegg is what he is as a result of social conditions, unequal opportunities, childhood deprivation and poor education, and Fowles asserts [in The Aristos, 1989] that in this novel he has tried 'to establish the virtual innocence of the Many'. The recurrence of expressions like 'I don't know why' or 'I don't know how' indicate that most of the time Clegg is at a loss, unable to understand what is happening. He has, as Fowles stresses in his preface to The Aristos, no control over what he is. Miranda clearly sees this when she tells him 'You're the one imprisoned in a cellar'.

Considering now Miranda's narrative voice, the beginning of her narration in Part Two of The Collector, with the date 'October 14th?', indicates at once that she is writing a diary in which her thoughts, feelings, perceptions and experiences about her present situation are going to be confided. In her diary she records all the events concerning her imprisonment and the painful experiences which accompany it, and at the same time she is able to recall memories of the past in which she can take refuge.

Miranda is, thus, in this part of the novel, as Clegg was in the others, an autodiegetic narrator since she is a narrator who tells a story in which she simultaneously plays a part as one of the fictional characters. It is she who acts as the focalizer—the agent of the narrative who concentrates her attention on the focalized object; ie all which concerns her present and Clegg, and also her past and G. P., George Paston, her artistic mentor. Her presentation of the fictional world, like Clegg's, is self-centred in that it is offered through her thoughts, memories and feelings—from an internal focalization. With such a process the reader is able to follow Miranda closely, observing her struggle and the transformations which her captivity effects in her inner self.

Fowles claims that Miranda 'is an existentialist heroine groping for her own authenticity', but he adds that 'her tragedy is that she will never live to achieve it. Her triumph is that one day she would have done so' [R. Newquist, 'John Fowles', Counterpoint (1964)]. Elsewhere he comments:

I'm interested in the side of existentialism which deals with freedom: the business of whether we do have freedom, whether we do have free will, to what extent you can change your life, choose yourself, and all the rest of it. Most of my major characters have been involved in this 'Sartrian concept of authenticity and inauthenticity'. [Kerry McSweeney, Four Contemporary Novelists, 1983]

While Clegg makes use of his memoir primarily as a means of self-justification, Miranda on the other hand uses her diary in order to discover her self. Writing is for her a creative activity. Through introspection and self-criticism she is able to expose her old self and her narrative allows us to follow the transformations she is undergoing:

I want to use my feelings about life. I think and think down here. I understand things I haven't really thought about before.

I am beginning to understand life much better than most people of my age.

I'm growing up so quickly down here. Like a mushroom.

For Fowles, 'we must evolve to exist'. Contrasting with Clegg's spiritual inertia, deadness—subtly pointed out by his last name 'Clegg' which can be phonetically associated to the French 'clef', indicating his role as gaoler, but mainly in its meaning in dialect: a vampirish horsefly, and in its consonance with 'clog', suggesting heaviness and woodenness—Miranda is on the other hand to be seen as a symbol of moral growth, struggling to understand and become better. In The Aristos Fowles considers the following distinction: 'Adam is hatred of change', he 'is stasis or conservatism … Eve is the assumption of human responsibility, of the need for progress and the need to control progress … She is kinesis or progress'. Such distinction is clearly embodied in these two protagonists. Clegg (stasis or conservatism); Miranda (kinesis or progress).

Since she lives in the present of her captive world and she most desperately wants to escape from it, one sees Miranda making use of her memories, of her recollections of her past outside world, in order to escape, at least mentally if not physically, from her confined situation. She discloses this when she writes:

I felt I was going mad last night; so I wrote and wrote and wrote myself into the other world. To escape in spirit, if not in fact. To prove it still exists.

Remembering the past, and especially her relationship with G. P., helps her in her present confinement. It is through the introduction of a certain type of 'analepsis' or 'flashback'—designated by Genette as 'external', whose 'only function is to fill out the first narrative by enlightening the reader on one or another "antecedent"'—that Fowles permits his reader to know his protagonist better. Through such analepses one is in fact able to follow Miranda's progress from her 'old Ladymont self' into a new and better self, her growth through suffering and her striving for self-knowledge. On one occasion she even goes so far as to admit:

A strange thought: I would not want this not to have happened. Because if I escape I shall be a completely different and I think better person. Because if I don't escape; if something dreadful happened, I shall still know that the person I was and would have stayed if this hadn't happened was not the person I now want to be.

Being an artist with a creative temperament, Miranda's narrative voice is presented in her diary in various ways. She decides to use a variety of forms in her fiction including dialogue with stage directions, lists of thoughts and feelings and fictive letters. Her creativity can also be noticed in her use of language, offering a sharp contrast with her captor's. About her style Peter Wolfe rightly states [in John Fowles, Magus and Moralist, 1979] that 'Miranda's literary style gauges her personality, her values, and her ability to adapt to change'.

Throughout her diary Clegg has been referred to as one of 'the Many' or, as she derisively names him, one of the 'New People'—'the new-class people with their cars and their money and their tellies and their stupid vulgarities and their stupid crawling imitation of the bourgeoisie'—while she sees herself as one of 'the Few': 'a sort of band of people who have to stand against all the rest'. 'In this situation', Miranda claims, 'I'm a representative', but being a representative of 'the Few' does not mean that she is to be regarded as perfect and that the author's viewpoint is to be identified with his heroine's. Fowles himself draws our attention to this when he clearly asserts [in The Aristos]; 'That does not mean that she was perfect. Far from it she was arrogant in her ideas, a prig, a liberal-humanist snob, like so many university students'.

Miranda's flaws are apparent in her narrative. Like Clegg she makes use of clichés 'I love life so passionately, I never knew how much I wanted to live before', prefers avoiding verbal 'impropriety', and refers, for instance, to people by initials. What Fowles wants us to understand is that contrary to Clegg, who learns nothing, who cannot change or mature, 'if she had not died', he says about his heroine, 'she might have become something better, the kind of being humanity so desperately needs'. The author further explains his views on The Collector when he remarks:

The actual evil in Clegg overcame the potential good in Miranda. I did not mean by this that I view the future with a black pessimism, nor that a precious élite is threatened by the barbarian hordes. I meant simply that unless we face up to this unnecessary brutal conflict (based largely on an unnecessary envy on the one hand and an unnecessary contempt on the other) between the biological Few and the biological Many; unless we admit that we are not, and never will be, born equal, though we are all born with equal human rights; unless the Many can be educated out of their false assumption of inferiority and the Few out of their equally false assumption that biological superiority is a state of existence instead of what it really is, a state of responsibility—then we shall never arrive at a more just and happier world. [The Aristos]

With Miranda's second 'autodiegetic narration' Fowles enhances the unbridgeable gap that exists between her and her captor. Through her narrative, Clegg's version of the events is complemented and often corrected, striking contrasts and ironies becoming thus apparent. Events which have been previously narrated by Clegg are treated differently in Miranda's narrative, disclosing to us his distorted self. Throughout the novel Clegg and Miranda appear to misread each other constantly. When he expects some understanding from her, none is shown, and when she sympathizes with him, he is not able to see it. Their mutual incomprehension is illustrated by Miranda when she writes 'We'll never understand each other. We don't have the same sort of heart', and also by Clegg when at a certain point he declares: 'We could never come together, she could never understand me, I suppose she would say I never could have understood her, or would have anyhow'. Apart from the different treatment of the events, the intersection of the autodiegetic narrations primarily reveals the fundamental differences between these two antagonistic selves.

This narrative process through which the writer presents his two autodiegetic narrators is fundamental for an effective treatment of the subject and points primarily to the two different selves of the protagonists. In The Collector Fowles appears thus as an author in full control of his material offering, through an effective handling of two specific narrative devices—voice and focalization—an existential parable which delineates Clegg's destructive being and Miranda's creative becoming.