The fiction of John Fowles is concerned primarily with the search for mystery and self-knowledge. Without mystery, there is no real life, no passion to exist. To Fowles, "Mystery, or unknowing is energy."¹ Most of his characters begin without mystery, secure in their conventions and eventually are forced to see beyond the stale metaphors of their lives into the world of mystery. Some characters, like Nicholas Urfe in The Magus, eventually accept the existential responsibility of being—they are forced to see into the mystery, and they embrace it; others catch a glimpse of this passion and push it back beneath the conventions of their lives like David Williams in The Ebony Tower. Whichever way, almost every major character in Fowles's fiction is allowed—forced—to see the mystery of reality, and all are changed by it whether they accept the mystery or suppress it.

The Ebony Tower, which Fowles called Variations as a working title, further explores many of the fictional and philosophical situations put forth in The Magus. Variations on the quest for self-knowledge, variations on the godgame and absconding god themes, and variations on his use of mystery all occur in the novella, three short stories, and the translation of Marie de France's twelfth-century romance which make up the collection entitled The Ebony Tower. In this collection Fowles often sets up a timeless garden of Eden into which he places a character repressed by certain conventions. What ensues is Fowles's version of the Fall: man falls not from innocence to knowledge but from knowledge to mystery. We see this pattern first in The Magus, and it occurs here in the novella The Ebony Tower, in "Poor Koko," and in "The Cloud."

Another key variation is this collection is Fowles's use of the absconding god pattern that we see at the end of The Magus when Nicholas realizes: "It was logical, the perfect climax to the godgame. They had absconded, we were alone. . . . How could they be so incurious? So load the dice and yet leave the game."² This pattern is varied in every story in The Ebony Tower.

The fictional themes and variations explored in The Ebony Tower and The Magus have roots in a system of philosophical thought put forth by Fowles in The Aristos, a book of aphorisms which Fowles has described as "my own self-portrait in ideas . . . a self-description of a writer who is determined to remain free from all parties, classes, churches, cliques, and movements."³ Fowles believes that one of the greatest heresies and tyrannies of our time is the commonly held belief that only the specialist has a right to hold opinions—and then only in his field.⁴ In The Aristos Fowles presents his naked opinions and philosophies on a multitude of subjects ranging from the nature of mystery to religion to games. He presents his case in as dogmatic and unrhetorical a manner as possible. The result is a very clear roadmap to his system of thought, and since Fowles is a fiction writer of ideas, The Aristos is an invaluable informant to his fictional themes and variations. Here The Aristos will be used to inform three major patterns and variations that occur in the original works of Fowles's collection The Ebony Tower: his concept and use of mystery, his concept and use of the Fall, and his concept and use of the absconding god.

Fowles defines and redefines mystery for us in The Aristos. Every philosophical belief he holds can be reduced to its lowest common terms: the need for man to generate mystery in every aspect of his life. He writes in The Aristos: "Mystery or unknowing is energy. As soon as a mystery is explained it ceases to be a source of energy. . . . We are intended to solve much of the mystery; it is harmful to us. We have to invent protections against the sun in many situations; but to wish to destroy the sun? The easier mysteries, how at a superficial level things work mechanically, how things are 'caused,' have been largely solved. Many take these mysteries for the whole mystery. The price of tapping water into every home is that no one values water any more" (28). The protagonists in this collection of stories: David Williams, the narrator in "Poor Koko," Michael Jennings, and all the characters in "The Cloud" with the exception of Catherine need to learn the value of mystery: they need to learn to value water again.

David Williams is defined for us as a "fully abstract artist" who has been a studio teacher and lecturer and who is now a reviewer. We learn that he is well liked, has always been successful, and has a happy marriage. Fowles tells us in summation that "David was a young man who was above all tolerant, fair-minded and inquisitive."⁵ At our first view, we tend to see David as a sort of ideal, but he is soon starkly contrasted with the famous artist Henry Breasley, whose work David has come to review. Breasley is a fierce individualist, a representational painter who calls abstraction the "greatest betrayal in the history of art. . . . Triumph of the bloody eunuch" (36). Breasley is inarticulate, rude, and above all intolerant. We learn from Diana, one of Breasley's young live-in assistants, that "Henry thinks one shouldn't show toleration for things one believes are bad" (39). In every way Breasley is a contrast to Williams: the contrast becomes a conflict between reality and abstraction. Reality and Breasley stand for life, passion, and mystery; abstraction and Williams stand for convention, security, and death. Breasley tells Williams: "Don't hate, can't love. Can't love, can't paint" (40). Diana translates for him: "Making is speaking. . . . Art is a form of speech. Speech must be based on human need, not abstract theories of grammar" (40). The challenge has been made to David: throw off your conventions, your abstractions, and embrace reality and all its mystery. Conchis offers Nicholas the same challenge in The Magus when he forces Nicholas to see life as reality and to stop viewing it as art, as if he were a character in a novel. Conchis finally teaches Nicholas that man "needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solutions" (223). David never fully grasps this truth, but he is plunged into self-knowledge, and the test comes in the form of Eden and the Fall.

David goes to meet Breasley at Breasley's home which is located in the forest of Brittany. It is called Manoir de Coëtminais. Coët means "wood" or "forest." When David enters Coët, he sees two young women sunbathing naked in the garden. The women turn out to be Breasley's livein assistants who help him with everything from sex to painting. They are Diana and Anne, nicknamed "Mouse" and "Freak," and are often naked. A feeling of timelessness and innocence pervades the setting of this novella. At one point while David is watching the two women sunbathe, he reflects: "Another echo, this time of Gauguin; brown breasts and the garden of Eden. Strange, how Coët and its way of life seemed to compose itself so naturally into such moments, into the faintly mythic and timeless" (51). This setting is a variation of Bourani, the Edenic-like setting of The Magus. The effect of these settings are to lull the protagonist (and the reader as well) into a state of openness. He becomes more susceptible to things that would ordinarily be shocking to him and is prepared for the temptation in the garden. In The Magus the temptation is the beautiful ideal of womanhood: Lily/Julie. Because ideal, she is unreal, an illusion, and therefore something to transcend. In The Ebony Tower the temptation is another beautiful woman, yet a very real one: the Mouse. In the sunbathing scene mentioned above, the Mouse even offers an apple to David, making obvious the many suggestions of the Fall.

Fowles's variation of the Fall can be traced to The Aristos: "The enormous price of knowledge is the power to imagine and the consequent power to compare. The 'golden' age was the age before comparison; and if there had been a Garden of Eden and a Fall, they would have been when man could not compare and when he could" (60). Fowles expands this definition later: "I interpret the myth of the temptation of Adam in this way. Adam is hatred of change. . . . The Serpent is imagination, the power to compare, self-consciousness. Eve is the assumption of human responsibility, of the need for progress and the need to control progress. The Garden of Eden is an impossible dream. The Fall is the essential processus of evolution. . . . Adam is stasis, or conservatism; Eve is kinesis, or progress" (165). Seen in these terms, David Williams falls from the security of his life and conventions to mystery, change. The temptress is Eve (the Mouse, nicknamed by Breasley to combine "Muse" with the "O" shaped vulva) who offers him kinesis through comparison. Breasley is a god figure (like Conchis in The Magus, which Fowles wanted to title The Godgame), standing for a counterpole of existence for David to compare himself with. David at the end of the novella feels like "the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his true lost self. . . . Underlying all this there stood the knowledge that he would not change" (96). David remains Adam; he falls only briefly: "a moment's illusion; her reality just one more unpursued idea kept among old sketchbooks at the back of a studio cupboard" (98).

We see this re-enactment of the garden and the Fall again and again in Fowles's canon. One should note that it is always men who fall in Fowles's work, and almost always women who tempt and educate the men (an exception occurs in "Poor Koko"). A critic has asserted that without equality one cannot gain entrance into mystery and points to the master-slave relationship set up in The Magus (which recalls The Collector) as representing a struggle for equality.⁶ Women always control the relationship no matter how subservient they appear. The argument rings true for Alison and Nicholas in The Magus, for the Mouse and David in The Ebony Tower, and for Catherine and Peter in "The Cloud" (although Peter does not gain any knowledge of mystery), and for Isobel and Jennings in "The Enigma." Fowles tells us in The Aristos that women "know more about human nature, more about mystery, and more about keeping passion alive" than men (95). In "The Enigma," a parody of the detective story, Michael Jennings, a detective attempting to solve the mystery of the missing Parliament member Marcus Fielding, learns that some more important mysteries should remain unsolved. Isobel Dodgson, the Eve of the story, is described by Jennings as "someone alive, where everyone else had been dead, or playing dead; someone who lived in the present, not the past" (199). She takes Jennings from the rational world of solving mysteries, of finding and establishing facts, to a final understanding that "the tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean—" (218).

An exception to women tempting men with the understanding of mystery occurs in the second original work of the collection, "Poor Koko." In this story we have another example of the unlived life. Like David Williams and Nicholas Urfe, the anonymous narrator of "Poor Koko" has spent his whole life behind conventions, always warding off reality. He says, "Nor can I deny that books—writing them, reading, reviewing, helping to get them into print—have been my life rather more than life itself (131). The narrator, an elderly man of words, is quite conventional and trite in his use of language, and his use of stale metaphors and dated expressions of speech have already been pointed out.⁷ The narrator, like David Williams, is plunged into an Edenic setting; this time it is a small quaint cottage in North Dorset lent to him by friends. He has gone there from his home in London to finish writing a biography of Thomas Love Peacock. Again the pattern of the Fall is re-enacted: the narrator is forced to fall from security to mystery by a young man who comes to rob the cottage. During the robbery, the young man treats the narrator very considerately. He gently ties him up before he leaves and appears to intend no harm. Then, for no explainable reason, he burns the narrator's only manuscript and all his notes. The effect of this act violently jars the narrator from his conventional world into a state of passion and unknowing. The next year of his life is spent trying to solve the mystery, and the writing of the story is his conscious attempt to understand it.

The narrator makes the mistake (from Fowles's perspective) of trying to solve the mystery; however, the attempt provides him with a source of energy he has apparently never harnessed before. He attempts to rewrite the book and tells us: "I found that my memory was a good deal better than I had previously suspected. Some kind of challenge was involved" (158). Since Fowles is the author, the narrator's book should be far superior from memory, without the security and staleness of his notes, than it would have been otherwise. Clearly, the narrator has grown from his encounter with the unknown. Although he insists on formulating theories as to why the robber committed his gratuitous act, he closes the story with what he calls "my incomprehensible epigraph." He says that this shall have the last word—a fitting ending to Fowles's story and one that the narrator could not have thought of without Fowles's help.

Fowles often uses the technique of the absconding god in his fiction: we see it in The Magus and with variation in every story of The Ebony Tower. The technique is central to his art and to his thinking. He writes in The Aristos: "If there had been a creator, his second act would have been to disappear" (19). The mystery and hazard so vital to Fowles's view of life is impossible with a conventional, intrusive, and omniscient god. "A god who revealed his will, who 'heard' us, who answered our prayers, who was propitiable, the kind of god simple people like to imagine would be desirable: such a god would destroy all our hazard, all our purpose and all our happiness" (18). Fowles, in playing the godgame of being an author, tries to give his characters as much free choice as possible, which the end of so much of his work illustrates. At the end of The Magus we are unsure whether Nicholas ends up with Alison or not. That Catherine kills herself is implied in "The Cloud," but we can never be perfectly sure. Fowles discusses such ambiguity in an interview: "I must confess I like endings where the reader has a certain element of choice, and can feel: 'Well it might have gone this way or it might have gone the other way.'"⁸ In order to educate his protagonists to a level where they can make their own decisions, Fowles often employs a god figure such as Conchis. In order to keep the character's options open, to maintain a high element of hazard and mystery, the god figure must disappear and leave the character with pure freedom of choice.

The most literal example of the absconding god figure in Fowles's fiction is Conchis in The Magus. In naked terms Nicholas realizes "it was logical, the perfect climax to the godgame. They had absconded" (666). In The Ebony Tower the variations on this theme are more subtle and require a looser definition of the "absconding god." In the novella, Henry Breasley is a god figure—he literally owns the forest surrounding Coët and tells David, "Rather proud of my forest. Worth a dekko" (45). Since the garden of Eden is recreated within that forest and the Fall occurs there, the suggestion of Breasley as god is a logical one. Another suggestion of Breasley as god occurs when Anne is angry over Diana's falling out with David. She refers in anger to Breasley as "that sadistic old shit up there" (91). Breasley, so central to the dramatic and philosophical conflict of the novella, disappears (71), well before the actual Fall scene takes place. In a sense, Breasley has created the conditions for the Fall and then absconded. He never enters the novella again, and thus David is existentially free to choose and compare for himself.

In the next story, "Poor Koko," the technique is varied even further. We might refer to the robber as the "absconding satan." Fowles's belief in counterpoles is so strong that we can assume god and the serpent to be interdependent. In The Aristos he writes: "The obvious counterpole of an idea is the contrary idea. The world is round; the world is not round. . . . Now the contrary idea (the world is not round) is at first sight the most dangerous enemy of the pole idea; but all those subsidiary counterpoles (other concerns; other events, other exigencies, other ideas) that distract the mind from the pole idea endanger it far more; in fact to the extent that they do not signal it, but submerge it, they reduce it to nothingness. There is thus a paradoxical sense in which the contrary idea signals and supports the idea to which it is superficially opposed" (83). The robber creates the mystery, as god figures do in Fowles, and he also acts as tempter, as serpent or satan figures do. The difference is not that important; what is essential from Fowles's perspective is that mystery has been created.

Absolutely necessary to the existential lesson behind this story is that the robber absconds and is never apprehended. His gratuitous act and his subsequent disappearance force the narrator into the unknowing, the vital energy of existence. The robber teaches the narrator that the "nightmare is the reality" (156)—the existential lesson Fowles imparts to us. To hide behind stale metaphors is to abstract reality, to commit the sin that David Williams commits. Because the robber disappears without a trace, the narrator learns or begins to learn that the nightmare is the reality; stale metaphors will not hide it.

In the next story of the collection, "The Enigma," we see a missing member of Parliament in the role of the absconding god. In an interview Fowles provides us with a neat piece of evidence for Marcus Fielding as a god figure: "I've always felt that if God existed he'd probably be very much like a conservative member of Parliament, and therefore a man to be avoided."⁹ The parallels between Fielding and God go further: Fielding never appears in the pages of the story, as God never appears in the world He created; the second act of Fowles's god would be to disappear. Fielding has created a perfect mystery (as God has done) and left purely without a trace.

The story begins in much the way a conventional detective story would begin, in a scientific manner, quoting statistics on the types of missing persons, but the story soon proves to be quite a switch from the conventional (Fowles wrote in The Aristos: "Yet man is starved of mystery: so starved that even the most futile enigmas have their power still. If no one will write new detective stories, then people will still read the old ones"—108). The people of the story with the exception of Isobel are all conventional, conservative, and in Fowles's view livers of the unlived life. The search for Fielding is foreshadowed by the story's beginning: it will be purely rational and based on facts. The message here is clearly that this approach will be futile, as it proves to be. Man cannot solve the mystery of God or of existence with rational means. This lesson Isobel finally teaches to Jennings, the detective. She accepts Fowles's theory of the absconding god and tells Jennings: "Theologians talk about the Deus absconditus—the god who went missing? Without explaining why. That's why we've never forgotten him" (214).

The final message of the story is that the search for the absconding god is irrelevant besides being impossible. Reality, the human relationship, is what is important, Fowles ends the story with a poetic flourish in stark contrast to the way he began: "The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean—indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out" (218).

"The Cloud" shares many thematic similarities with the other stories in The Ebony Tower, but it is a very elusive work. Most commentators on Fowles shy away from this story, one calling it "Fowles's most difficult work to penetrate, certainly the most opaque in The Ebony Tower'."¹⁰ The story is very impressionistic, and the focus is constantly shifting, reflected in the verb tense which changes from past to present at least twice, remaining mostly in the present. Note the impressionistic use of color, light, and shadow in the opening paragraph: "Already a noble day, young summer soaring, vivid with promise, drenched in blue and green, had divided them, on the terrace beside the mill, into sun and shadow. . . . Inky blue dragonflies fluttered past; then a butterfly of pale sulphur-yellow. From across the river, one saw a quietly opulent bourgeois glade of light, bright figures, red and aquamarine parasol blazoned on top . . . with the word Martini; the white cast-iron furniture, sun on stone, the jade green river, the dense and towering lighter green walls of willows and poplars. Downstream, the dim rush of the weir, and a hidden warbler; a rich, erratic, unEnglish song" (221). This passage is really a word-painting. The scattered details, the use of shadow, light, and color, the blurred and then suddenly poignant details all produce the effect of an impressionistic painting. The entire story follows in this vein. Conversations are given only in part. Details and important exposition is withheld. The whole story flutters on the page, moving in and out of focus. In Fowles's work, language and metaphor are always once removed from reality, and this work seems to be an attempt to capture reality as wholly as possible. One gets the sense that Fowles is sorry he had to do it with words.

The story shares an Edenic setting and a variation of the absconding god/satan with the other stories in the collection. It is set in a timeless forest setting in France, and references to snakes, lizards, and serpents abound. The first sighting of a snake provokes a response from Paul: "Oh well. Proves it's paradise, I suppose" (223). Catherine, the temptress/god figure in this story is very early identified with snakes. "Catherine lies silent behind her dark glasses, like a lizard; sun-ridden, storing, self-absorbed; much more like the day than its people" (224).

The Fall that is recreated here is much less obvious than in the other stories. Part of the difficulty involved with fitting the story into the pattern of varied themes is the total lack of didacticism in "The Cloud." No character learns anything. Catherine is the only character who seems to possess any knowledge of mystery and existence, but she enters the story already equipped with such knowledge. The Fall is only implied. Catherine, who literally tempts Peter in the climactic seduction scene, metaphorically tempts everyone with her withdrawn, enigmatic behavior. At the end of the story, Catherine disappears. A cloud appears, "a mysterious cloud, the kind of cloud one will always remember because it is so anomalous" (271), and we assume that Catherine has committed suicide. The last lines of the story recall the fairy tale that Catherine has told to Emma: "They disappear among the poplars. The meadow is empty. The river, the meadow, the cliff and the cloud. The princess calls, but there is no one, now, to hear her" (274). The sense of emptiness suggests Catherine's suicide. The Fall, the plunge from knowing into unknowing, is implied: Catherine, who has brought enigma and mystery to the other characters, has disappeared, and we assume the other characters will be plunged into mystery by the discovery of her death.

Appropriately, Fowles placed "The Cloud" at the end of The Ebony Tower. Its elusiveness, its sense of immediate reality reflected in its present tense, force the reader into the unknowing. Even the literary critic, that analyzing, rational animal, is plunged into mystery. The story remains an enigma; we are left wanting more. It is a fitting end to a collection of stories by a man who wrote in The Aristos that "Our universe is the best possible because it can contain no Promised Land; no point where we could have all we imagine. We are designed to want: with nothing to want, we are like windmills in a world without wind" (19).

Notes

¹ John Fowles, The Aristos (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 28. Subsequent references are to this edition.

² John Fowles, The Magus (New York: Dell, 1978), p. 666. Subsequent references are to this edition.

³ John Fowles, on the dust jacket of The Aristos.

⁴ Fowles, The Aristos, p. 8.

⁵ John Fowles, The Ebony Tower (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 15. Subsequent references are to this edition.

⁶ Lucien Le Bouille, "John Fowles: Looking for Guidelines," Journal of Modern Literature, 8, No. 2 (1980-81), 203-10.

⁷ Kerry McSweeney, "John Fowles's Variations in The Ebony Tower," Journal of Modern Literature, 8, No. 2 (1980-81), 303-24.

⁸ Robert Robinson, "Giving the Reader a Choice—A Conversation with John Fowles," The Listener, 31 October 1974, pp. 584-85.

⁹ John F. Baker, "John Fowles," Publisher's Weekly, 25 November 1974, pp. 6-7.

¹⁰ Barry Olshen, John Fowles (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), p. 103.