I

If you were to ask professors of English literature to name a few contemporary British short stories which are of comparable interest and importance to those by Jorge Luis Borges or Robert Coover, James Joyce or Katherine Mansfield, you would very often receive no reply. A look at recent research confirms the impression that either no outstanding British short stories have been published during the last two or three decades or that, if these works exist, they have so far not been duly recognized.

There are many excellent studies of the contemporary American short story and Die amerikanische short story der gegenwart (1976), a collection of essays edited by Peter Freese, contains about a dozen interpretations of American short stories published after 1960; but hardly any corresponding studies of the contemporary British short story have been published. Thus, Karl Heinz Göller and Gerhard Hoffmann finish their collection Die englische Kurzgeschichte (1973) with interpretations of short fiction by John Wain, Alan Sillitoe and John Brunner, none of which was published later than 1960. When Walter Allen published his survey The Short Story in English in 1981 the situation had not changed, the most recent British author of short fiction covered in Allen's book being Alan Sillitoe. Even the eight-volume compendium Critical Survey of Short Fiction published in the same year does not go beyond Angus Wilson in its chapter on "British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries."¹

A similar lack of recognition for the recent British short story may be inferred from the most widely distributed collections of short fiction. Thus the popular Penguin Book of English Short Stories, edited by Christopher Dolley, which was first published in 1967 and last reprinted in 1987, ends with a story by Angus Wilson published in 1949.² There was a major change, however, when, in 1987, Malcolm Bradbury edited The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, in which British short fiction of the last twenty years is well represented.

As far as I know, there are only two recent studies which devote more than a few pages to the British short story after 1960: an article by Walter Evans and a chapter in a book by Clare Hanson, both of which were published in 1985.³ It is symptomatic, however, that these authors have, on the whole, selected completely different authors for their analysis. Clare Hanson restricts her chapter on "Postmodernist and Other Fictions," apart from Beckett and Borges, to Ian McEwan, Adam Mars-Jones and Clive Sinclair, whereas Walter Evans regards Angela Carter, Christine Brooke-Rose, John Fowles, Giles Gordon, Wilson Harris, Gabriel Josipovici, and Ian McEwan as the most interesting and innovative contemporary writers of short fiction in Britain. The fact that only one writer is represented in both studies suggests that either hardly any contemporary British writer of short stories has so far won general recognition or that no outstanding British short stories have been published after 1960.

This preliminary impression is supported by the apparent neglect of the short story by some of the leading contemporary British novelists. Some of them, like Iris Murdoch, appear not to have published any short stories at all, while others like Anthony Burgess or William Golding, for example, have written only very few stories which are neither well-known nor representative of their achievement as writers of outstanding fiction. Again, one gets the impression that the situation of the contemporary British short story is quite different from that of short fiction in the United States, in Ireland, or in other English-speaking countries of the world.

All this reminds one of the situation of English short fiction in the nineteenth century. The American short story of that period soon gained international recognition, and some American writers like Edgar Allan Poe even specialized in the short story rather than the novel. The leading writers of fiction in Victorian England either chose not to write short stories at all or, like Dickens and Hardy, contributed only marginally to the production of short fiction. A change took place, of course, around the turn of the century when Kipling and Conrad and, soon afterwards, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield produced short fiction which was not only able to compete with the best American works in this genre, but also to innovate the short story and adapt it to the poetics of modernism. But even so, most of these authors cannot simply be classified as British, as they were born or lived in other parts of the world—Anglo-India, Poland, Ireland, and New Zealand. When, in the thirties and forties of this century, the United States again took over the lead in the production of short stories, the British contributions to this genre still remained worthy of attention, but were certainly less innovative and exciting than the short fiction published in the United States.

This applies even more strongly to the short stories published in Britain during the fifties by authors like Graham Greene, Alan Sillitoe, John Wain or even Angus Wilson. One might, therefore, tend towards the conclusion that there has been a decline of the British short story during the last few decades. This impression would be confirmed by H. E. Bates, who, when he published the first edition of The Modern Short Story in 1941, was still quite optimistic as far as the future of the British short story was concerned, but who in the preface to the second edition published in 1972 stated that the innovative impulse in British short fiction had declined.⁴

Of course it is difficult—and perhaps too early—to an-swer the question why this is so. Possible answers, however, may be sought in various directions.

First of all one may point out that there has been a general decline of British fiction during the last few decades, which the short story shares with the novel. The main reason for this development, in its turn, may be seen in an aversion to innovative fiction, which is often said to be characteristic of the average English reader as well as the writer of today. Thus David Lodge writes:

There is a good deal of evidence that the English literary mind is peculiarly committed to realism, and resistant to non-realistic literary modes to an extent that might be described as prejudice. It is something of a commonplace of recent literary history, for instance, that the 'modern' experimental novel, represented diversely by Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, which threatened to break up the stable synthesis of the realistic novel, was repudiated by two subsequent generations of English novelists.⁵

Malcolm Bradbury gives a similar diagnosis:

where the novel in other countries changed and advanced, in England it retreated: there was, to quote from the title of another of the books, a 'reaction against experiment' which separated English fiction from other developments. In particular, there was a reversion to provincialism and little Englandism, an 'I Like It Here' philosophy that asserted, in effect, that Joyce and Woolf, Proust and James, hadn't or shouldn't have happened, [ . . . ] the serious contemporary novel was therefore being written somewhere else: in France, or Germany, or the States. The serious young reader therefore held in his hands Butor or Barth or Barthelme or Beckett or Borges, and the homebrew was largely offered either as light relief or as evidence that we could survive locally in the event of a holocaust.⁶

Both Lodge and Bradbury do not mention short fiction—which may be symptomatic—and moreover they have in common an assumption which might be questioned: that good fiction today has to be innovative, non-realistic, experimental. However true that may be or not, they offer one explanation to our problem. One might of course object that experimental fiction has partly come into fashion again in Britain in recent years; Annegret Maack in her book Der experimentelle englische Roman der Gegenwart (1984) has assembled an overwhelming amount of material to prove this point. Even so, few experimental English novels of the last two decades have won international recognition comparable to that of North or South American novels, and British short fiction seems to share the fate of the British contemporary novel.

Nevertheless this explanation is not sufficient. It does not explain why so many contemporary British writers do not write short fiction at all or do so only marginally. One reason is certainly that the media for the publication of fiction in Britain are far less interested in short stories than they are, for example, in the United States. Though there are some periodicals in Britain which do publish short stories, none is comparable to The Kenyon Review or The New Yorker, which in the United States have become institutions by having printed a great amount of more or less innovative short fiction for various decades. This would also explain why some innovative British authors of short fiction published their first stories in American magazines.⁷ At the same time British publishers do not seem very interested in publishing collections of short stories. Edward Hyams undertook an experiment to prove this point by approaching, under the mask of a promising, but yet unknown young writer, some leading English publishers and literary agents and offering them a collection of short stories. In most cases, he found no interest at all, and in some cases he was even advised to write novels instead.⁸

A more thorough investigation into the reasons for this apparent neglect of the short story in Britain remains yet to be written. The same applies to a critical assessment of the British short stories written after 1960, a field in which the chapters by Clare Hanson and Walter Evans mentioned above mark only a very first step.

Neither of these tasks will be attempted in the present paper. Instead, a different approach will be taken. Against the background of these introductory remarks, I shall give an analysis of John Fowles' "The Enigma" (1974), which deserves to be ranked among the most interesting and best English short stories of the last twenty years and, what is more important, may be shown to be representative of the present situation of the contemporary British short story or at least of one of its most characteristic forms.

So far, Fowles has published only one collection of short stories, a volume entitled The Ebony Tower, which came out in 1974 and which contains, among other stories, "The Enigma." Thus, short fiction has remained a marginal genre in Fowles' oeuvre—a fact which is just as representative of the situation of short fiction in Britain today as "The Enigma" itself.

II

The beginning of "The Enigma" is deceptively familiar:

The commonest kind of missing person is the adolescent girl, closely followed by the teenage boy. The majority in this category come from working-class homes, and almost invariably from those where there is serious parental disturbance. There is another minor peak in the third decade of life, less markedly working-class, and constituted by husbands and wives trying to run out on marriages or domestic situations they have got bored with. The figures dwindle sharply after the age of forty; older cases of genuine and lasting disappearance are extremely rare, and again are confined to the very poor—and even there to those, near vagabond, without close family.

When John Marcus Fielding disappeared, he therefore contravened all social and statistical probability.⁹

The reader thus learns at the very outset that the sudden disappearance of John Marcus Fielding, 57-year-old Tory M.P., is the central enigma of the story. Apart from the fact that in conventional detective fiction the central enigma is nearly always supplied by a mysterious murder, the following narration seems to follow closely the conventions of the genre, which demand that the major part of the story should be taken up by the investigation carried out by the police or by a private investigator and that all story elements should be strictly functional and lead towards the solution of the central enigma. In Fowles' story the investigation is first conducted by a special squad from New Scotland Yard and later on, when they have proved to be completely unsuccessful and no one really wants the mystery solved any more, by a police detective called Michael Jennings.

Also, the methods of investigation are meant to seem familiar to the reader of detective fiction: the action mainly consists of a series of interviews and interrogations of the missing man's family, his secretary, and his colleagues. Moreover, Fowles keeps emphasizing the kinship of his story to conventional detective fiction by using terms usually employed in this genre (like "evidence," "red herring," pp. 204, 215), by lists of clues and possible solutions (pp. 198-200), or by intertextual allusions to other authors of detective fiction (references to Agatha Christie, pp. 236, 237 and to the "rules" of the detective story, p. 232). Also by locating the story partly in London and partly in an upper-middle-class country house Fowles is following a convention established by English writers of detective fiction as early as in the so-called Golden Age of the genre.

At the same time, the story creates the impression that it is also following another code: that of realist fiction—i. e. of fiction that does not draw the reader's attention to its own fictionality but to the social reality of a specific time and place. This impression is clearly established by the opening paragraph quoted above, which is a general statement on the statistics of missing persons in what resembles nonfictional prose. In the further course of the story the sociopolitical background to its action is more strongly elaborated than in detective fiction of the usual kind. The beginning of the story is set at a precise time: at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, July 13th, 1973; that is, one year before its first publication. The political background of this period, in which Marcus Fielding was active as a prominent Tory backbencher, is evoked by references to Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Enoch Powell, to political scandals, affairs and other events of this time like the Lambton-Jellicoe case,¹⁰ Watergate,¹¹ the Lonrho affair,¹² and the London letter-bomb epidemic of August 1973.¹³ The political tensions between Marcus Fielding and his son Peter, who is characterized as "vaguely NL (New Left)" and "temporary pink" (p. 206), also help to place the story firmly in the period right after 1968.

Thus the story gives the reader the impression that it is following a familiar pattern and that it will end, as a true detective story ought to, in the discovery of a surprising solution to the enigma of Marcus Fielding's disappearance, and, probably, in a solution with a political point. But after Fleet Street has declared the Fielding case dead, after Michael Jennings' superiors are no longer interested in a solution, and after Jennings has interviewed all the likely informants, the story imperceptibly takes a different turn when Jennings sets out to interview Isobel Dodgson, the girl friend of the missing man's son.

Michael Jennings has ruled out kidnapping, political abduction or a fit of amnesia as possible causes for Marcus Fielding's disappearance. After realizing, therefore, that the only explanation may be a voluntary act of the missing man, Jennings has been trying in vain to find a motive for such a sudden decision. Apparently, Fielding played to perfection all the roles demanded of him—that of the reliable Tory politician, of a committed country squire, of a faithful husband, and of a good father—making it thereby improbable that he could have become a dropout of his own free will. By not allowing anyone to see behind the "facade" (p. 222) of his roles, however, Fielding also made it just as impossible to say anything about his true identity as if he were an actor seen only on the stage (p. 210). All the people whom Jennings has interviewed have confirmed how perfectly Fielding played his various roles, and none of these people is able to give any indication of that crack in the facade of this wealthy, successful man which Jennings is so desperately looking for. But in any case, Fielding seems to have been a man who was permanently keeping "reality at bay" (p. 208), who was not very much "alive" or "real" himself.

Isobel Dodgson appears to Jennings to be quite different, not only from Marcus Fielding, but also from his whole family and social class: "He had an immediate impression of someone alive, where everyone else had been dead, or playing dead" (p. 217), of someone who was able to be herself (p. 227). Although Isobel had met Fielding only a few times, Jennings expects her to help him to understand the missing man's psyche because being so "alive" herself, she may have recognized whether and how Fielding was "alive" behind his conventional façade and thus may give a psychological clue to the solution of the enigma.

Nevertheless, as far as evidence is concerned, Isobel can give Jennings only the tiniest clue; Fielding was last seen in the British Library before he disappeared, apparently a completely unplanned visit. On the evening before his disappearance, Isobel had told Fielding that she would be working in the reading room of the British Library the following day. Thus, the possibility arises that Fielding might have wanted to see the girl, perhaps in order to ask her to help him to disappear. But as Isobel did not work in the British Library on that day after all, they did not meet, which means that another chain of reasoning has landed in yet another dead end.

Isobel's next move in trying to provide an explanation is of a completely different kind and seems to subvert the realistic texture of the story which Fowles has so carefully been building up. She confronts Jennings with the following statement: "'Nothing is real. All is fiction'" (ibid.).

The policeman of course does not understand this sweeping, apparently postmodernist statement, and so Isobel explains:

Lateral thinking. Let's pretend everything to do with the Fieldings, even you and me sitting here now, is in a novel. A detective story. Yes? Somewhere there's someone writing us, we're not real, (ibid.)

Freed from the restrictions of reality, Isobel then goes on to develop various endings a novelist might give to a story in which she, Jennings and Marcus Fielding figure as fictional characters, which she then evaluates according to aesthetic criteria. First of all she dismisses "'the deus ex machina possibility'" because it is "'not good art'" (ibid.). She then develops a scenario in which Fielding meets her in the British Library and she helps him to go into hiding, but she rejects this ending as well, because it is not imaginative enough. Finally she develops a scenario which "'disobeys the unreal literary rules'" of the detective story and does not end, as conventional detective stories do, "'with everything explained'" (p. 232). This breaking of the rules may take place when the central character takes on a life of his own when he walks out on the writer who has created him. In this particular scenario this may mean, according to Isobel:

There was an author in his [Fielding's] life. In a way. Not a man. A system, a view of things? Something that had written him. Had really made him just a character in a book. [ . . . ] So in the end there's no freedom left. Nothing he can choose. Only what the system says. [ . . . ] He's like something written by someone else, a character in fiction. Everything is planned. Mapped out. He's like a fossil—while he's still alive, (pp. 232f.)

If the Marcus Fielding of this scenario realizes all this and wants to get out of "the book," he must logically want to disappear without leaving any traces, without the mystery being solved. "'If he's traced, found, then it all crumbles again. He's back in the book, being written. A nervous breakdown. A nutcase'" (pp. 234f). This version of the story would, therfore, have to end with Fielding killing himself and nobody ever finding out.

The ending of the story, into which Isobel's version of how things may have happened is put in the form of a mise en abyme, is just as open. The Fielding case is never solved, and there is only an ending to the story of Isobel and Jennings: at the end, they have dinner and make love.

It must have become clear by now that towards the end, "The Enigma" takes on typical characteristics of what has been called the postmodernist way of writing:

—the dividing line between fiction and reality seems to be deconstructed,

—fiction turns into metafiction (and here it is of course symptomatic that Isobel is a would-be novelist; perhaps her surname Dodgson is even an allusion to Lewis Carroll, who anticipated postmodernist techniques and views in the nineteenth century),

—the mise en abyme, by which fictions are interpolated into the fictional 'reality' of the story,

—the open ending or rather the alternative endings if one takes the scenarios developed by Isobel into account,

—the deconstruction of the pattern of the detective story so frequent in postmodern writing.

But the impression that the realistic texture of the story is insidiously subverted by the use of these postmodernist techniques is misleading. Marcus Fielding is for Isobel by no means a fictional character who walked out on his author (like the characters in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-two Birds).¹⁴ Rather Isobel is using a postmodernist convention from the realm of fiction in order to explain why the "real" Marcus Fielding may have walked out on the sociopolitical system which he had faithfully served for such a long time. It is therefore significant that she is using the convention of the character walking out on its author only as a fiction or as a comparison to make her point:

—"'Let's pretend everything to do with the Fieldings [ . . . ] is in a novel'" (p. 229),

—"'There was an author in his life. In a way. Not a man. A system, a view of things?'" (p. 232),

—"'He's like something written by someone else, a character in fiction'" (p. 233),

—"'He feels more and more like this minor character in a bad book'" (p. 234).¹⁵

Thus it becomes clear that the statement "'Nothing is real.All is fiction'" is itself a fiction—a fiction which helps Isobel to make two points: first she implies that fiction may very well be true to life and help us to understand reality, perhaps even more so than other forms of discourse, by its capacity for "lateral thinking"; and second, she suggests a psychological interpretation for Marcus Fielding's disappearance. This explanation leads us to the philosophical assumptions behind Fowles' fiction. In The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) Fowles compared the well-adapted Victorians to fossils, because they have lost their freedom and have ceased to be "alive." Sarah is the only character who succeeds in committing the "leap" into freedom, whereas Charles does not have the courage to "leap" and to become "alive." "The Enigma" is based on the same existentialist position. Marcus Fielding may have felt that he, too, may have become "like a fossil" (p. 233) by being "just a high-class cog in a phony machine" (p. 234). Paradoxically, however, his "leap" into becoming "alive" may have meant suicide for him, whereas Isobel and Jennings become "alive" by their mutual love across the boundaries of class, political views, and education.

There is even a third point behind Isobel's statements. Literature may become "fossilized" as well as life by following dead conventions, and it is by breaking the conventions that literature may become alive and at the same time true to life.

All this distinguishes "The Enigma" sharply from works of experimental, postmodernist fiction in which the conventions of detective fiction are radically deconstructed. As has repeatedly been observed, authors like Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Peter Handke, Thomas Pynchon or Vladimir Nabokov have frequently used the pattern of detective fiction in order to subvert the basic premises on which it is based. They have repeatedly tried to demonstrate that human reason is not compatible with the enigma of reality and, at the same time, that literature is not able to represent reality.¹⁶ "The Enigma," however, begins as a story in the realist tradition, then for a moment seems to topple over into experimental, self-reflexive and anti-illusionist fiction, only in order to return, admittedly on a different level, to the context of social realism with which it began.

Though Fowles "quotes" various postmodernist conventions, "The Enigma" resembles much more closely a story-within-the-story told by the detective Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930). Here, seemingly quite out of context, Sam Spade narrates how a man called Flitcraft walked out on his family and on his job quite out of the blue without leaving any traces, exactly like Marcus Fielding in "The Enigma." The point Sam Spade wants to make by this story is that human behaviour is very often not rational and that therefore the rationalist assumptions behind the conventional detective story cannot adequately cope with it. But there is another point to Sam Spade's story: years after his "leap" into the unknown, Flitcraft is discovered by accident in a town far away from his previous domicile; he has settled down to a similar job and to a family exactly like the one he left years ago. This seems to imply that, though the assumptions behind conventional detective fiction are too simplistic to help us to understand human motivation, there is a rational pattern behind human actions after all, and this pattern can also be represented in literature. Even though the missing man in "The Enigma" is not found and the enigma of his disappearance is not solved, there seems to be a similar assumption behind Fowles' story, thus connecting it more strongly with the earlier experiments in detective fiction by Hammett, Dürrenmatt and others, than with the more radical deconstructions of the genre in, for example, Pale Fire or The Crying of Lot 49.

III

For all these reasons, "The Enigma" can be called representative of contemporary British fiction and of the British short story in particular. There have been two traditions of British short fiction: a tradition characterized by social realism and a tradition characterized by experimentation and an emphasis on aesthetic, rather than mimetic qualities. The short story in Britain first acquired an international reputation during the period of High Modernism, when it broke with the tradition of social realism and conventional storytelling. But on the whole, in short fiction perhaps more strongly than in the novel, the strong point of British authors was not the experimental, the phantastic or the metafictional story but the story firmly rooted within the tradition of realism.

Even after 1960, in British short fiction works of both kinds have stood side by side. "The Enigma," as we have seen, tries to amalgamate, though perhaps not quite successfully, these two traditions.¹⁷ Nevertheless, the disquieting assumptions of postmodernism subvert the realistic texture of the story only temporarily, and in the end, as we have also seen, the realistic texture is established again. In this manner, the disturbing implications of statements like "'Nothing is real. All is fiction'" are "domesticated" again.

This "domestication" of postmodernism is to be found in many other contemporary British short stories, and in novels as well.¹⁸ Readers may prefer this kind of fiction for its avoidance of radical experimentation, or they may find it unexciting in comparison to the more daring fiction by foreign authors. But one might agree at least on this: that these texts in their avoidance of radical positions are very English. This applies to "The Enigma" as well.

Notes

¹Critical Survey of Short Fiction, ed. Frank N. Magill, 8 vols. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1981ff), vol. 2, pp. 513-27. This statement also applies to the article "Short Fiction Since 1950," vol. 1, pp. 278-322 in this handbook. Even the dictionary of authors in this compendium fails to mention some of the leading contemporary writers of short fiction in Britain.

²The Second Book of English Short Stories, ed. Christopher Dolley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 [1972]) also does not go beyond Angus Wilson, Muriel Spark and Kingsley Amis. Since the end of the 1970s Penguin has also published a paperback magazine of contemporary short stories under the title Granta.

³ "The English Short Story in the Seventies," in Dennis Vannatta (ed.), The English Short Story 1945-1980: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne, 1985), pp. 120-72; "Postmodernist and Other Fictions," in Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 140-72. Another exception is Birgit Moosmüller's M.A. thesis "Postmodern Aspekte in der englischen Short Story der Gegenwart" (typescript, München 1988), to which the present article is indebted for some valuable information.

⁴ H. E. Bates, The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey (Boston, Mass.: The Writer, 1972 [1941]), p. 9.

⁵ "The Novelist at the Crossroads," in The Novel Today: Contemporary-Writers on Modern Fiction, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 84-110, here p. 88.

⁶ "The State of Fiction: A Symposium," contribution by Malcolm Bradbury, The New Review, 5, No. 1 (Summer 1978), 24-27, here 25.

⁷ This applies, for example, to some of the stories by Ian McEwan (cf. Evans, "The English Short Story in the Seventies," p. 121).

⁸ "The International Symposium on the Short Story: Part Four," contribution by Edward Hyams on England, The Kenyon Review, 32 (1970), 89-95, here 94f.

⁹ All quotations are taken from John Fowles, The Ebony Tower (London: Pan Books, 1986 [1974]), pp. 185-239, here p. 187.

¹⁰ Pages 189, 195; in 1973, Anthony Lord Lambton, junior minister in charge of Royal Air Force affairs, and Earl Jellicoe, Conservative Leader in the House of Lords, had to resign after The News of the World had reported about their connections with prostitutes (see "Pressing Hard," Newsweek, June 18, 1973, pp. 15f.).

¹¹ Page 208; the Watergate affair began in 1972 and led to Nixon's resignation in August, 1974.

¹² Page 201; for details on this affair, in which the Lonrho (London and Rhodesian Mining and Land) Company and the "adventurer capitalist" "Tiny" Rowland figured prominently, see Anthony Sampson, The Changing Anatomy of Britain (London etc.: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982), pp. 331-35.

¹³ Page 239; at the end of August, 1973, more than 30 explosive devices, some of them contained in letters, were discovered in London. Though IRA spokesmen refused to claim responsibility for these bombs, the IRA was held to be responsible for them (see "The IRA Blitz," Newsweek, September 3, 1973, pp. 26ff.).

¹⁴ Fowles used the same motif in The French Lieutenant's Woman.

¹⁵ Words not bold in the original text.

¹⁶ For postmodernist deconstructions of the detective story see Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1984).

¹⁷ See also Malcolm Bradbury, "Introduction," in Modern British Short Stories, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988 [1987]), p. 13.

¹⁸ See also my article on Fowles' novel Mantissa, "Kritik am postmodernen Roman im postmodernen Roman? Einige Bemerkungen zu John Fowles' Mantissa (1982)," in Hans Holländer/Christian W. Thomsen (eds.), Besichtigung der Moderne: Bildende Kunst, Architektur, Musik, Literatur, Religion: Aspekte und Perspektiven (Köln: Dumont, 1987), pp. 109-20.