Writing as Machine: A Deleuzian Study of John Fowles's Fictions

• Main Authors: Mei-Hung Wu, 吳美虹
• Other Authors: Chi-ming Yang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/76711212418120350020

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 96 === This dissertation gives a novel construction of a system of feedback interconnection between Deleuzian and Fowlesian, reaching a state of equilibrium of Game that creates characters of the novels. By means of writing as machine firstly introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this construction applies the theory of games to analyze the schizophrenic behaviors of those characters in John Fowles’s fictions: The Collector (1963), The Magus (1965) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Simultaneously, this construction manifests that those characters in Fowles’s masterpieces play the “Deleuzian Game,” reflecting the reality of Deleuzian theory of games. Deleuze and Guattari propose, “Schizophrenia is like love” in which the “schizo” is a method of “thinking a life governed by a self that has submitted to the law.” A schizoid will bear the deterritorialized movements of free thoughts in mind while trying to write his or her particular story in terms of writing-machine. Writing will “wed a war machine and lines of flight, abandoning the strata, segmentarities, sedentarity, the State apparatus.” The major lines of the deterritorialized movements will end at the body-without-organs that closely connects with the rhizome, a kind of subterranean term. Each object is a machine where the game structure exists. Each machine executes its game: “machines driving other machines, machine being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.” A game includes the multilayered strategies, is always the “measure of something else” and operates the performance of game world where chess and Go are capable of learning something about life from game because for Fowles “fiction is to be anything but a game.” The dissertation is organized into five parts: Introduction, three Chapters as main body and Conclusion. The part of Introduction and the “theory of games” appear in the first chapter. The second chapter focuses on the chess game and rhizomatic writing in The Collector. The collector motif reveals a “Fowlesian immorality and the nature of moral institution” and stems from the sense of “claustrophobia and frustration.” The design of game originates from the collector motif which illustrates the writing magic powers of these magic writers (Fowles, Miranda and Clegg) because writing as machine has and extends nth power. The third chapter details an analysis of magic realism in The Magus. The Magus is also an experimental novel of metafictional study that sets in the fictional Greek island of Spetsai where the happening history of experimental drama dates back to the historical incidents of 1940s. Nicholas Urfe is a man who desires to search his emancipation and would like to be a magus; however, at the end he turns to a real schizoid, learns the moral education and gets the experience of transculture and transnations. The fourth chapter focuses on Sarah Woodruff’s love game by means of her writing machine in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. With the theory of games, Sarah designs a complicated network of game as a love machine haunted with Charles Smithson, as Fowles reiterates, “‘Games are far more important to us, in far deeper ways, than we like to admit.’” In these three novels, the quest motif originates from the delicate psychological games and reveals the “infinite semiosis” of capitalist society that a novelist is able to operate “in detail a psychological state of mind; relate present feeling to past ones; use similes and metaphor.” In these three novels, the episodes of “transformation invites celebration” definitely come to the final conclusion because for those characters of these three novels the moral dedication is the essential process of becomings. Throughout the quest motif, those male characters of these three novels are educated and are guided to the moral world by those female characters of these three novels which reflect the reality of Deleuzian theory of games.