"Stratagems to unblind" : reflexivity and existentialism in three novels by John Fowles

• Main Author: Immerman, Linda R
• Other Authors: Bertelsen, Eve
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2016
• Subjects: English Language and Literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/21972

Bibliography: pages 161-174. === This thesis proposes to re-examine John Fowles's self-reflexive practice and its interactions with existential themes on the basis that critical commentaries have not fully accounted for the rigour of his reflexive approach, nor for the complexity of its interrelations with existential philosophy, as it is used in his work. In my introductory chapter, I give a brief outline of critical treatments of Fowles's reflexivity, identifying two broad approaches. The first of these suggests that a reflexive aesthetic is a means, for Fowles, of remaining within a realist frame in an age of epistemological scepticism about the validity of its premises. The second approach more explicitly links reflexivity to Fowles's existential scruples whereby the 'ontological guilt' engendered by the conscious control of novel-writing can be assuaged and a degree of 'authentication' achieved. Reflexivity, in other words, exposes the writer's own 'bad faith' and allows him to be purged of it, alongside his characters who engage in journeys of discovery, leading to greater self-knowledge and moral commitment, through the enabling medium of personal narrative. These approaches, I suggest, are limited in that they assume that Fowles's reflexive novels can be apprehended as a unified body of work located within a conservative poetics (thought to be peculiar to English fiction) and assimilated to a humanistic moral branch of existentialism. My own method, then, is to attempt to look more closely at what I call the "reflexive positions" of each of the three novels under discussion and to account for their differing theoretical, epistemological and ontological affinities by establishing the critical contexts in which they reflexively situate themselves. This enables a more thorough examination of Fowles's development as a reflexive writer than has been offered thus far. The careful specification of Fowles's reflexive commentaries, furthermore, allows for a critique of the assumption that his reflexivity is explicable entirely in terms of his existential commitment. The thrust of my argument is to throw into question the unproblematic alliance between aesthetic and philosophical concerns that commentators perceive in his work. These issues are traced through Fowles's first three novels, The Collector (1963), The Magus (Revised Edition, 1977) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), each of which is treated in a separate chapter. My approach in these chapters is to specify clearly the "reflexive position" of the individual novel under discussion and then to examine critically its correlations with existential preoccupations. The resulting disruptions, contradictions and displacements I identify suggest a deviation in Fowles's work from the existential framework used to explain it and a growing concern with issues converging on postmodern and poststructuralist areas of inquiry, particularly the constitutive capacity of language, the decentering of the subject and the discursivity of what we call 'reality'. The typically recuperative positions Fowles's critics take up and the existentialist, moralist and humanistic grounds on which they interpret his work, I suggest, are inadequate to coping with his self-reflexive practice, necessitating such a reappraisal. A brief examination of his later novels in an appendix indicates that Fowles's movement away from humanist themes is anticipated in the earlier novels to a degree not widely recognised by critical commentaries.