Transitional Narratives in John Fowles's A Maggot - Cairn

THE CAPACITY FOR CHANGE: TRANSITIONAL NARRATIVES IN JOHNFOWLES'S A MAGGOT

Ben Winsworth

Klincksieck | « Études anglaises »

2008/1 Vol. 61 | pages 19 à 30 ISSN 0014-195XDOI 10.3917/etan.611.0019

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Ben WINSWORTH

The Capacity for Change: Transitional Narratives in John Fowles’s A Maggot

As with many of John Fowles’s earlier novels, A Maggot (1984) seeks to involve the reader in an experience that, to quote from the prologue to the revised version of The Magus (1976), has the potential to become something “beyond the literary.” One of the tasks of this article will be to examine the ways in which Fowles, whose primary interest as a novelist lies in the relationship between fiction and reality, attempts to make such an experience possible. In a novel that shares similarities with D. W. Winnicott’s theoretical work on transitional objects and transitional phenomena, Fowles offers both a commentary upon—and an exercise within—the benign influence that cultural or artistic encounters can have. The mysterious pro-ject set up by Lord_, under the alias of Mr Bartholomew, parallels the creative interplay between reader and text in facilitating an experience that has the capacity to effect existential change. A Maggot deploys post-modern tactics to undermine its 18th-century setting and call into question empirical approaches to experience, tac-tics that clearly underline Fowles’s Romantic sympathies, at the same time as the meta-fictional aspects within it confirm an interest in the reader as a subject able to “rewrite” himself through the creative exercise that the novel affords.

Comme souvent les premiers romans de John Fowles, A Maggot (1984) désire faire vivre au lecteur une expérience qui l’entraîne « au-delà du littéraire », comme Fowles le dit lui-même dans le prologue à la version revue de The Magus (1976). Le projet de Fowles se fonde sur les rapports entre fiction et réalité ; l’un des objectifs de cet article est de se pencher sur ce point. Ce roman partage cer-taines affinités avec le travail théo rique de D. W. Winnicott sur les objets et phénomènes transitionnels et Fowles y propose une réflexion (en même temps qu’une mise en pratique) sur les effets bénéfiques de la rencontre entre l’individu et l’art. La mystérieuse entreprise de Lord_, alias Mr. Bartholomew, est à mettre en parallèle avec l’interaction entre le lecteur et le texte. A Maggot déploie des stratégies post-modernes d’écriture qui sont le contrepoint du cadre historique du XVIIIe siècle, ce qui remet en question les approches empiristes de l’expérience humaine. De telles stratégies révèlent les inclinations romantiques de Fowles de même que ses aspects métafictionnels confirment sa conception d’un lecteur considéré comme sujet capable de se ré-écrire à travers la pratique active de sa lecture créative du roman.

Ben WINSWORTH, The Capacity for Change: Transitional Narratives in John Fowles’s A Maggot, ÉA 61-1 (2008): 19-30. © Klincksieck.

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20 Études Anglaises — 61-1 (2008)

A Maggot (1984), published nearly twenty years after the first edition of The Magus (1966), extends the concerns of the earlier novel. It is more conscious of its existence as a fiction, Fowles explaining in the Prologue that the title comes from the obsolete sense of maggot as a “whim or quirk.” However, at the beginning of this Prologue we are informed of the more obvious meaning; that the maggot is “the larval stage of a winged creature, as is the written text, at least in the writer’s hope” (5). The Prologue suggests that Fowles is offering us a novel that is fanciful, but one that also has the capacity to effect a change in the reader’s understanding of the relationship between fiction and reality. For a work of fancy it is rich in historical detail, and even though Fowles wishes to resist the application “historical novel” (6), he intertwines fiction with documented fact, particularly in the pages from The Gentleman’s Magazine that intersect the narrative, and fiction is grafted onto history in the nativity that concludes the novel.

Fowles also considers the ways in which the narratives we construct to explain our lives sometimes cancel out the option of more healthy and productive ways of seeing. A Maggot suggests that this may be especially so if we claim that the narratives we have adopted, or that have adopted us, are the only versions of our experience. In The Magus the idea of being able to explain one’s self and the environment in which one exists in a single, fixed, and unshakable account, is challenged by an experience that continually evades the attempted reduction of Nicholas Urfe and the reader. The mysterious quality of Bourani encourages a creative inter-play that can lead to a more imaginative apprehension of the world. A Maggot also emphasizes the gap between language and experience, and in inviting us to play also asks us to consider the importance of imaginative encounters with the medium of the novel in ways that transcend the merely fanciful. Furthermore, in the appeal to accept the fluidity of narrative against the stasis of a final analysis, we become involved in a process of perceptual reassessment. While A Maggot may have gained its inspiration in a manner similar to the archaic sense of the word that gives the novel its title, it continues to maintain its etymological associations. This maggot is a larval stage or chrysalis not only for Fowles, but for the reader as well in its provision of an experience that, as Fowles writes in his prologue to the revised version of The Magus, has the potential to become something “beyond the literary” (Fowles 1976, 6).

The novel is largely made up of the “Examination and Deposition” of various characters caught up in the mysterious enterprise engineered by Lord_, under the alias of Mr. Bartholomew. While the opening page recreates the “looped film” that Fowles writes of in the Prologue, and presents the characters riding towards the conclusion of their journey, the expected climax is only partially evoked in the later reflections and confessions of those involved. The objective control of the narrator is soon lost in Henry Ayscough’s quest to find out what happened, and led up to, the events that took place on May 1, 1736, in the countryside surrounding the remote provincial town of C_ in the South West of England. The

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Transitional Narratives in John’s Fowles’s A Maggot 21

authority of the novelist, the guidance and revelation that we would expect from a more conventional novel is abandoned, and we are left (apart from historical observations) to find our own way through this fragmented text. There is no single narrative truth, instead a number of different versions that can only partially recreate what happened.

Henry Ayscough is the prime mover of empirical inquiry in the novel. Commissioned to discover the mysterious circumstances surrounding the disappearance of his employer’s son, he carries out his duties with both painstaking diligence and zeal. As he tells the incumbent of C_ in the early stages of his investigation:

I shall find the bottom of this, Mr. Beckford. I work slow, but I sift small. What heresy is to gentlemen of your cloth, subterfuge and deceit are to mine. I will not suffer them in my parish, sir. I’ll not rest ’till all’s laid bare. (103)

He not only remains incredulous in the face of Rebecca’s account of events on May 1, he is also affronted by her confident and assertive nature, understanding this to be another symptom of the world growing worse (319), as well as a challenge to the divinely granted authority of his own sex. The final letter that he writes to his employer is part interpretation, part cautionary tale, and bears the imprint of the brain’s left lobe in being “rational, mathematical, ordered … careful and conventional” (430). While Ayscough does not understand Rebecca to have lied in the ordinary sense— she repeats what she believed she saw and experienced—this is only because her sensibilities were played upon by “his Lordship and his man” (441). Towards the end of the letter he suggests that Rebecca’s testimony “which is more of gross fantasy than credible fact,” was probably inspired by “means of drug or potion, or by black art of some kind” (448). His Lordship was, Ayscough writes, bound upon some philosophical investigation of a most dangerous nature and sought “wickedly to pierce some dark secret of existence” (445). Ayscough puts forward the thesis that conscience ended his Lordship’s venture, and recognizing the extent of his failure and sin he took his own life.

The lawyer’s concluding letter attempts to make inanimate the fluidity of Rebecca’s experience, one that she communicates in a narrative that bears the imprint of the right lobe of the brain in “treating both past and future as present,” in its capacity to “confuse … upset…. Disturb” (430). During her interrogation she refuses to bend to Ayscough’s attempt to impose reason on the chaos that he understands to be facing him. She insists on maintaining her own reading of what has taken place in the cave, and, recognizing the threat that Ayscough represents to her newly discovered freedom, declares: “Thee’s cloud thee’s night, thee’s Lucifer with thy questions, thee’d bind me with thy lawyer’s chains, that bind thee worse thyself” (430). As readers, however, we cannot help but have a degree of sympathy for Ayscough’s method of inquiry. We also struggle to make sense of the material that is made available to us; we want to know what happens, we want to know what it means, and we read towards the last

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page in the hope that these questions will be answered. We remain, however, ultimately puzzled, with no security in the truth of our ideas. Even Ayscough concedes, in his penultimate paragraph, that we cannot know everything, and in so doing he casts an ironic glance back upon the interpretation he has been working out, even if his eyes are still dazzled by Anglican philosophy:

Man would of his nature know all; but it is God who decrees what shall or shall not be known; and here we must resign ourselves to accept His great wisdom and mercy in such matters, which is that He deems it often best and kindest to us mortals that we shall not know all. In the bosom of that great mystery, I most humbly suggest, should Your Grace seek comfort. (450)

Fowles is making a similar appeal to us in A Maggot and is providing a space in which we are encouraged to accept mystery and utilize its energy in positive ways.1 By abandoning any singular authority, the novel encourages us to read creatively, to play with the text, and perhaps come to terms with the fluidity of experience and reading(s) of experience beyond its pages.

In so doing A Maggot is setting up an area that corresponds to D. W. Winnicott’s concept of “potential space.” In his influential collection of papers, Playing and Reality (1974), Winnicott describes this space as being an “intermediate area of experiencing to which inner reality and external life both contribute,” and he designates it as being the experiential location of both infant play and adult encounters with art and culture (Winnicott 1974, 3). Of greatest importance to Winnicott is his belief that our encounters within potential space contribute to our creative apperception of the world, and make us feel that we are real and that the life we are living is of value. The primary example of this is the infant’s early playing with what Winnicott refers to as the first “transitional object” which, he suggests, may be the thumb, the fingers, a bit of cloth, or a soft toy. The transitional object is experienced as being both a part of the child and also a part of the mother from whom the infant is gradually separating herself out. It facilitates the infant’s development from a purely subjective state (where it feels itself to be merged in with the mother), towards a degree of objectivity. It can, perhaps, be regarded as a stepping stone towards external reality. Furthermore, it also allows the infant to locate what Winnicott calls its “inner reality” within the world it is reaching out to (Winnicott 1974, 2). For Winnicott, this marks the beginning of what he calls “creative living” and the capacity to feel that life is worth living (Winnicott 1986, 39-45).

1. In The Aristos Fowles writes: “Mystery, or unknowing, is energy. As soon as a mys-tery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy. If we question deep enough there comes a point where answers, if answers could be given, would kill. We may want to dam the river; but we dam the spring at our peril” (1964, 28).

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It is the intermediate nature of this early play, playing to which both internal reality and external reality contribute, that allows Winnicott to propose that the origins of cultural activity lie within its potential space. He conceives of the intermediate area of cultural experience as a “resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated” (Winnicott 1974, 3), but he does not necessarily equate the regression that this seems to imply with neurosis. There is also a sense in which it can become much more than a “resting place”: recreation can become re-creation. If, as Winnicott understands it, play “facilitates growth and therefore health” (Winnicott 1974, 48), and if a strong connection is being made between playing and cultural experience, it becomes possible to view the relationship that Fowles seeks to establish between the reader and the text as approximating that between the infant and its first transitional object. A Maggot provides a potential space that helps to facilitate the reader’s imaginative impulse, and through the creative interchange that results, our reading itself has the capacity to become a transitional experience.

Whatever the exact nature of events inside the cave on May 1, Bartholomew has for a long time been constructing an elaborate fiction in preparation for the journey that he makes with his assembled company. In all his direction (and non-direction) he operates like a novelist, creating various characters and plots, while all the time masking his final purpose and design (if we presume in our ignorance that there is to be one) from both his protagonists and potential readers. In his conversation with Lacy at the Black Hart, extracts of which are reported by both the narrator and Lacy during his examination by Ayscough, Bartholomew compares mankind to first an “audience in a playhouse” and then to the “personages in a tale or novel” (149-50). In these parallels he argues that we exist in ignorance of following an already prepared script. We are made to “serve other ends, far different from what we supposed,” as are the characters employed by Bartholomew himself. However, this concept of a preordained universe runs contrary to his earlier consideration of individual freedom. Lacy tells Ayscough:

For how might a better world come, he said, if this one may not change? And asked me if I did not think of the Creator’s divine purposes this at least was most clear: that His giving us freedom to move and choose, as a ship upon the vast ocean of time, could not mean that we had always best stay moored in that port where we were first built and launched. (142-43)

The message is clear enough, but the problems with which Bartholomew is dealing saturate his mind, and in this solution a complex crystal is formed. When Lacy reveals Bartholomew’s belief in the ability of the Ancients to read the “story of the world, to the very last page,” Ayscough picks up on the contradiction between freedom of choice and the already written text. Lacy, however, is already prepared to reply:

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To which he answered, that we may choose in many small things as I may choose how I play a part, how dress for it, how gesture, and the rest, but yet must at the end, in greater matters, obey that part and portray its greater fate, as its author creates. And he said although he might believe in a general pro-vidence, he might not in a particular one. (151-52)

As this suggests, while Bartholomew employs his characters for a contracted purpose, they are none the less free to exercise a certain amount of choice in how they play the roles that have been assigned to them. There is room for development within the framework that he has structured. The autonomy that he seeks to give to others shares similarities with Fowles’s conception of the characters within his own novels. In “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” he writes of the struggle that exists between his wishes for a particular character, in this instance Sarah Woodruff, and her resistance to those wishes during the composition of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The notes suggest that Sarah, as much as she is guided by Fowles, also writes herself:

Characters sometimes reject all the possibilities one offers. They say in effect: I would never say or do a thing like that. But they don’t say what they would say; one has to proceed negatively, by a very tedious coaxing kind of trial and error. (Bradbury 159)

In the dynamic tension between the novelist’s aims and the characters’ seemingly independent growth we can understand Bartholomew’s fiction to be a metaphor for his progressive reading of the world, one that encapsulates the ways in which Fowles is attempting to relate his novels to the drama of life itself.

Even though Bartholomew is creating a medium in which his characters are free to develop their own personalities, a medium he understands to be related to life and to have a potential influence on the choices one makes in that life, his treatment of Rebecca is sometimes cast in an extremely pragmatic light. Like Nicholas Urfe in The Magus she often seems more played with than allowed to play, and yet is somehow elect and the principal character in a text whose main purpose appears to be deliverance into greater self-reliance and subjective control. Control is the one thing that Rebecca, when we first encounter her, does not possess. As a prostitute she has surrendered any individual volition she may have had, a lack of freedom that is reinforced through Bartholomew’s hiring of her to fulfill what at first appear to be specific ends; to sleep with Dick, and to meet the “keepers of the water.” Rebecca’s view of the world is focused upon the external factors in any given situation, and the narrator tells us that she is resigned to being an instrument for other people to use and abuse:

Her time has little power of seeing people other than they are in outward; which applies even to how they see themselves, labelled and categorized by circumstance and fate. . . . Fanny does not weep with frustrated rage, from a

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modern sense of self, because life obliges it to suffer this kind of humiliation, but much more with a dumb animal’s sadness. Such humiliation is as insepa-rable from life as mud from winter roads. (55)

I want to suggest that Bartholomew’s election of Rebecca is dependent upon her being a prostitute and that because of this she becomes almost a metaphorical figure for the human condition as Bartholomew perceives it to be. It is this condition that Bartholomew seeks to assess and change, and he can only begin by first locating, for Rebecca’s benefit, exactly where it is that she stands. He attempts to do this in his violent condemnation of her decadent life in a speech charged with language to equal the ecclesiastical comminations of the time (48ff). Having delineated the narrowness of the corridor that Rebecca, on reflection, understands herself to have been walking down—“I knew I was on the path to hell” (309)—Bartholomew then draws attention to the potential explosion of its confines. Bartholomew tells Rebecca (Fanny) that the stars, those representatives of human destiny, shake with laughter in mockery of her. Not because they direct the pattern of Rebecca’s life, although once again the presence of a force beyond individual control is acknowledged, but because Rebecca has surrendered to hazard:

“They care not one whit what may become of you, no more for the courses of your miserable existence than those on a high hill who watch a battle in the plain below, indifferent to all but its spectacle. You are nothing to them, Fanny. Shall I tell thee why they scorn?” She is silent. “Because thou dost not scorn them back.”(56)

Bartholomew is persuading Rebecca to believe that one’s destiny depends to a large extent upon internal, rather than external, factors. He is attempting to detach Rebecca from any sense she may have of a fixed narrative imprisoning her. As Bartholomew’s own example comes to show, there is no wholly omnipotent creator. Rebecca is being encouraged to write herself.

Rebecca displays this independent spirit in her interview with Ayscough when she refuses to submit to the pressure of reason that is continually applied to her deposition. Clearly, much of Rebecca’s confidence is fueled by the defiance of religious dissent, and by her association with the Quakers whom she is discovered amongst in Manchester. It is, however, Bartholomew who has given Rebecca the power of choosing for herself in the first instance, and who creates the space in which her metamorphosis is engendered. What takes place in the cave concludes a revolutionary experience that radically alters Rebecca’s sense of place and perception in the world. As well as being the climax of Bartholomew’s enterprise it is also of central importance to Fowles’s consideration of the novel as a medium that provides an essential imaginative space.

Bartholomew challenges Ayscough’s empirical assumptions in the same way that David Hume undermines the edifice of Reason constructed in Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). While

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Hume’s project begins with the attempt to amplify Locke’s ideas he comes to the skeptical conclusion in A Treatise Of Human Nature (1739, 1740) that a great deal of what we think we know with certainty is, in fact, only probable knowledge. This he understands to be the case with causal relations, and he uses this example to put forward the hypothesis that the sense we make of the world and our relationships to and within it rely more upon our imaginative faculties than Locke allows in his own illumination of reason. Hume proposes that:

all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are deriv’d from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cognitive part of our natures. (I, iv, i)

Bartholomew is exercising a similar form of skepticism, and in his constructing of a fictional enterprise he actively encourages the imagination to apprehend experience. The imagination may not always make sense of that experience, and the gap between words and objects may be too large to bridge, but the escape from empirical observation that Bartholomew is offering points towards a more creative apperception and interpretation of the world. Consequently this must lead to a greater degree of individuality and freedom.

In many eighteenth-century novels, for example Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), there is a sense of journeying towards some physical and moral destination. For the reader the text is like a map and we are assisted by the novelist in our discovery of references that ensure we reach the conclusion that is intended for us, that we have come to expect and, perhaps, to wish for. However, in breaking away from this teleological formula Fowles is opening up his own eighteenth-century novel to Romantic ideas and influences. Lord_’s attempts to break away from empiricism, combined with his Shelley-like belief in imagination as a force for individual liberty, shows him to be drawing up new maps, not only of the physical world but also of the mind’s relation to it. Similarly, he is proposing that it is through the imagination that the individual relates to the world, or to use Wordsworth’s lines from Tintern Abbey, that experience is made up of what the eye and ear both “half create, / And what perceive.” Bartholomew seeks to make this interplay a reality for Rebecca at the same time as Fowles engages us in an exercise in which Wordsworth’s, and also Winnicott’s, creative equation is discovered in the act of reading. As our experience of reading A Maggot is reflected in the details of the narrative so our reading reflects, in an existential sense, the ways in which we can read the world and ourselves within it outside the novel. Fowles is making the point that this freedom, in both the complex dynamics of the novel as story, and in the associations that he wishes us to make with the novel as active readers, is dependent upon the facilitation of imaginative experience.

The “maggot” that Rebecca describes as having been in the cave has a direct connection with the Maggot of the title. Fowles would seem to be drawing attention to the way in which the content of his novel mirrors at

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least a possible relationship between readers and texts. What Fowles writes and what Rebecca speaks of is a fancy, dismissed by Ayscough as such. At one point in the proceedings he asks Rebecca to “return to thy well-called maggot” (383). Rebecca herself is open to the possibility that she has witnessed an elaborate spectacle, but paradoxically maintains that her account in no way deviates from what she has seen:

I tell thee this came not in a dream, by apparitions, but more like to those prodigies I have seen on show in London. Thee may say they are false, done by deceit and trickery; but not that they were not there to be seen. (363)

Rebecca describes the “maggot” as being

[of] white, yet not of flesh, as it were wood japanned, or of fresh-tinned metal, large as three coaches end to end, or more, its head with the eye larger still; and I did see other eyes along its sides that shone also, tho’ less, through a greenish glass. And at its end there was four great funnels black as pitch, so it might vent its belly forth there. (359-60)

This immediately encourages our imaginations to fancy that Rebecca is describing, with the obvious handicap of her place in time, a space ship. Fowles tempts us into playful associations of this nature throughout our reading of Rebecca’s efforts to detail all that she has seen. There are clear suggestions of time travel, a sense that the woman in silver (a space-suit?) comes from the future and takes Rebecca, Bartholomew and Dick to her own time, where an ideal society or socialist paradise is revealed, referred to by Rebecca as “June Eternal.” Balanced against this harmony are Rebecca’s descriptions of what sounds to be modern aerial warfare. She speaks of

great carriages that bore cannon within . . . that flew as hornets in a rage, the which did drop great grenadoes upon their enemy and made untold destruc-tion upon them—why, whole cities laid to ruin, like ’twas said London did look on the morrow of the great fire. (382)

Much of this suggests nuclear destruction, and there is even a tantalizing description of certain of the victims that allows Nagasaki and Hiroshima to spring to mind if we compensate for Rebecca’s obvious ignorance: “for their faces were such they portray of Chinamen, upon pots and the like, more yellow skinned than we, the eyes narrow” (382). The “three moons that shone upon a scene of carnage” also summons up pictures of mushroom clouds and radioactive fall-out.

It may be that Fowles is using the prospects revealed to Rebecca as a way of showing us the possible directions that civilization can take, and in so doing is once more emphasizing the need to choose what he has termed in The Aristos “the good.” Recalling Fowles’s Self Portrait in Ideas, this is something that we can, however fancifully, entertain. Such playing will be dismissed if we are reading A Maggot in the expectation of a reward, or final revelation; if we are only seeking clues. There is nothing unfamiliar in

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Fowles once more resisting this kind of approach. As I have already stated, A Maggot is attempting to validate the playful exercise—one possibility of which is listed above—independent of any purpose. It represents an alternative, and potentially more creative mode of experience than other rational programs of thought and inquiry. In this sense the spirit of the novel shares similarities with Marion Milner’s ideas on the necessity of entering states without rule or reason if one is to get in touch with one’s imagination at the deepest levels. Her Winnicottian approach to what she calls “free drawing,” in On Not Being Able to Paint, suggests that it is in moments of chaos, when order is temporarily abandoned, that insight and inspiration can sometimes be found. We can hypothesize that the playfulness that this demands is related to a basic prerequisite of reading Fowles’s novels, if not others, creatively. In this light it is possible to apprehend how fancy can, paradoxically, become a serious business.

Fowles extends his consideration of the reading process in the Epilogue to A Maggot. It is here that the grafting of the novel onto history is acknowledged, the Rebecca of Fowles’s maggot having given birth to Ann Lee, the founder of the “United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as the Shakers” (455). Fowles reveals his affection for this branch of Protestant Dissent, and they are described as having been in direct opposition to orthodox Christianity.2 His admiration is, he writes, “not only for social and historical reasons” (456). There are aspects of Shaker ritual and practical life, its “richly metaphorical language and imaginative use of dancing and music,” that Fowles understands to have parallels with the relationship between fiction and reality:

We novelists also demand a far-fetched faith, quite often seemingly absurd in relation to normal reality; we too need a bewildering degree of metaphorical understanding from our readers before the truths behind our tropes can be conveyed, can “work.” (456)

While we can regard this as a direct reference to the novel we have been reading, a statement that expresses the necessity of entering a contract with fantasy if one is to gauge the more serious aspects of A Maggot, it is also clearly saying something about reading in a more general sense. This “far-fetched faith” describes an individual’s ability, or willingness, to enter potential space in the activity of reading. To continue using a Winnicottian frame of reference, it is only in our ability to play within the potential space of the novel that the possibility of our reading becoming a transitional experience presents itself. As Winnicott writes:

It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. (Winnicott 1974, 63)

2. For a more detailed account of Shaker belief and practice, see Tarbox 159ff.

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Whatever the exact nature of Bartholomew’s spectacular conclusion, it proves to have been a transitional experience for Rebecca. In the crowning piece of his fiction Bartholomew plays an ever more passive role. He retreats slowly from what he has set up, and in so doing allows Rebecca to interpret what she encounters for herself. This interpretation, although placed within a religious frame of reference, is her own. Bartholomew’s complete disappearance becomes the example par excellence of what Fowles, in The Aristos, calls “the Godgame.” The tensions at work within this game are similar to those that constitute the struggle between freedom of choice and hazard. Fowles writes:

The Divine Solution is to govern by not governing in any sense that the gover-ned can call being governed; that is, to constitute a situation in which the governed must govern themselves. (Fowles 1964, 19)

This is a consideration that is related to Bartholomew’s conversation with Lacy about whether or not existence is an already prescribed text that we are compelled to follow. Remembering that Bartholomew believes in a degree of freedom between the beginning and end of life, the vanishing from his own fiction enables him to make a further comment on the nature of existence, as he perceives it to be, and draw closer parallels between art and life. Bartholomew is playing Godgames in the paradox of direction and non-direction of his characters, in the creation of a space in which they are free to make their own choices, and in his withdrawal from any sense of authorial control. The fact that Rebecca, in a late interview with Ayscough, understands Bartholomew to be Christ (379), suggests a certain amount of playfulness on Fowles’s part.3 It also draws further attention to his interest in the relationship between that other trinity: novelist, text, and reader. Bartholomew certainly seems to be following Fowles’s prescriptions in The Aristos:

If there had been a creator, his second act would have been to disappear.Put dice on the table and leave the room; but make it seem possible to the players that you were never in the room. (Fowles 1964, 19)

Aspects of the above comments apply equally well to the non-purposive analytic space that Winnicott is keen to establish. In the course of psychotherapy, he encourages his patients to play, but is careful not to impose any pattern of his own upon the direction of that play. Winnicott wishes his patients to begin from “formlessness” (Winnicott 1974, 63).

3. Of Bartholomew, Tarbox writes: “Certainly Rebecca ultimately sees him as a Christ figure, a kind of pure light, which is the metaphor with which Christ describes him-self: ‘I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’” (John 8.12). Christ’s admonition to his followers is the same as Bartholomew’s: “You will seek me and you will not find me” (John 7.23). “‘Bartholomew,’ of course, was one of Christ’s Apostles, but the only distinction achieved by Bartholomew the Apostle is that absolutely nothing is known about him” (Tarbox 146).

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That there will be elements of the analyst’s influence, after all he has set up the space, is an inevitable consequence of the program. It is as unavoidable as the intervention of hazard in our lives. But just as we need not surrender to fate, neither must those responsible for effecting beneficial changes of development in others impose their own perspectives of the world upon those they are trying to help. (Neither is there any need for the patient to accept them.) This is a strategy that can also be adopted by existentialist writers of the kind that Fowles and Bartholomew are attempting to be. As Bartholomew’s disappearance confirms Rebecca’s freedom in both his novel and her life (she goes back into the world to make her own choices and decisions), so Fowles’s resolution not to give any final or lucid explanation refocuses attention upon the autonomy of his reader. The inconclusive nature of A Maggot, and its lack of a distinct or singular narrative voice, encourages the reader towards a fluid and creative involvement with the text, one that has the potential to alter our field of vision. The novel, and our reading of the novel, generates a challenge to empirical objectivity that we can take into the world when we leave the cave of the text. We are made aware, to borrow from the title of Peter Lomas’s study of the misuse of psychoanalytic theory (Lomas 1987), of the limits of human interpretation; that there are countless ways of explaining the phenomena of being alive, that each articulation is provisional, and that there will be no absolute understanding.

Ben WINSWORTH Université d’Orléans

Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. The Novel Today. London: Fontana, 1990.Fowles, John. The Aristos: A Self Portrait in Ideas. London: Jonathan Cape, 1964.—. The Magus. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966.—. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.—. The Magus: A Revised Version. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976.—. A Maggot. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. [1740]. Ed. L. A. Selby Bigge. Rev.

P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1975.Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. [1690]. Ed. P. H.

Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1975.Lomas, Peter. The Limits of Interpretation. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.Milner, Marion. On Not Being Able To Paint. London: Heinemann, 1971.Tarbox, Katherine. The Art of John Fowles. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988.Winnicott, D. W. Playing and Reality. London: Penguin, 1974.—. Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. London: Penguin,

1986.Wordsworth, William, Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Rev. ed. Ernest de

Selincourt. London: Oxford UP, 1936.

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Transitional Narratives in John Fowles's A Maggot - Cairn

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