Metafictional Narratives and Intertexuality in the Novels of John Fowles

Metafictional Narratives and Intertexuality in the Novels of John Fowles.

John Fowles begins Daniel Martin with the words: ‘Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation.’ But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions.

It is with this cracked lens constantly in mind that this dissertation will attempt to examine John Fowles’ novels in relation to their position within the post-modern genre, focusing mainly on their metafictional and historiographical elements. It will draw heavily upon Linda Hutcheon’s books Narcissistic Narrative, the metafictional paradox and A Poetics of the Postmodern, along with her essay ‘Historiographical Metafiction’. Mark Currie paraphrases Linda Hutcheon’s definition, in the introduction to her essay,

historiographical metafiction is defined in terms of its ability to contest the assumptions of the ‘realist’ novel and narrative history, to question the absolute knowability of the past, and to specify the ideological implications of historical representation, past and present.

By analyzing traditional historical narratives, as outlined in Lukács’ The Historical Novel, these texts will be placed in context and a comparative base formed. While I will be focusing on four of John Fowles’ novels, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, A Maggot, The Magus and The Collector, I will also draw on Fowles’ non-fiction writings, such as Wormholes so as to compare these texts with the ideologies set out in his fictions.

Fowles’ novels bend, and at times break, the boundaries between history and fiction and, in doing so, allow for the combination of two apparently opposed narrative modes and structures. Neither history nor fiction is necessarily privileged encouraging the reader to question all narrative authority and thus create new modes of reading. This scepticism