Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ready-made 1860s plot and tell it from a 1960s point of view. It is like a reincarnated Thomas Hardy revising one of his tales from the vantage point of films, Freud, space shots and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On one level, this yields an engaging parody of the Victorian novel-with chatty narrator, digressions, subplots involving cockney servants and narrative juggling. The technique also enables Fowles to compensate for some of the Victorian novel's omissions and evasions, particularly that dark side of the Victorian moon, the bedroom...
...real object of Fowles' bifocal vision, though, is not so much the Victorian novel as the life it reflected. His story unfolds amid quotations from the prophets of the age (Marx, Darwin, Tennyson), factual footnotes (married farm laborers at that time, he reports, got twice the wages given bachelors), and provocative sociological speculations (the Victorians, he suggests, may have enjoyed sex even more than our own oversexed century, because they practiced it less frequently). The purpose of all this is to place his characters, as no Victorian novelist could have, in a long perspective as exemplars of the historical...
This thesis makes relevant all of Fowles' seemingly disjointed literary games, documentary digressions and attempts to make the Victorian past appear imminent to our present. In a cunningly oblique way, the whole novel employs an old-fashioned method to draw a timeless moral. As Fowles' epigraph from Marx puts it: "Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself...
Bearing Fruit. Toward this end, he turned to writing, supporting himself for 15 years with teaching jobs, and wrote part or all of at least a dozen novels. "I'm a great believer in natural organic growth. You grow a lot of things for a long time, and eventually something flowers and bears fruit." The first novel Fowles submitted to a publisher was The Collector, which was made into a film. After that, he didn't have to teach any more...
...never missed it," he says. "The whole human condition is slavery, and self-liberation is that little flash in the darkness for the individual." That attitude is about all that Fowles' novels have in common. "In modern art we ought to get used to the idea that the world of the imagination is a kind of landscape in which a writer can go wherever he likes." Among future excursions Fowles is planning: a novel of Nabokovian linguistic experiment and two "entertainments"-a detective thriller and a science-fiction story...