Symbolic Narratives: The Dangers of Being an Intertextually Inclined Character

John Fowles’s first published novel was The Collector (1963), and since its publication, critics have offered a variety of reasons for the failure of the relationship between its two main characters, Frederick Clegg and Miranda Grey. Since Miranda’s first experience of Clegg is being kidnapped by him, perhaps we should not expect too much out of this relationship. But readers do expect something. The reading of a plot, as Peter Brooks points out, is a “form of desire,” an “arousal” that initiates the sense-making process in the reader (37–38), and given the conventional fictional situation of a young man and a young woman meeting under unusual circumstances, only some progression in the relationship–whether negative or positive–will make sense.¹ We also expect some significant development in the relationship because there are only two characters physically present in this novel. Miranda and Clegg are all the reader has to work with–to identify with, or anticipate an outcome for, or wish an outcome for–and the narrative makes it clear that the characters themselves realize that the two of them are all they have to work with. As Miranda puts it in her diary, “It is not that I have forgotten what other people are like. But other people seem to have lost reality. The only real person in my world is Caliban” (148).

The two characters do fail to produce one of the outcomes most readers might expect, however–friendship, love (even if it turns out to be the Stockholm syndrome variety), or at least understanding–and the usual reasons given for that failure to connect are social, philosophical, psychological, or some combination of these. Thus Thomas Foster sees the primary obstacles to mutual understanding as gender and social class. Miranda is better educated, not to mention sane (20, 26–27). Katherine Tarbox separates them according to their reactions to experience: Clegg gains no insight, while Miranda’s diary “represents real self-examination” (44). Carol Barnum agrees that Miranda acquires self-knowledge while Clegg is “frozen,” without the vitality needed to match Miranda’s development (41–42). Pamela Cooper (19–20) and Mahmoud Salami (49) both see the physical power Clegg exercises over Miranda as a main stumbling block to the development of any fruitful relationship. But there is another cause that has received relatively light treatment from the critics and that may be more important than the others, and that is the adoption by its characters of different narrative strategies, in particular strategies that allow them to reconstruct themselves and each other.²

Virginia Woolf, through the character of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, established what we have come to recognize as a central truth about the way we think about other people: as characters in a fabula we are either narrating or authoring. Alan Palmer describes this practice among fictional characters as “doubly embedded narratives,” which he defines as “versions of characters [that] exist within the minds of other characters” (15). In Woolf’s novel, Lily catches herself “writing” others as she thinks about the Rayleys, Paul and Minta, and what had come of their marriage: “And this, Lily thought…this making up scenes about them, is what we call ‘knowing’ people.…Not a word of it was true; she had made it up; but it was what she knew them by all the same” (173). So Lily, to use a term from Lisa Zunshine’s recent book on theory of mind in narrative, “metarepresents”; that is, she keeps track of herself as the source of her representations of the Rayleys and avoids the danger of treating these representations as “architectural truth” (48)–information about which there are no suspicions regarding its source, or even any identification of a source, the information simply existing as reality. At the same time, Woolf made clear what had always been true in fiction–that characters construct their own narratives, and that they can be as cleverly intertextual in their creative endeavors as any author or reader. Among twentieth-century novelists, Fowles has been especially interested in having characters become...