Trickery's Mixed Bag: The Perils of Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman

Trickery's Mixed Bag: The Perils ofFowles' French Lieutenant's Woman RICHARD HAUER COSTA Novelist Caroline Gordon, while explaining Aristotle's concept of Peripety, finds the perfect analogy for the ways even a classical author manipulates audience: It's a little like the old shell-and-pea game at die county fair. The operator makes you tfiink he is doing one diing when all die time he is doing something else, and he uses one hand to conceal die movements of die odier. [In Oedipus Rex] Sophocles tells us one thing and our conscious minds accept it as a fact, but all the time the unconscious mind to which he is also addressing himself is giving a different interpretation or sometimes adding anodier interpretation. We call this irony.1 Or, more fully, dramatic irony: the audience knowing, the characters, necessarily, in the dark. This arrangement between playwright and audience, if all we read about catharsis is true, is a congenial one. But manipulation has come in our time to lead a life of its own. In the hands of former novelists like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, excursions into various species of higher reportage lead to hybrid genres. For all his claims of having written the first Nonfiction Novel, Capote in In Cold Blood elaborately structures documented details to arrive at nothing deeper than a homicidal strip-tease. Mailer's creation of "Mailer" or "The Novelist" as the main character of Armies of the Night is a form of celebrity exploitation which, judging from his latest, an imRichard Hauer Costa is editor of Quartet and professor of English at Texas A&M University. 1 How to Read a Novel (New York, 1957), p. 32. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW1 possibly-priced Marilyn Monroe picture-book with extended captions, knows no bounds. Mailer's subtitles for Armies—History as a Novel; the Novel as History —more aptly apply to John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman,2 which is both an historical and an experimental novel. Fowles sticks to fiction rather than resorting to journalism to re-examine the notion, first expressed in The Poetics and reinforced by the classic critical manuals of Philip Sidney and John Dryden, tliat historiography is anathema to literary art. Fowles' technique is to take a ready-made 1860's plot and allow a 1960's point of view to overlay it. As he sees it, there is no better way to lacquer the has-happened than allow it to lie like a palimpsest on the present and comment on it. It is like a reincarnated George Eliot, revising the relationship between Dorothea Brooke and Casaubon from the vantage point of Freud, McLuhan and Roland Barthes. On one level, Fowles' ploy yields an undercutting of the Victorian masters in which the author was God. The technique also enables Fowles to fill in the Victorian novel's omissions, particularly the era's evasions about sex. The main action, the flimsiest of covers for Fowles' didacticism, can be easily summarized. Charles Smithson, with an innate noblesse-oblige disguised as affability, is a Victorian intellectual who is given to paleontological forays and to introspection. Toying with ideas is Charles' chief occupation in his thirties, yet he does not understand Darwin. His fiancée is Ernestina Freeman, a mindless creature locked into her era's confinements—chaste, repressed, ignorant. Tina is a bore, and in no time Charles has located someone else. She is Sarah Woodruff, the French Lieutenant's Woman, who seems to be a fallen woman, but only because her impulse towards freedom and her instinctual knowledge of sexuality lead her to appear as one, and not because she really is "fallen." Here Fowles imposes, in a parody of the Victorian fourdecker , three endings on the fate of Charles—and Sarah. In the first, he 'The French Lieutenant's Woman (Signet-New American Library, 1969). All quotations from the text arc from this paperback edition. 2 TRICKERY'S MIXED BAG returns to Tina and his old life, his "vagrant moment" over. In the second, he endures calumny and ruin to hold Sarah. In tlie third, he again prefers Sarah, but she eludes him, preferring freedom to any sort of confining relationship. Thus Charles...