In her essay" Against Dryness," Iris Murdoch set the terms of what is one of the central dichotomies in recent fiction. We must overcome, she suggested the our" desire for consolation" as seen in our sense of form:" Against the con solation of form, the clean crystalline work, the simplified fantasy-myth, w must pit the destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea character." 2 But in later discussion with Frank Kermode, she points out t difficulty of creating character, when" often it turns out in the end that somethin about the structure of the work itself, the myth as it were of the work, has drawn all these people into a sort of spiral, or into a kind of form which ultimately the form of one's own mind." 3 Much post-war fiction is testimony to this lat comment, and many novelists, certainly those practitioners of the nouveau rom and their progeny, have adopted the hermeticism of the" crystalline" work wit its self-referential stance, subsuming character into function or pattern, perso into participle in the" sentence" of the text.

Against this, however, we can posit the attempts of John Fowles to" fore-ground" character, to open the character out to the" tragedy" of the hum situation in acceptance of his" suffering freedom," to struggle against wh Fowles sees as the twentieth century's retreat into form and Lamaism. 4 Humani and morality are important to Fowles, and he refuses the retreat into the form mythoi of his novels, emphasizing instead the content and human charact rather than the medium of the artifice. His method chiefly involves three strat gems: manipulation of narrative points of view; an attempted negation of the print medium itself; and the adroit use of the proper name. The aim is to prese character in the way that Nicholas comes to see Alison in The Magus: as" constant reality." Fowles wants to create the illusion that his characters are a real as we who read-not just" like" people we know, but of the same ontologic status as the readers of their texts.