The World-Making Capacity of John Fowles's Daniel Martin

I take as my starting point a question that uses literary terms to address an issue with cosmological implications: Is it possible for a novel to merge the physical and intellectual scale of a Tolstoy epic with the nuanced interior dynamics associated with Proust while also qualifying as postmodern?

I think some would say no categorically: the task is too paradoxical, with too many cross-purposes, too many epistemes to juggle. Others might respond more favorably but still be concerned about the prospect of a literary white elephant and wonder about its mobility and overall usefulness.

A potential benefit of such a synthesis—if it truly is a synthesis and not a mere pastiche or parody—would be a new way of seeing the three modes in question. For instance, what would a vast-canvas Tolstoyan novel look like if it had a playful skepticism about its masculine authority and claims to metaphysical truth? What would a novel with a Proustian inner life look like if it also threw itself into the political fray and took a more than passing interest in other tribes and the fate of civilization? What would postmodernism look like if its ironies and self-reflexivity were yoked to a form in which characters, settings, and dialogue had a full-bodied, nineteenth-century amplitude and in which ethical and social concerns were not sidelined? At issue is not only the compatibility of these literary modes—representing, in broad terms, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, the three great epistemes in fiction of the past two centuries—but also what kind of perception can arise when they are held in creative tension. The nature of this perception, it seems to me, would have wide-ranging implications in the fields of literature, philosophy, and social theory, among others.

Such a synthesis would be a tall order—some would say a grand narrative indeed and thus by definition not postmodern. But there's a new spirit of inquiry about what is lost by following postmodernism to the letter, particularly in terms of its proscription against metanarratives and the metaphysics of presence. In Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry (1995), Mark Edmundson writes, "We lose too much pleasure and vitality when we turn away from all vision and join the ascetic priesthood of Derridean deconstruction. Rather than having a philosophical policy of zero tolerance for presence, it is better, I think, to adjudicate cases one by one" (237). Slavoj Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes (2008) similarly calls for an informed reconsideration of metanarratives after their long exile. Žižek speaks about a postmodernism grown complacent, its familiar antitotalitarian agenda revealing elements both sophistic and reactionary. These critics are pointing in a new philosophical direction that, one might surmise from their writings, presently has no artistic equivalent—a work possessing the kind of complexity, force of imagination, and intellectual stature needed to help galvanize the change they are advocating.

This brings me to the novel that sparked my opening question, John Fowles's Daniel Martin (1977). I see it as overdue for the kind of adjudication Edmundson calls for. It conspires to be a totalizing and an anti-totalizing narrative at the same time; a novel invested in ancient as well as modern cultures; an intimate character study as well as a kind of Western-civ intertribal reckoning. Scholars from a striking variety of fields have attested to the novel's contributions to narratology, poetics, and linguistics; psychology and neuroscience; philosophy and phenomenology; religion, spirituality, and mythology; political, socioeconomic, and postcolonial theory; feminism and masculinity studies; environmentalism and nature writing; geography and travel writing; and art history and film studies. Lest it begin to sound too austere, let me add that the novel has plenty of jokes, a few sex scenes, an "interlude" presented in the form of a fable, and a teen-romance chapter, titled "Phillida," that was excerpted by the popular women's magazine McCall's. The polarities Daniel Martin engages serve as a reminder of art's capacity to enlarge the range of human sensibility. Clearly Daniel Martin...