British fiction from the 1960s to 1980s and the philosophical background of postmodernism

= reaction on failed illusions of modern avant-garde. In England spokesman of the architects Ch. Jencks, French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard brought postmodernism into discussion in Europe. Grew out of the feeling of ‘disappointment with heterogeneous file which is called modernism.’ In 1981 exhibition of contemporary architecture was held in Paris under this statement. Understanding of post-modernism is in many ways divergent. Some beleive it to be reaction on modernism. Some the late modernism. As post-modern authors are sometimes called modernists – Joyce, Marquez, it’s very vague, ambiguous term. The role of action in the novel became important again. Critical view of the progress,
 *  Postmodernism  – a term used originally in architecture. In American architecture, it was a reaction on the ‘international style’ – term used for tendency of avant-garde architecture towards functionalism. Functionalism was originally connected with image of revolution in society. But the belief in revolution of society was vanishing. The functionalistic purism began to be perceived as a dictation.


 * Michael Tournier, Umberto Eco , Milan Kundera , Friedrich Durrenmatt , Hermann Broch
 * Situation when it’s not possible to repeat the modernist gesture which represents the present as the beginning of new era. Kundera says that present novel can’t live with the spirit of our time in peace.
 * There are no guarantees of contact with reality. Follows 3 traditions: Tradition of pluralism. Tradition of irony. Skepticism. Tradition of idea of freedom. Free will and creativity.
 * It is a general, sometimes controversial term. It refers to changes, development, and tendencies which have taken place since the 1950s. It is connected with various experimental techniques and no-traditional narrative. It explores the relationship between reality and fiction.
 * The authors refuse a totalitarian view of the world. They depict it as fragmentary and chaotic. Some of them present multiple versions of reality. They use some elements of popular genres (thriller, detective story, spy-novel, horror story). In the view if intertextuality. They use various quotations and allusions to other texts. They openly disclose their creative process and emphasize that they are writing fiction.

These features we can find in the work of John Fowles . One of the most successful novelists of the 1970’s.

The Collector, 1967
 * In his novels, he often reflects tension between reality and fiction. He speculates about the nature of fiction. His novels address the collision between individual psychology and social convention. Three of his novels became bestsellers and were made into motion pictures. The historical dimension is a feature that best novels of the 1970’s have in common. They are not historical novels in the traditional way. They speak about the present at first. It is both highly intellectual and popular among readers.


 * Renewed stress on the action tension can be seen. A thriller topic: a young clerk Frederick Clegg, average man, collects butterflies. Is in love with a beautiful girl of higher class Miranda. Observes her from a young age. She is now a student of architecture. Frederick is extremely shy, inhibited with women and society. He is absolutely unsociable and fussy pedant. Wins a lot of money in lottery. He wants to gain everything he was deprived of by both the nature and the society. Buys a cottage, and plans everything for kidnapping her. He doesn’t want to hurt her, only wants her as a masterpiece of his collection. Puts her into the cellar of the well-arranged cottage, so she cannot escape. Cares for her, brings her anything she wants - expensive books, LPs, champaigne, caviar. Never realizes he is hurting her and ruining her life.
 * She displays various reactions. She tries to escape. She tries to make friends with him. She even tries to seduce him, thinking that he will give her more freedom. However, Frederick totally fails in any physical contact, gets angry and sends her down again. Miranda gets sick from the bad air in the cellar. She develops pneumonia. He is confused that his darling is sick, but he is shy to go to a doctor. He only cares for her. Then he finally goes to a doctor, a policeman reprimands him for bad parking and he is scared. Only buys some pills and Miranda finally dies. First he wants to go to denounce himself but then he removes the dead body, keeping a lock of her hair and goes out to find another girl with long fair hair.
 * The thriller topic is enriched in several ways: Clegg’s motivation is exceptional. He doesn’t kidnap her to blackmail anyone or to abuse her sexually. The only thing he wants is to posses her. This perverse sense of possession is exaggerated to absurd paradox. He offers her marriage several times but he is both physically and emotionally impotent. He desires for the institution of marriage but is unable to love. As a courtship he chooses kidnapping and encageing.
 * The motivation of his doing is showed gradually and such is the narrative method. First narrated in the 1st person. Then Miranda narrates according to the diary she keeps. There are two narrators. Two views on the same action. Miranda gradually gets to the position that she controls him. She ironizes him and later tries to educate him. In literature, she gives him books he has to read. He has imprisoned himself at the end. He is imprisoned by his not being educated.
 * Miranda is chosen consciously: she is young, beautiful, sexual symbol, girl from higher middle class. Naturally intelligent and talented. She is educated, has certain manners and way of speaking. For him she represents the social status which he was deprived of.
 * Clegg suffers by the complex of inferiority. The author puts moralist thought into his mouth.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The ironic reversal of values graduates in the scene when Miranda tries to seduce him but finds out he is impotent which causes him another humiliation.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Fowles uses atypical, abnormal psychology to exposure petit bourgeois.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The topic is derived from Heracleitos who distinguished moral and intellectual minority (few) and not thinking, conform mass (many). This conflict in Fowles becomes a moral conflict of good and evil. Fowles writes that the border between the few and the many has to be inside every individual not between individuals.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Clegg represents the many but it is stressed that he is a product of some environment. Insufficient education and social deprivation

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Miranda is influenced by certain environment too - rich parents, education, intelligence, but she is arrogant. Fowles is very socialistic in this view. On another level, the novel is a parallel to Shakespeare’s play The Tempest - the name Miranda is taken from it and the nickname for Frederick - Miranda calls him Kaliban. The world of The Collector is not the beautiful new world as in The Tempest but ironic parody of this world. Kaliban is here changed into unhappy, uneducated wretch that gets money at once and doesn't know what to do with it. He is able to “have” not to “be”. The sense of possession is hyperboled into monstrous allegory. It is an instinct killing in both literal and figurative meaning. He kills butterflies to collect them and then he does the same with Miranda. His language is full of empty cliches which look innocent at first. Just like Clegg looks innocent at first sign, but are warning against potential aggressivity hidden inside him.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Fowles’s method pays attention to pathologic social phenomena. He diverts from the common realism and adopts “fabulation”, e.i. Allegory. Another paradox of his method is that he isolates the characters from the society to show features which are only social. He chooses rather figurative images, symbols, allegory, experimental moment. Tendency to moralize is strong. It appears in his style, it is used mainly in Miranda’s diary where she writes her opinions about society, art, love and sex. It has two parts. One is told from his, the other from her perspective. The plot is the same. It is a parody on Shakespeare’s Tempest, to which it often alludes. <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The French Lieutenant’s Woman

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">his best work. Set in Lyme Regis, in Victorian England in 1867.


 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Sara plays a cruel game with her partner. He’s a Victorian gentleman. She covers him with her lies to gain his love, by her stories she only confirms the legend about her seduction by he French lieutenant which have made around her in the small-town environment a kind of aura. She subverts his self-confidence as a Darwin’s follower.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Sarah is said to be mistress of a French Lieutenant. She is a governess with Mrs. Poulteney. She took care of Varguennes after his ship sank. She tells Charles her story - Vargueness promised her his love and promised to take her with him. She says she spent a night with him in a pub and then he left for France.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Charles is supposed to inherit a house from his uncle Sir Robert, but Sir Robert gets married. So he does not have any house and Ernestina’s father offers to let him take over his business. He refuses, because he is a gentleman and gentleman cannot go into business. Meanwhile. Sarah has fled to Exeter and Charles in the end decides to visit her. He sleeps with her and finds that the rumors were groundless - she was a virgin, she lied. He breaks his engagement with Tine and she threatens with legal action.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The Magus
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Smithson cancels his engagement with a girl of his social class and he faces a conflict with moral codex of his time. Sara manages to make herself free from her dependent situation at the end refuses to marry him although she had a baby with him. All this story was for her only a way to her freedom.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He goes to Exeter again to offer marriage to Sarah, but she has left for London and he cannot trace her. He even employs a detective agency, but without success.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The author gives us two possible ends of the book: The first turns out to be Charles’s dream: it is a classical Victorian happy-ending. He meets Sarah and the child he had fathered, married her. The other is seen in the cynicism of the 20th century. They quarrel and Charles leaves in anger, never to see Sarah again.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Author says that there are two ends because “it’s no use to show optimism or pessimism” when we “all know, what has happened since that time.”
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Confrontation of conventions of Victorianism and conflicts of its morals with our time doesn’t result positively. That’s the way how he problematise the image of progress and that’s the post-modern situation in Fowles.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">It contains contemporary details, solid characterization and scene-setting of a Victorian novel. It is blended with a self-questioning text of the 1960s.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He gradually begins to step down from the traditional story-telling. He disrupts the realistic illusion and openly discloses three alternative ending. He questions Victorian morals and manners and compares them to the present ones. Before each chapter he quotes Marx, Darwin, and Victorian poets or sociologists
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">It is existential in that we are entirely responsible for our own lives. There is no god to blame, we cannot separate ourselves from the world of laws, morals, and traditions.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Sarah is a 20th century feminist born before her time, yet a typical woman of the 19th century.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Charles and Ernestina were perfectly acceptable for Victorian marriage.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He writes a Victorian novel within a novel, abtruded authorial comments offer a “modern” justification of this procedure. Chapter 12 ends with a Victorian rhetorical question: “Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?” Chapter 13 opens with a “modern” authorial statement. “The story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. .. but I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Ronald Barthers. If this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. ... we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing, but in the new theological image with freedom as first principle, not authority.”
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Fowles’s understanding of Victorian life and literature is crude and derived from the Bloomsburys rejection of it, which makes his technical nostalgia fascinating. His theory of “freedom” leads to two alternative endings, which destroys the narrative “reality”, authorial shifts in style, interjections, and essays on Victorian reality.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The future tense, like the future, is a creative lie. But these alternative endings are neither future nor conditional, but fixed, Victorian, narrative past. They therefore cancel each other out, and cancel their participants.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Chapter 16 opens with some authorial sagacities and apostrophes about Victorian life, and continues in the present tense, with Ernestina’s reading of The Lady of La Garaye. Two paragraphs late, Fowles is back with his love-story between Sarah and Charles, and in the habitable past tense.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The Lady of La Garaye, extensively quoted. Is thin, high Victorian emotional cliche, possible for Ernestina to be moved by.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The present tense displays her, and it, for judgement. The reader effortlessly and pleasurably switches form watching to imagining with the change of tense. It is a nice game.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Anacronyms = things that remind us of the time in the past, i.e. “the local spy” - the idea of observer is from the 20th century, Henry Moore is mentioned - famous Br. sculpture, Darwin mentioned, K. Marx - he was a middle-class Victorian, a Jew
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The narrator is not omniscient, metafiction, diletanty - he likes playing with ideas, knows a little about many things.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Sexual theme - Charles has a sexual relationship with both women.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Author pays attention to the servants - concerns class system.


 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">It takes place on a Greek island Phraxos.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">It displays series of magical theatricals carried out by Conchis, The Magus.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He performs before the eyes of an astonished Nicholas d’Urfe, a young English teacher.