The Authorial Innocence/Naivety o f John Fowles

Abstract

The author offers a reading of the work of John Fowles that is suspect of his proclaimed traditionalism. By glancing at the narrative structure, plot mechanisms, the relationship between fiction and history, as well as at the inherent conception of language within his novels, the article focuses on what the author calls the disillusionistic strategies. Drawing attention to the gaps, scams and indeterminacics, an attempt is made in the article to justify the suspicion concerning Fowles 's authorial innocence/naively. The following constitute a run-down of the features that the article foregrounds in Fowles’s opus: the questioning of the ability of language to represent; self- reflexivily; intertexluality; variant novel endings the paradoxical crisscrossings of fiction and reality; the thawarting of reader expectations; the problem of the novelist’s relation lo his characters. The author underlies that his approach emphasizes only one aspect of Fowles’s work and concludes that, although these strategies lestify to his know-how in regard to recent nfirrrativc tendencies, Fowles docs not decisively depart from the liberal-humanist matrix of the English realistic novel.