John Fowles’s Sense of an Ending

Abstract

I wish to select one particular aspect of Fowles’s work for consideration. His two novels since The Collector: The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, are both very long works (perhaps needlessly long) and deal with a great many topics; far too many for me to attempt to comment on them all in this discussion. One can get an impression of the range of subjects which interest Fowles by taking a look at the presentation (on the whole disappointing) of his personal ‘philosophy’ in The Aristos.¹ A man may have a great many ideas, good or bad, and his novels may be vehicles for those ideas, but that does not guarantee that his fiction will therefore be any more interesting or any more valuable. So it is not his ‘philosophy’ as it appears in the novels that I am interested in, but what might at first sight seem a much less important affair, the use of scenes of ritual drama at crucial points in The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Although these scenes are very short in comparison with the great length of the novels in which they occur, they are the focal points of the fiction, the points towards which the novels seem to be moving. Their occurrence is, I believe, a significant event for the novel in our time.