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ABSTRACT
As a historical meta-narrative, the novel "The Collector" contains features such as realism, a mixture of memoir genres,
thematically focuses on the ideology of fascism and Darwin's theory, existentialism and psychopathic behavior, and
some of the features of postmodernism are shown in this novel.
KEYWORDS
Collector, mixture of genres of realism, fascism, theory, mention , an amateur lepidopterist, parody, novel.
INTRODUCTION
“The Collector” is Fowles' first novel published in 1963,
quickly became a big success, enabling him to give up
his teaching job. «The Collector» is the story of the
abduction and imprisonment of Miranda Grey by
Frederick Clegg, told first from his point of view, and
then from hers by means of a diary she has kept, with
a return in the last few pages to Clegg's narration of
her illness and death.
Clegg's section begins with his recalling how he used
to watch Miranda entering and leaving her house,
across the street from the town hall in which he
worked. He describes keeping an "observation diary"
about her, whom he thinks of as "a rarity," and his
mention of meetings of the "Bug Section" confirms
that he is an amateur lepidopterist. On the first page,
then, Clegg reveals himself to possess the mind-set of
a collector, one whose attitude leads him to regard
Research Article
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN THE NOVEL OF “THE COLLECTOR”
Submission Date:
June 20, 2024,
Accepted Date:
June 25, 2024,
Published Date:
June 30, 2024
Crossref doi
https://doi.org/10.37547/ajps/Volume04Issue06-24
Sodikova Bakhtigul Idivullayevna
Denau institute of entrepreneurship and pedagogy, doctoral student, Uzbekistan
Journal
Website:
https://theusajournals.
com/index.php/ajps
Copyright:
Original
content from this work
may be used under the
terms of the creative
commons
attributes
4.0 licence.
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Miranda as he would a beautiful butterfly, as an object
from which he may derive pleasurable control, even if
"collecting" her will deprive her of freedom and life.
Clegg goes on to describe events leading up to his
abduction of her, from dreams about Miranda and
memories of his stepparents or coworkers to his
winning a "small fortune" in a football pool. When his
family emigrates to Australia and Clegg finds himself
on his own, he begins to fantasize about how Miranda
would like him if only she knew him. He buys a van and
a house in the country with an enclosed room in its
basement that he remodels to make securable and
hideable. When he returns to London, Clegg watches
Miranda for 10 days. Then, as she is walking home alone
from a movie, he captures her, using a rag soaked in
chloroform, ties her up in his van, takes her to his
house, and locks her in the basement room.
When she awakens, Clegg finds Miranda sharper than
"normal people" like himself. She sees through some
of his explanations, and recognizes him as the person
whose picture was in the paper when he won the pool.
Because he is somewhat confused by her unwillingness
to be his "guest" and embarrassed by his inadvertent
declaration of love, he agrees to let her go in one
month. He attributes her resentment to the difference
in their social background: "There was always class
between us."
Clegg tries to please Miranda by providing for her
immediate needs. He buys her a Mozart record and
thinks, "She liked it and so me for buying it." he fails to
understand human relations except in terms of things.
About her appreciation for the music, he comments, "It
sounded like all the rest to me but of course she was
musical." There is indeed a vast difference between
them, but he fails to recognize the nature of the
difference because of the terms he thinks in. When he
shows her his butterfly collection, Miranda tells him
that he thinks like a scientist rather than an artist,
someone who classifies and names and then forgets
about things. She sees a deadening tendency, too, in
his photography, his use of cant, and his decoration of
the house. As a student of art and a maker of drawings,
her values contrast with his: Clegg can judge her work
only in terms of its representationalism, or
photographic realism. In despair at his insensitivity
when he comments that all of her pictures are "nice,"
she says that his name should be Caliban-the
subhuman creature in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Miranda uses several ploys in attempts to escape. She
feigns appendicitis, but Clegg only pretends to leave,
and sees her recover immediately. She tries to slip a
message into the reassuring note that he says he will
send to her parents, but he finds it. When he goes to
London, she asks for a number of articles that will be
difficult to find, so that she will have time to, try to dig
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her way out with a nail she has found, but that effort
also is futile.
When the first month has elapsed, Miranda dresses up
for what she hopes will be their last dinner. She looks
so beautiful that Clegg has difficulty responding except
with cliches and confusion. When she refuses his
present of diamonds and offer of marriage, he tells her
that he will not release her after all. She tries to escape
by kicking a log out of the fire, but he catches her and
chloroforms her again, this time taking off her outer
clothing while she is unconscious and photographing
her in her underwear.
Increasingly desperate, Miranda tries to kill Clegg with
an axe he has left out when he is escorting her to take
a bath upstairs. She injures him, but he is able to
prevent her from escaping. Finally, she tries to seduce
him, but he is unable to respond, and leaves, feeling
humiliated. He pretends that he will allow her to move
upstairs, with the stipulation that she must allow him
to take pornographic photographs of her. She
reluctantly cooperates, and he immediately develops
the pictures, preferring the ones with her face cut off.
Having caught a cold from Clegg, Miranda becomes
seriously ill, but Clegg hesitates to bring a doctor to the
house. He does get her some pills, but she becomes
delirious, and the first section ends with Clegg's
recollection: "I thought I was acting for the best and
within my rights."
The second section is Miranda's diary, which rehearses
the same events from her point of view, but includes
much autobiographical reflection on her life before her
abduction. She begins with her feelings over the first
seven days, before she had paper to write on. She
observes that she never knew before how much she
wanted to live.
Miranda describes her thoughts about Clegg as she
tries to understand him. She describes her view of the
house and ponders the unfairness of the whole
situation. She frequently remembers things said by G.
P., who gradually is revealed to be a middle-aged man
who is a painter and mentor whom Miranda admires.
She re-creates a conversation with Clegg over, among
other things, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
She gets him to promise to send a contribution, but he
only pretends to. She admits that he's now the only
real person in her world.
Miranda describes G. P. as the sort of person she would
like to marry, or at any rate the sort of mind. She lists
various ways he has changed her think- ing, most of
which involved precepts about how to live an
authentic, committed life. Then she characterizes G. P.
by telling of a time that he met her aunt and found her
so lacking in discernment and sincerity that he made
Miranda feel compelled to choose between him and
her aunt. Miranda seems to choose his way of seeing,
and he subsequently offers some harsh but honest
criticism of her drawing, which seems to help her to
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become more self-aware and discriminating. Her
friends Antoinette and Piers fail to appreciate the art G.
P. has produced, and Miranda breaks with her Aunt
Caroline over her failure to appreciate Rembrandt.
Miranda describes her growing attraction to G. P.,
despite their age difference and his history of sexual
infidelity . In the final episode about him, however, G.
P. confesses to being in love with her and, as a
consequence, wants to break off their friendship. She
is flattered but agrees that doing so would probably be
for the best.
Miranda says that G. P. is "one of the few." Her aunt
and Clegg are implicitly among "the many," who lack
creativity and authenticity. Indeed, Miranda associates
Clegg's shortcomings with "the blindness, deadness,
out-of-dateness, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous
malice of the great bulk of England," and she begins to
lose hope. She gets Clegg to read “Catcher in the Rye”,
but he doesn't understand it. Miranda feels more alone
and more desperate, and her reflections become more
philosophical. She describes her reasons for thinking
that seducing Clegg might change him, and does not
regret the subsequent failed attempt, but she fears
that he now can hope only to keep her prisoner .
Miranda begins to think of what she will do if she ever
gets free, including revive her relationship with G. P. on
any terms as a commitment to life. At this point,
Miranda becomes sick with Clegg's cold, literally as
well as metaphorically. As she becomes increasingly ill,
her entries in the journal become short, declarative
sentences and lamentations.
The third section is Clegg's, and picks up where his first
left off. He tells of becoming worried over her
symptoms and over her belief that she is dying. When
he takes her temperature, Clegg realizes how ill
Miranda is and decides to go for a doctor. As he sits in
the waiting room, Clegg begins to feel insecure, and he
goes to a drugstore instead, where the pharmacist
refuses to help him. When he returns and finds Miranda
worse, Clegg goes back to town in the middle of the
night, to wake a doctor; this time an inquisitive
policeman frightens him off. Miranda dies, and Clegg
plans to commit suicide.
In the final section, less than three pages long, Clegg
describes awakening to a new outlook. He decides that
he is not responsible for Miranda's death, that his
mistake was kidnapping someone too far above him,
socially. As the novel ends, Clegg is thinking about how
he will have to do things somewhat differently when
he abducts a more suitable girl that he has seen
working in Woolworth's.
From the point of view of narrative technique, the
novel is striking because it features not a coherent
account of what happens when Clegg (the novel's anti-
hero), having won a large amount of money in the
lottery, decides to capture Miranda, a beautiful girl
from the neighbourhood, and imprison her in the cellar
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of a countryside house which he managed to buy with
the money he had won. What the reader is presented
with are two narratives, one by Clegg and one by his
victim, Miranda. It is by virtue of this narrative
technique, as we will see, that Fowles achieves an
opposition of the two points of view which results not
only in pointing out the respective motives and goals
that can be seen as the determining factors for the
specific ways in which those narratives are structured,
but also in confusing the reader's moral response to
the novel as such.
As the subsequent discussion will show, the politics of
representation form what we may call one of the major
postmodernist constituents of the novel, but
representation is also critically examined from a
slightly different perspective. While the novel points
out to what degree a personal account (Miranda
significantly writes in form of a diary) might be
determined by the interests of the narrator, and to
what degree the narrator is able to structure and
influence what is being represented as text, the two
main characters are as well shown as victims of the
representative process: highly personal in their own
contributions, they tend to misread and misinterpret
the narratives of the respective other .
On the level of meaning, as we will argue, the novel
presents the reader with two characters. While the
reader would expect a condemnation of Clegg as the
moral monster he is, the open ending and Miranda's
apparent snobbism work to question her morally
superior status from the very beginning of her
narrative, while it sometimes seems that the novel is
more apologetic for Clegg's behaviour than we might
be willing to expect.
As said above, the novel is divided in two parts, both
commenting on the general theme of Miranda's
imprisonment in very different ways. While both depict
from the perspective of an insider the events that are
connected to her abduction, it is clear from the start
that both narratives also are diametrically opposed to
one another.
Clegg, on his behalf, tells us a lot about his social
background, how he won the pools, how he first met
Miranda and how the idea of abducting her gradually
grew within him, as well as providing us with a detailed
account of the preparations for the crime. Throughout,
the reader may watch his obsession to justify himself,
and one of the questions that remain unanswered is
before whom does he want to justify himself? As far as
the depiction of facts is concerned, Clegg is
significantly silent about his own or other people's
emotions, concentrating on describing the 'safety
measures' he installs to prevent her escape. For him,
two more events seem to be worth mentioning: first,
Miranda's trying to coax him into having sex with her
(C; 94 ff.) marks for Clegg the turn ing point of their
relationship; it is literally the point that makes him lose
all res pect for her, thus justifying him in his decision to
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force her to pose for the pornographic photos he'll
later take of her; second, he misinterprets Miranda's ill
ness, thinking (or rather hoping) that it's a simple cold
while in fact it's pneumonia that results in her death.
The death of her gives him a new opportunity to
develop strategies about what to do now, and he
pictures with a lot of detail his plans after her death.
On the other hand, while Clegg is being very technical
about
Miranda's
imprisonment,
her
account
concentrates on the depiction of her emotional
dilemma of being torn apart between hating Clegg and
feeling sorry for him. Miranda starts her diary at the
seventh day of her imprisonment, and in contrast to
Clegg, she does not bother the reader with technical
details. As in the case of Clegg, the reader is informed
about some of the facts about her past, but the
intention that hides behind the two narratives is a
completely different one: while Clegg writes about his
childhood partly to explain and justify his present
behaviour, Miranda introspectively explores her past
to come to terms with herself as a person, and her
account thus appears to be more honest.
Because the interplay between the use of specific
narrative techniques and modes and the critique of
representation and its politics is very intricate in this
novel, I will give each of the two protagonists one
subsection of their own.
When confessing that part of the inspiration about
how to keep a prisoner comes from a book called 'The
Secrets of the Gestapo', not only does this mentioning
link him with a fascist ideology of power , but it also
undermines the apparently altruistic justification he
tries to convince others with: 'The first days I didn't
want her to read about all the police were doing, and
so on, because it would have only upset her. It was
almost a kindness, as you might say. While the validity
of Miranda's descriptions and attitudes might be
questioned on the grounds of her apparent snobbism,
on which I will comment later on, it is clear from the
beginning that Clegg is the morally guilty party of the
two. While both suffer some form of a
representational failure, or a state of mind that does
not always allow them to see realistically, it is mainly
Clegg who has problems with realistically evaluating
the nature and content of his own plans: “I don't know
why I said it. I knew really I could never let her go away.
It wasn't just a barefaced lie, though. Often I did think
she would go away when we agreed, a promise was a
promise, etcetera(C; 57).
The sense in which it might be claimed that Clegg
suffers from a representational failure is that he fills
the cherished concepts of humanism with perverted
meanings and all the wrong associations. Having
gagged and bound Miranda, he comments: 'It was very
romantic, her head came just up to my shoulder.' (C;
50) This false identification happens on the moral side
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as well, and already the language Clegg uses shows
that he is unable to differentiate between what
concepts and ideals are valid for him, and what are
valid universally. In an al most characteristic shift of
pronoun, Clegg blurs the distinction between what he
feels he has to do and what he thinks is generally
advisable: 'Perhaps I was overstrict, I erred on the strict
side. But you had to be careful' (C; 57). It is as well
conspicuous
that
Clegg's
representation
and
evaluation of the facts serve his own ends most; in
trying to shun the responsibility for forcing Miranda to
pose for pornographic photos, he is trying to appeal to
every ever so minor circumstance that might lessen his
guilt, a train of thought that can be but the bitter
parody of a moral argument: I never slept that night, I
got in such a state. There were times I thought I would
go down and give her the pad again and take other
photos, it was as bad as that. I am not really that sort
and I was only like it that night because of all that
happened and the strain I was under. Also the
champagne had a bad effect on me. And everything
she said. It was what they call a culmination of
circumstances(C; 57).
«The Collector» values the outward appearances of
objects more than their intrinsic value: butterfly
collectors are interested in the beauty of certain
specimens, not in their biological function as put into
praxis. Miranda effectively characterizes this mentality
as desiring something both living and dead at the same
time: 'I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to
flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be
dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He
knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it's the
dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.' (C;
203) This corres ponds to Clegg's own confession that
it is mainly the outward and superficial qualities of his
'object' Miranda that interest him: 'She smelt so nice I
could have stood like that all the evening. It was like
being in one of those adverts come to life'. (C; 82)
«The Collector» mentality that Clegg exhibits also
corresponds to his crite rion for reality; faced with two
real events (Miranda's attempt to coax him into having
sex with her and him nursing her when she's ill) he
defines as real only the second one, largely on the
grounds that it comes a lot closer to the ideal he has
set up for himself: As Clegg's own discourse reveals,
«The Collector» mentality is closely linked with the wish
to dominate people and to have power over them: I
don't know why I didn't go then, I tried, but I couldn't,
I couldn't face the idea of not knowing how she was, of
not being able to see her whenever I wanted. (C; 271,
my emphasis) I couldn't do anything, I wanted her to
live so, and I couldn't risk get ting help, I was beaten,
anyone would have seen it. All those days I knew I
would never love another the same. There was only
Miranda for ever. I knew it then. (C; 273)
His concept of love is thus one structured by his wish
to dominate, and as such exemplifies the Politics of
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Representation at its most obvious: his des criptions do
not reveal anything factual about the outside world,
but rather tell us something about his psychological
make-up and his interests. The con sequence of such an
attitude is to appropriate existent patterns of
explanation for one's own personal ends, such as when
Clegg invokes the discourse of behaviourism to justify
his unwillingness to assist his disabled sister Mabel: It
was like when I had to take Mabel out in her chair. I
could always find a dozen reasons to put it off. You
ought to be grateful to have legs to push, Aunt Annie
used to say (they knew I didn't like being seen out
pushing the chair). But it's in my character, it's how I
was made. I can't help it. (C; 271)
While it seems clear at first sight that Clegg is, in fact,
the moral mons ter of the present novel, and that his
own efforts of justifying what he did ulti mately reveal
only his egoist motives, there is nevertheless a sense in
which both the novel and its author seem to exculpate
Clegg. After all, much stress is laid on his spoiled
childhood. Without positively justifying him, the novel
at least mentions some of the sad events of his
childhood that might be described as factors over
which Clegg has no control (his being nearly orphaned,
the psychological terror that his aunt sets up by using
his sister Mabel to discipline him and make him feel
guilty). Further, any unified interpretation according to
which Clegg alone is the morally reprehensible party is
foreclosed by the fact that Miranda as well is subject to
the Politics of Representation, and by her snobbism, a
point I will comment on in the following section.
There is also the suggestion (voiced by Clegg) that
more people would do what he has done had they both
the means and the opportunity. In this con text, it is
significant that Clegg has the opportunity by virtue of
his winning the lottery. This is by no means a
justification of his conduct, no more than his own
explanation of why things ended as they have at the
end of the novel. Com paring Miranda with his future
guest Marian, Clegg sees his former 'failure' as being
conditioned by the social border that separated him
from Miranda:
She isn't as pretty as Miranda, of course, in fact she's
only an ordinary common shop-girl, but that was my
mistake before, aiming too high, I ought to have seen
that I could never get what I wanted from somediv
like Miranda, with all her la-di-da ideas and clever tricks.
I ought to have got someone who would respect me
more. Someone ordinary I could teach. (C; 282)
Far from being a justification, for his conduct, these
comments allude to one of the minor themes of the
novel, which consists in opposing the different social
strata that Clegg and Miranda belong to. While their
social backgrounds are manifest in their respective
characteristic ways of using language, there is also a
fundamental inability (as well as lack of will) to enter
(even linguistically) the world of the other in order to
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understand him - a point I will comment on again when
discussing Miranda in the following section.
Speaking about Miranda we may say the following.
Clegg is the morally reprehensible party of the present
novel, it is small wonder that Miranda is its heroine. But
as in the case of Clegg, this is a characterisation that, in
spite of all its convincing power at first sight, is not re
versed, but questioned and undermined in important
respects. While Clegg's first comment on Miranda's
snobbism is certainly out of place when uttered by a
person who has captured her some days before, the
second part of his argument (in italics in the following
quote) tells us something about Miranda.
She wasn't la-di-da, like many, but it was there all the
same. You could see it when she got sarcastic and
impatient with me because I couldn't explain myself or
I did things wrong. Stop thinking about class, she'd say.
Like a rich man telling a poor man to stop thinking
about money. (C; 41)
As it is clear that Clegg's discourse is structured by his
interests, so is it obvious that Miranda is likewise
unable to adopt the point of view of someone who
does not come from the same social strata as she does.
Voiced in meta narrative terms, she adopts a
paternalistic attitude towards Clegg because of her
superior intelligence, thus exemplifying the exclusion
of unreason or idiocy from those who think themselves
as belonging to the community of rationalhumans, an
exclusion that betrays the use of reason as power.
While we might criticise Miranda's apparent snobbism
and the paternalistic attitude she adopts when dealing
with Clegg, this is not the only inter pretation possible.
We might as well interpret her insistence that Clegg
change his life along existentialist lines. I won't try to
paraphrase the structure of the existentialist
interpretations here, suffice it to say that most critics
see Clegg as a hopelessly inauthentic individual for
whom it is almost impossible to achieve personal
authenticity while this possibility is principally open to
Miranda - possibly at times foreclosed because of her
snobbism, but in the end simply not attainable because
she doesn't live long enough. She thus possesses the
ability that is necessary to take authentic decisions: she
can identify what's wrong with both her life as that of
other people: '"You have money - as a matter of fact,
you aren't stupid, you could become whatever you
liked. Only you've got to shake off the past. You’ve got
to kill your aunt and the house you lived in and the
people you lived with. You've got to be a new human
being."' (C; 76) On the other hand, as she becomes
aware that her former boyfriend, the artists G.P., is just
another instance of «The Collector» mentality (as is
argued by Woodcock 1984; 34 f.), she also realizes that
she as well has been leading a life of appearances, a
situation she cannot change while being confined to
Clegg's estate. While she reproaches herself for simply
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taking over the positions endorsed by G.P. as well as
for her snobbism, she seems also unable to overcome
it, while on the other hand Clegg really gives her every
reason to feel superior to him, and consequently her
position as an authentic person is questioned, but
never abandoned: He makes me change, he makes me
want to dance around him, bewilder him, dazzle him,
dumbfound him. He's so slow, so un imaginative, so
lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it's a sort of tyranny he
has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To
show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people. G.P. said
it once. The ordinary man is the curse of civilization. (C;
127)
I'm so superior to him. I know this sounds wickedly
conceited. But I am. And so it's Ladymont and Boadicea
and noblesse oblige all over again. I fell I've got to show
him how decent human beings live and behave. (C; 130)
It is interesting that Miranda here voices an argument
similar to one of Clegg's, viz. that the divide between
them is of both a social and an economical nature.
In contrast to Clegg, Miranda is very aware of the
Politics of Representation and this (despite her
snobbism) even when it comes to analysing her own
preferences and aspirations. Voicing her disgust for the
'ordinary man', she realizes that this disgust is to a
large extent motivated by the desire to belong to the
supposedly superior social strata: 'I'm vain. I'm not one
of them. I want to be one of them, and that's not the
same thing' (C; 209 - emphasis in the original). Being
aware of the Politics of Representation also makes her
recognize Clegg's inferiority complex and the desire to
exculpate himself, which hides behind his supposed
'explanations': He loves me desperately, he was very
lonely, he knew would always be 'above' him. It was
awful, he spoke so awkwardly, he always has to say
things in a roundabout way, he always has to justify
himself at the same time.' (C; 122)
The narrative technique used in the respective
contributions of both Clegg and Miranda appear not
only on the level of speech, attributing Clegg to a
working-class background with a general lack of
education, and linking Miranda with the upper social
layers. As demonstrated, they also help to characterise
the fundamental principles of the Politics of
Representation, and especially so in the case of
Miranda. In the present context, it is significant that
she writes in the form of a diary, a genre where writer
and reader traditionally coincide and which is not
meant for other eyes. What is important here is that
this form also allows Miranda to denigrate and to
ridicule Clegg, since he has no way of reacting to the
discourse of her diary, and the diary thus constitutes
one of the last domains where Miranda effectively
stays in power while betraying at the same time her
personal shortcomings and pre judices.
For Clegg, the only purpose of a story is its capacity to
explain (and he al ways uses 'explain' in the sense of
'justify') what has happened. 'I've always hated to be
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found out, I don't know why, I've always tried to
explain, I mean invent stories to explain.' (C; 32) This is
in keeping with his collector mentality, while for
Miranda, as we will see, aesthetic categories, as well as
personal free dom and authenticity, play a much more
important role.
The important fact to be remembered here is that both
characters suf fer from a distorted perception of
reality, due in both cases to their interests and
preferences. But it is not always clear that every
misinterpretation that Clegg advances is really due to
his interests. For example, he says about the severly ill
Miranda: 'It was not my fault. How was I to know she
was iller than she looked? She just looked like she had
a cold' (C; 110), and the reader is in no privileged
position to ascertain whether this evaluation is due to
his desire to keep Miranda, or due to an already
obvious paranoia that he has doubtlessly by the time
he writes his retrospective account. There are two
further metanarratives which structure the respective
accounts of Clegg and Miranda in ways similar to the
processes of the Politics of Representation.
As already mentioned, Clegg's language is often cold
and devoid of emotional content, and this has certainly
a connection with «The Collector» mentality he
exhibits. Miranda, on the other hand, is very conscious
about the Politics of Re presentation, and she does
adopt a rather aestheticist attitude to life (which, in
existentialist terms, might be seen as a sign of her in
authenticity) and positively confesses cheating over
some parts of the dialogues in her diary: '(I'm cheating,
I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what
I want to say as well as what I did).(C; 133)
As we have seen, Fowles is very considerate in trying to
realize the Politics of Representation on the formal
level of language as well, hereby ad hering to his
statement that he wrote «The Collector» in the
strictest possible realism'. This might go for the
organization of the two main characters ways of using
language (and especially for Clegg's violations of the
rules of grammar), but on the level of content, it
remains doubtful what realism actually is. Miranda is
very aware of the danger that the reality that
surrounds her during her imprisonment might soon
become the only reality that she can remember, thus
pushing out of the way other realities. She tries to
counter this danger by thinking about G.P. who is not
with her in reality, but in some sense is much more a
real presence to her than Clegg, but on the other hand,
Clegg is her reality in the last two months of her life: His
inhibition. It's absurd. I talked to him as if he could
easily be normal. As if he wasn't a maniac keeping me
prisoner here. But a nice young man who wanted a bit
of chivvying from a jolly girl-friend. It's because I never
see anyone else. He becomes the norm. I forget to
compare. (C; 189)
As a last point, I'd like to mention that not only the two
protagonists of the novel have to face problems of
Volume 04 Issue 06-2024
126
American Journal Of Philological Sciences
(ISSN
–
2771-2273)
VOLUME
04
ISSUE
06
P
AGES
:
115-126
OCLC
–
1121105677
Publisher:
Oscar Publishing Services
Servi
representation and of determining what sort of
phenomena might hide behind the appearances.
Throughout the whole novel, and while it is clear that
Clegg bears the moral responsibility for Miranda's
death, the reader does not know why exactly Miranda
died: the most likely answer is that he gave her an
overdose of sleeping tablets, but because he himself is
unsure about the quantity, as readers, we simply don't
know: I never had a worse night, it was so terrible I
can't describe it. She couldn't sleep, I gave her as many
sleeping tablets as I dared but they seemed to have no
effect, she would doze off a little while and then she
would be in a state again, trying to get out of bed (once
she did before I could get to her and fell to the floor).
(C; 267)
CONCLUSION
Fowles' «The Collector» adopts once again an attitude
of complicity and critique: while the anti-hero can
sometimes be identified with, the character of the
novel's heroine is at least questioned. While literary
modernism projected the difficult-to- identify-with
hero as a safeguard against identificatory strategies of
reading (in order to fully reveal the status of the work
of art as such), literary postmodern ism plays with the
identificatory strategies in a way that leaves no doubt
that those strategies have at least lost there
innocence. As a consequence, the reader has to think
for herself whether or not to take her initial evaluation
of the main characters at face value. The critique of
representation is here imminently linked with a critique
of interpretation, which may belie the same Politics as
the former.
REFERENCES
1.
Tarbox, Katherine, The Art of John Fowles,
University of Georgia Press, 1988.p. 90
2.
Tarbox, Katherine, The Art of John Fowles,
University of Georgia Press, c1988., p. 101
3.
Wormholes: Essays and occasional writings - John
Fowles. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Ref J.
(Ed.). (1998). p. 93
4.
Thorpe, M. (1982). John Fowles. England: Profile
Books. p, 86
5.
Thorpe, M. (1982). John Fowles. England: Profile
Books. p. 65
6.
Foster, Thomas C., Understanding John Fowles,
University of South Carolina Press, c 1994, p.
