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Bakhtigul Sodikova, Denau entrepreneurship and pedagogy institute
REASON, POWER AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE IN THE NOVEL OF “THE
COLLECTOR”
B. Sodikova
Abstract:As historioghraphic metafiction the novel “The Collector”
includes such features like mixture of genres of realism, memoir, on the
thematic level focusing on the fascism ideology and theory of Darwin,
existentialism and behavior of the psychopath.
Keywords: realism, collector, fascism, theory , a rarity , mention , an
amateur lepidopterist , power , parody
“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 Miranda as he would a beautiful butterfly, as an object
from which he may derive pleAndijan State University named after
Z.M.Boburrable 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
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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."
1
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 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.
1
Foster, Thomas C., Understanding John Fowles, University of South Carolina Press, c 1994,
p.
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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."
2
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 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
3
. 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
2
Thorpe, M. (1982). John Fowles. England: Profile Books. p. 65
3
Thorpe, M. (1982). John Fowles. England: Profile Books. p, 86
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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
4
.
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 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
4
Wormholes: Essays and occasional writings - John Fowles. New York: Henry Holt and
Company. Ref J. (Ed.). (1998). p. 93
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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
5
.
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 meAndijan
State University named after Z.M.Boburres' 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 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
5
Tarbox, Katherine, The Art of John Fowles, University of Georgia Press, c1988., p. 101
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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
6
, 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
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
6
Tarbox, Katherine, The Art of John Fowles, University of Georgia Press, 1988.p. 90
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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 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
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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 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
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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 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
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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 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
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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 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
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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)
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.
As historioghraphic metafiction the novel includes such features like
mixture of genres of realism, memoir, on the thematic level focusing on the
fascism ideology and theory of Darwin, existentialism and behavior of the
psychopath.
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. .
