Tag: British Literature

Jacob’s Room and the Limits of Biography

1922 was a good time to be a person who read books written in English. Ulysses and The Waste Land both appeared that year, though you might have had trouble getting your hands on the former because it was banned in various places for obscenity. However, if you wanted cutting edge fiction but couldn’t get your hands on Joyce’s work, then luckily there was another great writer ready and waiting. Virginia Woolf is a wonderful writer, and every time I have returned to her I am grateful for it. My wanderings within the pages of the first of her “experimental” novels, 1922’s Jacob’s Room, was no different. This is a novel about a man where his role as plot actor is very much secondary, his voice muffled. It’s a Bildungsroman with very little Bildung. Most of all, though, it’s a frolic, a joyous exploration of what literature and language can do.

But also, however, what they cannot. Jacob’s Room concerns the short life of a young man in Edwardian England, Jacob Flanders, yet from the title alone there’s already a hint of a problem – for the title refers to his lodgings, and not to the man himself. This problem is what makes the work so fascinating – I interpret Jacob’s Room as a work that’s both determined to shake off old ideas of characterisation and literary creation, while at the same time trying to defend itself against the kind of total narrative collapse that rejecting old forms entirely might lead to or imply. It’s this strange mix of past and future, a kind of conservative modernism, that makes the work so fascinating. Compared to Ulysses, it’s really a kind of anxious battleground about what the future of literature might look like – and what it should not.

Out With The Old

Somewhere or other I remember reading that literary modernism began with a growing scepticism of the idea of character. Perhaps the best way to explain how this works is by reference to a work by one of my favourite German writers of the 19th century, Theodore Fontane, No Way Back. In that novel, our main character, Count Holk, has an affair while away from his wife. His letters home, naturally, reveal none of this. But we, readers, know the truth. And eventually his wife finds out too. Fontane uses letters as a way of exploring the communication difficulties two people can have, all the while Holk’s character remains known to us and his wife’s remains knowable too – that Holk ultimately does not understand her, leading to the novel’s tragedy, is a fault of his character, not a statement about character in general.

Letters and other writings dot the pages of Jacob’s Room as well, and as with No Way Back they are places for concealment more than communication. Jacob writes home, revealing nothing of his loves or his thoughts. His mother is delighted, “he seems to be having… a very gay time.” But what separates the treatment of writing in both works is that in Jacob’s Room there comes no revelation of the truth, no contradiction to the apparent world of the letter. The final scene sees his mother and Bonamy, the man who loved him, standing in Jacob’s empty room with “all his letters strewn about for anyone to read.” The dispersal of the letters indicates a similar dispersal of character. Who is Jacob? One person to his mother, another to Bonamy. Putting all the letters together, or the two people talking, would only be to court chaos. It’s not that character is changeable; rather, that there may be nothing solid about it all.

Other letters and writings are similarly undermined. Those of well-bred Clara are “those of a child”, and even when she writes in her diary, there’s nothing more there than air – she writes “how the weather was fine, the children demons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly.” There’s a sense that even when characters in Jacob’s Room try to express themselves, they cannot. We readers only have what we can see of them, hear of them, and that is rarely enough. “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, not yet entirely what is done.” This phrase is repeated, word for word, twice in Jacob’s Room. What pessimism, really, lies in it – “hints,” “not exactly,” “not yet entirely”. If character is so diffuse that this is how we trap it, then clearly what we can trap will be far from the real thing.

Elsewhere that pessimism is more clear, as we can see from this description of men on a bus: “Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title, James Spalding, or Charles Budgeon, and the passengers going the opposite way could read nothing at all–save “a man with a red moustache,” “a young man in grey smoking a pipe.”” Traditionally, by focusing on individuals, we might get a past. This does not work here. Jacob’s father has a grave that may not be his, while the scenes of Jacob’s childhood are mere flashes of impressions with as much attention on the other characters and their thoughts as on Jacob himself.

Finally, we might hope that impersonal forces would provide a key to character. Instetten, in Fontane’s Effi Briest, decries this “society-thing” that forces him to kill a man he does not hate because of an idea of honour he is powerless to reject. What are the forces in Jacob’s Room?“The incessant commerce of banks, laboratories, chancelleries, and houses of business”, “the men in clubs and Cabinets”. Woolf explicitly names this “unseizable force” that drives men to their deaths. But whether the forces of her novel match those of, for example, Fontane’s, is another matter.

On the one hand, Jacob is shaped into seeming conventionality by a usual society – the artistically-inclined former graduates of Cambridge and Oxford. He stands for the Greeks (despite knowing the language poorly) and for Shakespeare, neither a particularly radical opinion. He has other views, such as his ideas of women, that are still more clearly conditioned by society. However, though ultimately his society does kill him – for the Great War is coming – it seems fair to say that Woolf suggests we cannot just turn to impersonal forces to describe character either. Since Jacob is hard to fix down to begin with, he is too uncertain to be moulded by external forces.

All this is to say that the novel looks to the sources of character from fiction of previous centuries – what is revealed in letters, or the forces of an impersonal society, and says these are not adequate. Even dialogue itself is typically disconnected, disjointed words floating on the page, with Jacob rarely speaking. The old ways do not work, but how does Woolf innovate and experiment to build an alternative idea of character – and what are the limits?

In With The New

If I try to think of how this novel works, what makes it modern in its depiction of character, the answer is simple – the fragmentary flashes of prose that make up the bulk of the text. Jacob’s Room is told in snatches, sometimes only a single short paragraph long. It is true that every biography is broken into events and key moments, for lives are long. But in Jacob’s Room the moments chosen are less obviously important, even when contextualised. We might read symbolic importance into them, such as by analysing the significance of the sheep’s skull he finds on the beach as a child or the image of the moth, but it’s not necessarily the case that any of the characters joins us in such narrativizing work.

All memory is fragmentary. When I try to think back to yesterday, an ordinary day, there’s scant solidity to it. I recall a few images, the food I cooked for dinner, but little more. Woolf enjoys noting vibrant colours, and drifting between her characters’ consciousnesses, as if they are already looking back from some moment a little ahead. This gives the text a kind of blurred feeling. Even its characters seem themselves a little like names on whirling sticks, because none is quite embodied, pinned down and described like a beetle in the previous century would be. Really, like certain paintings, while we may appreciate the texture of Woolf’s prose up close, it’s only when we retreat a little that we see the overall effect – the mood, the shifting shapes settling into scenes.

Such fragmentation puts action into the background and overall reflects that pessimism about getting to the heart of character which I mentioned earlier. Solidity, perhaps, comes from the novel’s interest in architecture and buildings, which, suggested by its very title provides the clearest example of this. Yet Jacob’s own room, when we first encounter it at Cambridge, gives no clue to his personality. “Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs.” For the first mention of the title, its lack of force is its force. He has books and the detritus recognisable to anyone who has gone to Oxbridge – “a photograph of his mother; cards from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and initials.” A piece of writing in his own hand is titled “Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?” – a normal assignment then, as if to highlight that Jacob is really only an average Edwardian, nothing special. 

We often think of Woolf as a writer of the inner world, someone who lived in the marginal thoughts of men and women. Jacob’s Room certainly shows her moving between her characters, but of them, Jacob is probably the one inhabited least. When we hear a voice, like his room it almost seems to tell us we were fools for expecting anything more of him – “I’m twenty-two. It’s nearly the end of October. Life is thoroughly pleasant, although unfortunately there are a great number of fools about. One must apply oneself to something or other–God knows what. Everything is really very jolly–except getting up in the morning and wearing a tail coat.” Here is the gentle delusion of superiority of the untested, but does this show Jacob to be any different to a hundred thousand other young men? Certainly not.

At the beginning I mentioned a kind of anxiety to the prose. Woolf read avidly among her modernist contemporaries such as Katherine Mansfield and knew through Eliot what Joyce was up to with Ulysses, so she had a keen awareness of the options for advancing prose which were being worked upon by others. One thing I found curious was that in her revisions of the novel Woolf primarily worked to reduce instances of interiority. It was as if, while retreating from the scenes and structures of 19th century fiction – the genealogies and letters, the carefully orchestrated scenes and overheard gossip – she did not want to commit wholly to something from the 20th century, that totally absorbing, egotistical monologic stream of consciousness of the sort we read from Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses. Something that is both extraordinary, yet at the same time a kind of dead end, for it denies the soul of every other living being.

All this is to say that it’s as if Woolf were experimenting here with trying to find a third way of characterisation, neither the pure continuous interiority of the stream of consciousness, nor the lifeless puppetry of the realist novel. A characterisation through fragments, through assembling snatched moments of life, and of consciousness, into a kind of whole. Except, if that is the goal, it is a failure. I have no idea who Jacob is, and I am not sure that any truth on that score really lurks within the novel. We may have escaped the madness of stream of consciousness and run out onto the street, but now cars are hurtling past us, and all is disorientation.

Yet if the goal is not to create a character, but to paint a world, to load readers with the impressions and thoughts of a society, then by contrast Jacob’s Room is a great success. We learn as much about Jacob in five pages as we do in fifty – giving us more is only like putting another thin sheet of coloured glass upon a heap, and indeed the effect of colouring is diminished as more and more is added. The first sheet is when things are most striking. So it is that in a single one of Woolf’s fragments she has more than enough opportunity to create her effects.

The one that sticks in my mind comes from early on, a tiny story of four pages, in which Jacob’s mother receives a letter from his tutor proposing marriage, considers it, and decides to remain independent. In this section Woolf’s total technical mastery is evident. Mrs Flanders receives the letter and, expecting nothing but remarks related to her son’s work, reads it while continuing her own business. Thus do we see her, divided: ““Yes, enough for fish-cakes tomorrow certainly – Perhaps Captain Barfoot—” she had come to the word “love.”” A few sentences on she rages at her children, not truly out of anger towards them, but because she is angry at the letter and cannot control it. This is all wonderful, delicate writing. Her emotions, a world of them, are covered in a few pages. Completeness stretches even to time – we get a little epilogue, in which some years later Mr Floyd sees Jacob by chance in London, but thinks he “had grown such a fine young man that Mr Floyd did not like to stop him in the street.”

What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Woolf comes up against the limits of biography within this approach. She can create characters through her experimentation, certainly. But with her reluctance to travel too deep and stay too long inside their heads, as she does in her later novels, that characterisation can only go so far. That is why Jacob remains a blur, while those other characters, whose internal worlds are clearer to us, are themselves are much clearer – Mrs Dalloway or Mrs Ramsay, for example. Overall, Jacob’s Room is a book of wonderful prose, challenging forms, and experiments which remain relevant to writing even today. I did not love it as I do To the Lighthouse, but that is no matter. Woolf was such a prolific writer – of letters and diaries as well as her novels – that as readers we get a view of nearly-unmatched privilege compared to other writers. We see not just the brilliance of her experiments when they succeed, but also the many false-starts and sites of practice she needed to prepare for them. That, for anyone interested in the craft of fiction, will never not be exciting.

Enduring Enduring Love

Enduring Love has a justly famous opening, bringing together a group of strangers as they attempt in vain to avert a hot air balloon catastrophe in the English countryside. It then shifts focus to become a strange book about the obsessive relationship between a young religious gay man, Jed Parry, and our narrator, Joe Rose, middle-aged and married (to a woman, Clarissa). I had read McEwan’s Atonement before, so I was on the lookout for narrative games, and was convinced I had spotted a twist only to discover that there was no twist after all.

The problem with the book is that it seems rather disorganised. With a title mentioning love you have a razor-sharp thematic focus right from the beginning, and love is complex enough that it can sustain the lengthiest of works. (Including a different Clarissa, in fact.) Enduring Love, however, is not a long work. Yet it seems burdened by its title, forced into discussing love, and forced by the thought of love’s range into talking about all too much. It’s wide in scope, rather than deep. Love is one word, but it can take many forms, each of which is rich enough for a story.

Instead, speaking broadly, we have: the romantic love of Joe for Clarissa and vice versa, the obsessive love of Jed for Joe, Jed’s love of God, Joe’s love of science, Clarissa’s love for Keats, the love of the widow of one of the men who tried to stop the balloon for her husband, who nevertheless she suspects had cheated on him, the love of a trio of drug addicts for one another, reflections on the love of parents for children, and so on.

In other words, there is too much here. The main focus, Jed’s obsession for Joe (and its contrast to Joe’s relationship with Clarissa), is not given enough development despite being the dominant part of the book. The tonics, questions of moral responsibility associated with the hot air balloon catastrophe (is Joe to blame for the victim’s death?), and the contrast of reason (science) and emotions (God, faith), are too faintly drawn.

Then there is the matter of the plot. Enduring Love is a book where things actually happen. But it is also a painfully real novel. It is the most upper-middle-class English story I have ever read. It’s just about people who have nice picnics with things from Waitrose or occasionally Fortnum and Mason, who have nice houses and nice friends. The upper middle class. My people, (by birth and education, if not always by inclination). So, when we have attempted assassinations by hired killers in busy restaurants, or calling up old friends to help us buy handguns from drug dealers, there’s something that seems more laughable than congruent. The opening scene is unlikely yet believable, the rest is just silly. (And as the action is being driven by characters, we can hardly say this fits into the whole ordered universe vs randomness theme, either).

There’s a fundamental tension in modern middle-class life, it seems to me, which causes problems for novelists. In the good old days, love plots were typically structured as being against society, and brought readers on side by the truth of the love against society’s fakeness. Now, with scant exception, we can love who we want, and though we may occasionally face some disapproval, in western Europe for the dominant social groupings we cannot create nearly enough drama to make a story. Instead, the novelist of average talent or below who wants to write about passionate love and make a story of it, is practically obliged to write about something like obsession.

Obsession, however, places the lover outside of society. It’s inherently less interesting because it reflects little back on our world. Its lessons stop as soon as we think about what makes obsession happen, patting ourselves on the back at the obvious conclusion that, for the example, we must be an atomised society to cause such madness in its members. In Enduring Love, Jed is not integrated in society. He is a loner, living at home, with no family and no job. Through his obsessiveness, he gradually disintegrates Joe’s position in society, spoiling his marriage and work as he draws him into his “love”. Indeed, Jed even does a good job of disintegrating Joe’s mind.

Now there are thoughts here that are interesting, like the way that Joe’s conviction that Jed is stalking him and dangerous is shared by nobody, so that we see as he falls away from social groups just how fragile our position in society can be. But again, there’s rather too much going on. We don’t need attempted murder to make these points. While I wouldn’t want to stress the point too much, there is a sense for me that in a serious book using shocking action like this is almost like the novelist is saying that they don’t trust themselves to hold my attention otherwise. (Which is probably true of this book).

I felt like Iris Murdoch struggled with a similar problem in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which shares with Enduring Love its focus on people who I went to school with or who my mother occasionally has round for tea. Murdoch’s novel seems at first to be the story of a demonic figure who manipulates a group of friends to ruin their relationships, as if by magic. Using words like “haunted,” “demons”, “materialises”, Murdoch creates an atmosphere or uneasy horror in spite of an essentially extremely bougie London setting. Yet when the time comes to have consequential action, those moments that would prove that the demon were truly a hellish visitant, Murdoch refuses to allow anything like that before finally dismissing the mystery at the story’s close. Meanwhile, McEwan rushes to jump the proverbial shark. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory. The one brings in the unreal and surrenders to the real. The other seems real, but refuses to abide by reality’s rules.

In general, I suppose I just find my people boring. I try to be a well-behaved writer and pay attention, but so far as I am aware there has been not one interesting story taking place around me in that circle in all the years of my life. (My time in Russia is another story). No cheating, no problems which are not immediately thrown under the rug, pure bourgeois stability, punctuated occasionally by death or mental decline, complaining over inheritance, but nothing more than that. That’s not to say I cannot write stories from the material I’m given. But the stuff of old novels, society scandal and the like, is essentially absent. The problem, one of them anyway, is that in Enduring Love McEwan doesn’t seem to trust either himself or his readers. The novel could work just as well as a slow burn, a gradual breakdown in sanity, a growing sense of menace. Instead, McEwan feels the need here to have every chapter be dramatic like a cheap thriller, to show love from so many angles, so that it’s far too busy a work to be an interesting one.

That’s not to say that there are not things I admired in the work. One part I liked is the novel’s ending, not what it says so much as how it says it. As with Lolita, where if we want to know Lo’s true fate we must read the parts where Humbert Humbert’s narration stops rather carefully, here too we have an appendix that gives more closure to everyone’s story than the section of Joe’s narrative does, while concealing its actual significance under the appearance of an article in a medical journal.

There is also the hard-to-dismiss fact that the book does work hard to establish tension, and as novelists are supposed to make their works entertaining, this is a good place to learn it. The first chapter is not that dull conversation business that animates the start of War and Peace, for example. (/s) Here, it’s pure energy, suggesting that we needn’t care about characters if the story is exciting enough. And as for that beginning, it’s also a good example of a way to draw out a morally complex theme from a conceivable real-world situation. It’s just that McEwan, for mysterious reasons, chooses to leave this theme in the background rather than the foreground.

Overall, your blogger shrugs his shoulders. I felt this was a busy book, with uninteresting characters and a silly plot. It was a contemporary story – I could tell at once how much the work was written under the sensible eyes (and scalpel) of a sensible editor, or even the ghost of one, tutting at the thought of an opening that did not grip, of anything that might lose the reader’s attention and do something so irrelevant as add depth to themes. Yet unlike the contemporary fiction of people like Sally Rooney or Patricia Lockwood, where even if I have my complaints I still am excited by the opportunities for reflecting our changed relation with the world under the effects of an ever more pervasive technology, I did not feel McEwan wrote a book that was contemporary in the deeper sense of telling me something about my world which I did not already know. (A classic, of course, can be a thousand years old and still manage this). Enduring Love, instead, feels already dated. Or, to be blunt, it’s a book which apart its opening, will probably not endure.

Blog note: the recent paucity of blog posts is due to two factors. First, my bag, containing my laptop and other quite useful items like the heavily annotated books I was aiming to write about (apologies to the reader who recommended Cusk – both Transit and Kudos are gone but there might still be a post on Outline), was stolen on the train. Second, I was struck by inspiration and wrote the first draft of a novel in the past two months, some 110000 words. This necessarily has to take precedence over other forms of writing, and indeed living.

Anyway, should be back to slightly more regularly updates from now ish.

Strange Ways of Making Real – The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a novel that I cannot imagine leaving any of us cold. It is a bag of tricks with multiple endings and a chatty modern narrator who refuses to let his characters be. Yet from its title onwards we are also led to expect something Victorian. That John Fowles delivers something much stranger than just another bulky Victorian monster is the cause of either our joy or our dismay. At first, I was in the latter camp, bothered by references to Henry Moore, taxpayers, and public loos that did not at all make sense with the novel’s 1867 setting. Later, the only words I had for my readerly experience were “breathless”, “excited” and “inspired.” The novel does something any writer can be grateful for – it shows that novels can still be novel, and that there are new games to play with readers while telling important stories.

For this post, my interest in the novel concerns its relationship with character and reality construction. Fowles takes some major risks with his storytelling, pulling us out of the narrative repeatedly through epigraphs, a digressive narrator who isn’t sure of his characters’ hearts, and through being inconclusive by providing readers with a choice of conclusions. Yet though Fowles is clear that this is a work of fiction, he is also clear that these characters are no less real for it. Our own lives, he points out in one chapter, are full of delusions and fiction. Yet we are sure they are real.

I want to argue that Fowles achieves the extraordinary here. For me, the artifice of the novel, with its postmodern flourishes, makes its story and people more real, at least to me. While spoiling much of the novel’s plot, I hope to explain what I mean.

The Story

First, though, the plot, so that I might contextualise at least somewhat the games and tricks of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In Lyme Regis, gentleman Charles Smithson is spending time with his betrothed, Erestina Freeman, when they come across Sarah Woodruff, a “fallen woman” and the French lieutenant’s woman of the novel’s title. (He seduced her and then left her). Charles falls in love, though it takes him time to know it, and has several coincidental and then less coincidental meetings with Sarah, before finally breaking his engagement with Ernestina.

While breaking it off, however, Charles loses track of Sarah and struggles to find her for the next two years while drifting around the world as a social outcast himself. Eventually, he does – the former governess is now an artists’ assistant, and has given birth to Charles’ daughter. Depending on the reader’s preferred ending, Charles and Sarah either make up, or Charles leaves to continue with his wandering. The novel’s other ending, some time earlier, is the one where Charles breaks his relationship with Sarah to be with Ernestina and has a boring domestic happiness, or thinks he has, anyway.

Less an Unreliable than a Poor Narrator

Writers claim, from time to time, that their characters get away from them and do their own thing. (Iris Murdoch, I think, said charmingly if tellingly, that she kept them locked up and deprived them of even the slightest freedom from her plans). John Fowles seems the only writer to claim it from within the bounds of his own story – for The French Lieutenant’s Woman has a strange narrative voice. Or perhaps “startling” is a better word. The narrator is speaking to us of 1867, but from the perspective of 1967, talking freely about the sexual revolution ongoing in his own time, mentioning artists and other figures born long after the novel ends. How, we might wonder, can such a voice create characters who feel real, when it so openly notes that they are fictional, and does not even pretend to be from their own time? (“This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.”)

Certainly, we know that these are fictions, just as we know that we are reading fiction. But what is true of all the techniques I mention in this post is that somehow they work in a way contrary to what we might expect, by bringing us closer to the characters and making them more real. The narrator claims he does not know what Sarah thinks at key moments. He leaves blanks and decides which of the final two endings we read first by a coin flip. He seems, on the whole, out of control.

So, who is in control? If it is the characters, that only makes them more interesting and real to us – they then have their own lives, their own emotions driving them. Even if we disagree with the narrator’s assessment of his abilities, the whole novel seems like it has been ripped open so that the inner machinery is visible to us. Instead of reading from afar, we are made to identify with the narrator as we too try to construct the story and its world inside our heads. We can think of there being three layers of participation in a story – one is as a character, one is on the level of the narrator, within the story but yet also with a certain distance and perspective, and the final layer is of a disinterested observer who can leave at any time. This is the reader. Therefore, if we are with the narrator, we are already closer than we normally would be.

We might think that we are closer to the story when we just read a straight narrative. It might seem more like it actually happened, if it is written well and we are of a believing bent. But only here do we feel close enough to it that the narrator can reach out and tap us on the back. Only through an honesty about the story he is telling – a piece of historical fiction with his contemporary narration – and by making the fiction obvious as he constructs it, does the narrator put us beside him. At the same time, by relinquishing obvious control over the characters’ destinies, he does make it seem as though they are acting for themselves – fictional beings, yet with real autonomy. With readers getting so close to him, we are more likely to trust his words about his lack of control, compared to if he were just pretending to lack control at one key moment. It feels more authentic.

Epigraphs

Each chapter in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is headed by at least one, and quite often two, epigraphs, a practice I most associate with Middlemarch, but which is by no means unique to it. Fowles quotes poets and writers like Hardy, Tennyson and Arnold, and also thinkers like Marx and Darwin, and social documents and historians. Such epigraphs set the tone of the chapter, for example by informing us that this one will be about duty, that one about the pressures on young women to marry, and still the other about Darwin’s theories of evolution. They show, undoubtedly, Fowles’ deep knowledge of the period – never amiss, when trying to write a kind of historical fiction.

But how does this relate to creating real characters? After all, you can research all you want, but that does not always mean you have the faintest idea of the true soul of a period or a people. If anything, at first glance at least, the epigraphs are a problem. They draw us out of the fantasy by reminding us we are reading a novel every time we start a chapter, rather than letting us race along with the narrative, and by giving us some guidelines on how to analyse the story (with Marx, for example, encouraging a Marxist reading) rather than just leaving us to it.  

Yet what this ultimately does is help the reader to become more involved. If we see the epigraphs and know we can use them to analyse, we will start analysing as we read. As we will see in this post, all of Fowles’s tricks we can understand as aiming at making the reader get herself engaging with what she’s reading. Instead of blindly turning the pages, now we are forced to think – about class, about gender, about duty. This focusing of attention means we get closer to the characters. They become more real to us as we question their motives and their correspondence to the epigraphs provided. Just as at school, reading a book closely for an exam means that often years later, sadly or joyously, parts of it will remain with us, so too does Fowles repeat the exercise in miniature by ensuring we do our own close reading for him.

There is another point here, related to the historical quotes and Fowles’ reading. He points out at one point that his goal is not to make the reader believe their narrator is from 1867, merely that the narrative is set then. By showing his reading, and being honest about his modern perspective looking back, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is marked by a kind of authenticity that other historical fiction lacks. It is a small point, sure, but not entirely immaterial that when reading it we do not have that sense that we are reading a pretence or lie, which we may do, in the backs of our minds, as we read something else.

Multiple Endings

The French Lieutenant’s Woman has three endings, and this too, strange to say, seems to add to its verisimilitude. In the first ending, Charles receives the address of the hotel Sarah is staying at in Exeter and chooses, as he passes through that town, not to see her. In the second and third endings, Charles does see her for a night of passion, has his years of wanderings, and finally meets her again. In one ending he and she reunite in love, in another he condemns her and leaves her alone.

Within the novel Fowles’s narrator is keen to stress his lack of control, even at times his lack of knowledge. The use of multiple endings only furthers this point. Placed in the position of the narrator, readers do not know what the characters will do. Normally, disengaged, we trust the writers to lead us along a logical path. But by presenting us with three endings, readers are forced to place themselves closer to the action as they determine which ending they consider more likely.

Reading is an active process, unlike watching a movie, because we have to imagine the characters. But where much of the time we can get away with merely visualising action, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman we are forced to imagine motive. Not from what is said explicitly, but from the cumulative impact of so many chapters. We must decide for ourselves whether Charles surrenders to the pressures of his age and chooses to marry Ernestina, whether he and Sarah come together, or whether he finally rejects her. To come to such a decision, we need to think and imagine. It is a gamble, as everything in The French Lieutenant’s Woman is. If we do not care for the characters, we will dismiss it as a trick. If we do, however, then suddenly we are placed in the same position as the author who finds his characters acting in ways he does not expect. And if the characters seem real to the author, they will seem just as real to us, in his position.

The pair of ultimate endings, where Charles and Sarah meet again, is interesting in another way from the perspective of characterisation. Here we have an explicitly doubled chapter, where the characters behave in opposite manners which are yet consistent with their prior depictions. The emphasis, inevitably, is on Sarah, and why she does not reach out to Charles after he puts so much effort into tracking her down. Unlike Charles, who the narration mainly follows, Sarah is the central figure of the story, whose image at the pier in Lyme first inspired Fowles to write it – and whose character is something of a mystery. Generally, we might think that consistency makes for good characterisation, but real people are anything but consistent. Sarah’s two behaviours in the epilogue make her more mysterious and inconsistent, yet more curious to us, more real.

It seems that using multiple endings like this is not a cheat for establishing an interesting character or someone real, but rather a way of emphasising certain types of figures beyond what is possible in a novel’s normal bounds. It makes them, the mysterious ones, more real. But readers must first be engaged, otherwise playing with endings will sooner leave them enraged.

Conclusion

If the thoughts here can be summarised simply, that’s more a reflection on how much sleep I am getting, and not on Fowles’s novel, which is really exciting. Fowles is far from the only writer to understand that making your reader work works brilliantly, provided they can be bothered to put the effort in, in creating a more engaging narrative. By making us choose endings, analyse the text with the help of the epigraphs, and fill in the gaps in characters’ motivations when the narrator claims not to know, readers play a far more active role in The French Lieutenant’s Woman than I am certainly used to doing.

Still, none of this would mean anything if the characters did not themselves have a baseline of realistic characterisation, and characters worth knowing about. What we see in this novel is not a replacement to all that, but a way of bringing us still closer to the fictional world – but only once we’ve first written it and written it and its people well.