'The French Lieutenant's Woman' and the evolution of the narrative - John Fowles Issue

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1996 by Katherine Tarbox

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is . . . what he will know.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

It has always seemed to me that The French Lieutenant's Woman is Fowles's most enigmatic novel and that its power to disturb arises from its experiments with narrative limits. I am proposing that this novel is an anatomy of the relationship between human cognition and narrative, and that it naturally implicates itself in this relationship as well. The stories within the novel dramatize the ways in which human subjects make experience intelligible through storytelling processes, activities mirrored by the narrator in his struggle to bring the novel as a whole into being as a narrative edifice. Yet at the same time the novel communicates a mood of despair about the fact that our narrative habits leave behind or eclipse unnarratable reality - all the Deleuzean Desires, all the affects, aporias, and imponderables that cannot speak and become real because they cannot fit the trajectories, protocols, and causal clockwork of narrative logic. The novel moves well beyond lament, though, because while it both narrates and defines the limits of narration, it simultaneously aims to produce, through its exertions, an evolved reader. This reader, by virtue of accepting the radical cognitive challenges the novel offers, develops new perceptual skills and processes that enable him or her to read in other than narrative ways, in other than institutionally conferred ways that take their being from narrative practice in the first place.

The town of Lyme Regis is a perfect microverse, a brilliant spatial metaphor that displays the way that humans impose narrative order on nonnarrative experience, with its hermetic system of roads, paths, streets, and cart tracks. It is an impress on a landscape - with its wild, engulfing channel waters and its looming, crumbling cliffs, repositories of inscrutable geologic and cosmic mysteries - that is the expression of all that is unknowable and which is coextensive with our being itself, with our undomesticated impulses, desires, and appetites.

Sarah, who always represents this extra-narrative reality as well as the attempt to become unstoried, is set by those in power among the paths of Lyme - the same conduits all the inhabitants use - and told not to stray. A long paragraph details how the paths splay outward, like narrative, into a series of binary choices that progress to familiar, approved destinations. She can "either turn down Cockmoil" or go "along the half-mile path" to the Cobb (62). She seeks escape from being written by this architectural syntax in her bonne vaux "poised in the sky" (166), an "eyrie," a place suggesting flight, the trope of desire and aleatory movement. She leads Charles into this unmapped territory, and he is afraid of the transgression: "The road he walked" suddenly became "a brink over an abyss"; he felt something "had gone wrong with his reading of the map," but he felt both "lost and lured" (145). He feels "beset by a maze of crosscurrents . . . swept hopelessly away from his safe anchorage" (176); "a slip and within a few feet one would have slithered hopelessly over the edge" (166).

Sarah's flight from linear, causal narrative must be seen as a subversive attempt to evolve beyond the cognitive habits that produce a narrative mentality in human beings, habits richly displayed by the townspeople of Lyme. They call Sarah "Tragedy" or "Whore," names that net her unruly being in canonical narratives. Mrs. Poulteney demands that Sarah match the story elements and meet the narrative shape of the Christian sin-and-expiation plot. The Vicar, speaking of Sarah, sighs, "That's a long story," (33) and assembles a tale that meets his listener's expectations. Charles, when he realizes he's forced a virgin, tries madly to reconcile this stunning and disruptive narrateme, against a list of plots in his mental files: the hysterical woman, the power-hungry woman, the man-hating woman, and so on. When he breaks off his engagement to Ernestina, he offers her a bouquet of familiar plots - the cad-and-bounder plot, the I-am-not-worthy plot, and so on - that might help her subdue her huge and formless pain and explain his inexplicable (even to him) behavior. Ernestina herself is often overcome by the anarchic forces of her own feelings. When Charles becomes angry with her she writes in her diary, "I cannot sleep . . . so very upset . . . I wished to cry . . . so very vexed" (253). But she disciplines herself and shapes her feelings into the mold of the sermon narrative: "Let this be a lesson to me to . . . obey . . . Let me earnestly and humbly learn to bend" (253).

All of these characters play out what Mancuso calls "the basic motivation of all psychological functioning" (102), which is the drive to "assimilate input . . . to an acquired, internal representation of narrative grammar structure" (91). He adds that we can only process incoming input, store it, and later retrieve it if it includes "semantic material representing all the properly sequenced story grammar parts of a text" (95). A repertoire of probable causes and likely effects are imprinted along with narrative syntax. When Sarah tells Charles that she gave herself to Varguennes, he recognizes the fallen-woman plot, but when she talks bizarrely of marrying her shame and pain, of social suicide, he cannot compute cause and effect, cannot process this information against his repertoire of internalized stories. He tells her to go away, in effect to erase this unacceptable story and try again to write one that can be sanctioned. She appears to agree and Charles is extremely pleased, smiling, relieved at the result of his repair procedure. Mancuso notes that the need to shape experience against a narrative template is as strong as the drive to eat, sleep, and breathe, and that doing so successfully generates extreme pleasure in the thinker (101). Charles can, now that Sarah is "cured" (182), write the denouement of her story, which before had been unimaginable. "He saw the scene already" (182). The problems, of course, are that hardwired narrative thinking brackets perception, disallowing other ways of perceiving unmediated life experience, and it becomes profoundly deterministic.