Astarte's game: variations in John Fowles's "The Enigma." - John Fowles Issue

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1996 by Maria Jesus Martinez

The life-giving power of mystery floods all of reality. Mystery squares well with Fowles's definition of man as seeker, or "everlack"; by discouraging the search for final explanations, it promotes means-oriented thinking. As Conchis says in The Magus, "mystery has energy, it pours energy into whoever seeks an answer to it" (235). The existence of mysteries is, in a sense, more important than their solution because the absence of certainty refocuses our efforts. Man stops fighting the truth that reality is fundamentally mysterious and starts to work with, rather than against, nature.

"The Enigma," as the title itself indicates, is based on a mystery and on the characters' attempts to clear it up. The story is included in The Ebony Tower, a collection which affords us our first experience of Fowles working in the shorter fictional forms and consists of four original stories and a modern prose rendering of a twelfth-century French romance, Marie de France's Eliduc. In "A Personal Note" preceding Fowles's "Eliduc" the author explains that the working title he used for the volume was Variations. By this he intended to suggest "variations on both certain themes in previous books of mine and in methods of narrative presentation" (117). The title was eventually discarded because of the judgment of his editor that it was without justification except as "a very private mirage in the writer's mind" (117). Fowles mentions this, no doubt, because he still thinks that the working title was appropriate, a belief with which some critics concur (Olshen and Onega).

Thematically, the five stories in this collection amplify ideas prominent in Fowles's other works. The concerns that unify them are the same as those that unify Fowles's corpus as a whole: matters of love and sex, the functions of art and the artist, the uses and abuses of language, the demands of freedom and the responsibilities of free choice, and so on (Olshen 92). But "Variations" is an equally apt description of the narrative techniques used by Fowles, not only in the sense that the narrative method varies from story to story but also in relation to the way in which each of them transforms the expected and conventional into something unexpected and unconventional.

Drawing on the whole of Fowles's work, Peter Conradi points to the way in which, in each and every one of his fictions, the author shows an evident willingness to risk himself into something new, as well as a curiosity about the technical and ethical potentialities of what has traditionally been regarded as "low" sub-genres of fiction, all of them broadly-speaking categories of romance (16-17). Both The Magus and "The Ebony Tower," in different ways, approach romance in its pure state; "Poor Koko" and The Collector use the formula of the thriller; The French Lieutenant's Woman, the historical romance and sensation novel. In each case, the interest of the work lies in the consequences of subverting the expectations raised by the genre. And the same can be said of the story that concerns us. "The Enigma" follows the detective-story genre which began with Poe and gained popularity with the work of Arthur Corian Doyle. But Fowles uses this tradition in a revolutionary way, if we measure "The Enigma" against other stories in the genre. While detective stories are based on the motif of solving mysteries, Fowles presents the mystery, with all its available evidence, and then blatantly leaves the enigma intact.

When asked if there were a particular picture of the world that he wanted to develop in his work, Fowles answered: "Freedom, yes. How you achieve freedom. That obsesses me. All my books are about that. The question is, is there really free-will? Can we choose freely? Can we choose? How do we do it?" (Olshen 11).

Freedom is generally explored along two paths simultaneously: the ethical or moral path, by involving us in the quest of the fictional characters; and the aesthetic, by illuminating the liberating possibilities, for reader and writer alike, of fiction itself. Thus "The Enigma" constitutes a good example of literary self-consciousness engaged in an exploration of the relationship between art and life as well as of the question of freedom related to the self and to the constraints of any chosen literary form.

The protagonist of "The Enigma," John Marcus Fielding, is perhaps the most publicly determined of all Fowles's characters. When he disappeared, he "contravened all social and statistical probability" (187). He was almost forty years out of his teens. He was not, and never had been, a vagabond. He had always seemed satisfied with his domestic life. He was not, or ever had been, a member of the working class. The story of the disappearance of a public man, a highly successful, very wealthy London executive and Tory M.P., "The Enigma" begins with statistical evidence about disappearances. Its opening is a pastiche of a classic type of detective tale, of which Daphne du Maurier's "No Motive" would be a representative example (Conradi 87).