Somewhere else in the forest

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1996 by Peter Brandt

fragments of a life which was once complete, disturbing fragments, close to us, ours for one moment, and then mysterious and unapproachable as the lines of a stone licked smooth by the wave of a shell in the sea's depths

Giorgos Seferides, Delphi

"- Et puis je vois tres bien ce qui va arriver, s'ecria Laura: dans ce romancier, vous ne pourrez faire autrement que de vous peindre."

Andre Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs

Daniel Martin is a long and winding road toward its own first sentence: "Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation." The novel describes the process by which its eponymous hero reaches that insight; at the same time it claims to be Dan's future reconstruction of that very process, so that the last two sentences in the book refer both backwards and forwards to the first sentence:

That evening . . . Dan told [Jane] with a suitable irony that at least he had found a last sentence for the novel he was never going to write. She laughed at such flagrant Irishry; which is perhaps why, in the end, and in the knowledge that Dan's novel can never be read, lies eternally in the future, his ill-concealed ghost has made that impossible last his own impossible first. (668)

At the center of Daniel Martin, says Kerry McSweeney, a man who is "placed in a situation of stress through which he becomes aware of a deprivation, senses an inauthenticity and lack of freedom in his present existence . . . and is moved in the direction of the dark, existential unknown" (31). This description would serve equally well for many a male protagonist in the Fowlesian universe: Nicholas in The Magus, Charles in The French Lieutenant's Woman and David in "The Ebony Tower" all undergo a similar process. Like them, Dan goes on a quest for his own self. The most obvious differences between him and his predecessors are his age and a greater awareness of his predicament, but he is as unable as they are to do anything constructive about it on his own. As with the other male protagonists, the outcome of Dan's quest is dependent on a woman who seems to embody an existential challenge and who can act as his guide and muse towards "whole sight." Sometimes in Fowles's fiction - in the cases of Alison, Sarah, and Isobel - the woman manages to lead the man to a new understanding of himself, of his limitations as well as his potentiality; and it is immaterial whether Nicholas, Charles and Michael actually "get" the girl at the end: the open endings of The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman and "The Enigma" all point to a new beginning. On other occasions - one thinks of Miranda, Diana, and Catherine - the woman's failure is due to some flaw in the man: Clegg learns nothing at all; David does learn something, but is incapable of acting on his knowledge; Peter seems doomed to look for new playthings in plastic playlets; and the allegedly open endings of The Collector, "The Ebony Tower" and "The Cloud" are open only in the sense that a desert is open.(1)

Jane's task in Daniel Martin is similar to that of the earlier heroines: to be the catalyst of the "situation of stress," to open the man's eyes to the false allurements of his inauthentic existence and to inspire and embody creativity. But just as Dan is older than the earlier male protagonists, so Jane is a more mature woman than the previous incarnations of the muse in Fowles's fiction. One of the consequences of this is that the challenge she sets Dan is much less erotically charged than, say, the one Sarah presents for Charles; the sexual attraction which plays so large a part for earlier questers in Fowles's fiction is virtually non-existent in Jane. Consider, for example, the difference between the explosive, and for Charles literally stunning, sexual climax in chapter 46 of The French Lieutenant's Woman and Dan's disappointed, yet sober, reaction after his and Jane's love-making in the paraffin-reeking room of Hotel Zenobia in Palmyra:

it did not take place as he had dreamed, did not reach that non-physical climax he wanted, fused melting of all further doubt. . . . It came to him, immediately afterwards, that the failure could have been put in terms of grammatical person. It had happened in the third, when he had craved the first and second. It left, too, a sad, sour little presentiment of age, of the death of the illusion that they could find each other as simply as this. It was too small, too short, too childlike a thing. (637)

One or two critics have complained about the relative flatness of Jane's character, when compared to other Fowlesian heroines, saying that the fascination which Dan feels for her can hardly be shared by the reader, that her deep reserve and secretiveness - so much the opposite of Dan whose opinion on every conceivable subject is minutely recorded - make her inaccessible and therefore almost uninteresting to the reader. It is true that Jane, even when compared to the mysterious Sarah, is the most secretive of Fowles's main female characters; but, paradoxical as it may seem, this points, I think, to Jane's centrality in the novel, not to her peripherality. For just as Sarah's enigmatic nature haunts the pages of The French Lieutenant's Woman, so does Jane's secretiveness lie at the very heart of Daniel Martin. But to reach that heart, we must first, by using that characteristic, roundabout way of the novel itself, look at Daniel Martin.