Postmodernism

Postmodernism elements in the

Johan Fowles’ “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”

• ·       Introduction:     Postmodernism Aspects/elements:
• ·       “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” as a postmodern text.
• ·       John Fowles attitudes towards Postmodernism in the text.
• ·       Conclusion.

Almost every text of postmodernism especially Johan Fowles’ “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is so elusive and we as a reader of postmodern, text are unable to point down anywhere. Because we have a suspension about its various narrative techniques and elements. Hence here is an endevour to know about postmodernism elements in the novel.

The dominant mode of literature between 1960 and 1990 was postmodernist writing. Which includes pastiche, fragmentation of Truth/ Reality, multiple points of view, intertexuality, metafiction, and Historiographic metafiction, maximalism, minimalism, Hyper reality, Metafiction, Faction, the demise of Grand narratives, the birth of mininarratives, Celebration of Chaos, Cacophony, a space of contingence of meanings/dispersion/discursiveness,pluralism and Plasticity, Anti-heros and various others. But more vividly some of the major postmodern aspects and narrative techniques used in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman are: pastiche, fragmentation, multiple points of view, intertextuality, metafiction, and historiographic metafiction.

Pastiche/ Montage/ Collage/Mélanges:

Pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic and pluralistic aspects of postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity: Though pastiche commonly refers to the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel).

 The clearest example of parody can be seen if we see Fowles's citation from Dr. Grogan's medical hypothesis on the head of each chapter an epigraph is put. Each epigraph differs from the other. Some epigraphs are from Darwin, some from Amold. Different rising Victorian voices are mingled. Several choices are mingled. This mingling of voices, these fusions of Victorian utterances is a brilliant example of pastiche. This technique of pastiche is used by Fowls as a device to subvert the monolithic dominion of a single dominant voice.

            For example: The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a pastiche of the great Victorian novelists. Fowles uses the conventions of the nineteenth century romantic fiction to write a study of Victorian manners, morals which includes two major themes: channeling erotic or sensual desire into the institution of marriage, and working out the financing of marriage and the family.

Such as the conversation between Charles and Ernestina they say:

Where as in chapter number two Fowles mentions that:

“These are the very steps that Jane Austen made Louisa Musgrove fall down in Persuasion.”

“How romantic.”

“Gentlemen were romantic ... then.”

“And are scientific now? Shall we make the perilous descent?”

“On the way back.”

While in chapter

“And what was the subject of your conversation?”

“Your father ventured the opinion that Mr. Darwin should be exhibited in a vague    I                      in the zoological gardens. In the monkey house. I tried to explain some of the scientific arguments behind the Darwinian position. I was unsuccessful. Et voila tout.” Similarly various pastiche can be vividly observed in Salvia Plath’s “Ariel”,  “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” and “ The Bee Meeting”.

        Intertextuality:

A term coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966 to denote the interdependence of literary texts, the interdependence of any one literary test with all has gone before it. It means that it is the acknowledgement of previous literary works. Postmodernism recognizes the value of tradition. It understands present culture as the product of previous representation. The intertextuality of postmodern fiction, the dependence on literature that has been created earlier, attempts to comment on the situation in which both literature and society found themselves in the second half of the twentieth century. For Kristeva the idea is part of a wider psychoanalytical theory which questions the stability of the subject and she is different from that of Rolland Barthes and other theorists. Intertextuality most commonly appears in The French Lieutenant’s Woman in the form of an epigraph in the beginning of each chapter. In these small passages, Fowles quotes famous literary works and authors, thus setting the theme and tone of each chapter. For example, chapter one begins,

“Stretching eyes west

Over the sea,

Wind foul or fair,

Always stood she

Prospect-impressed;

Solely out there

Did her gaze rest,

Never elsewhere

Seemed charm to be.

HARDY, ‘The Riddle’” (3)

This epigraph and the title of the poem itself emphasize the enigmatic figure of Sarah Woodruff who is presented as a riddle not only to Charles but to the narrator as well. Sarah is described in similar terms and remains mysterious throughout the novel.

Multiple Endings

Postmodernist writers disturbed the wholeness and completion associated with traditional stories, and preferred to deal with other ways of structuring narrative. One alternative is the multiple ending, which resists closure by offering numerous possible outcomes for a plot. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a classic instance of this. Fowles refuses to choose between two competing prominent denouements:

                           I.          one in chapter number 60 in which Charles and Sarah are reunited after a stormy affair, and

                         II.          The other in chapter number 61 in which they are kept irrevocably apart. He therefore introduces an uncertainty principle into the book.

                       III.          He even dallies with a third possibility in chapter number 44 of leaving Charles on the train, searching for Sarah in the capital. And

                      IV.          The fourth in chapter number 55 could be observed significantly.

Narrative Technique/Point of view

The interchangeable role played between Author and narrator. We remain conscious of the fact that Fowles is still lurking in the margins. The Author appears in the text, becomes a character ‘breaking’ through the conventionally sacrosanct digestic level of narratives. For example in chapter 55 Fowles himself enters a railway carriage and sits opposite the dozing Charles. Contradictory version of narrative sequences without cancelling any out.

          Fowles juggles with three distinct narrative voices in the novel:

       I.          a seemingly omniscient narrator and an intrusive twentieth century storyteller conversing with the readers using both first person.

     II.          second person narrative voices and

 Majority of the story is narrated from a third person point of view. Some parts of the text are directly addressed to the readers by the author. For instance, in chapter thirteen, the author conveys his unspoken thoughts, “ I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside

my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is

because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention

universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all,

yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.”

Reader Involvement:

The narrator in The French Lieutenant’s Woman intervenes in the story continuously. Many postmodern authors feature metafiction in their writing, which is essentially writing about writing. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality”.

Metafiction:

Fowles uses the technique to make the reader aware of the fictionality and the presence of the author.  Chapter thirteen begins with the lines, “I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind” (95). This authorial intimacy blurs the line between fiction and reality. Fowles is engaged with the problem on whether telling a story is telling lies, and this engagement draws him to examine the relation of the fictional world to the real world. Fowles refers to fiction as “world as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was.” This means that metafiction is not an imitation of reality, and instead of hiding the disparity between fiction and reality, it exposes it.

Historiographic Metafiction:

Linda Hutcheon coined the term "historiographic metafiction" to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include, John Fowles deals with the Victorian Period in The French Lieutenant's Woman. In regards to critical theory, this technique can be related to The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes. And the General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez about Simón Bolívar.

For example:

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is regarded as a compelling historiographic metafiction in contemporary British literature especially chapter number sixty one 61. The interweaving of historical and literary sources of the Victorian era is characteristic of the novel. As metafiction, it is conscious of its own fictional status; on the level of historicity, it is conscious of the fact that much of what is passed on as history represents not only the state of affairs of a former era, but reflects also the preferences and prejudices of those who wrote those accounts. Historiographic metafiction is conscious of the fact that it is not objective but also that such texts are the only means to learn something about the past. In Fowles’ novel, the readers shuffle between a realistic narrative set in the mid-nineteenth century and a contemporary narrative voice which is able to pull into that Victorian world a host of intertextual references which disrupt the novel’s historical realism. References to modern theoretical ideas such as Darwinism, along with notes explaining aspects of Victorian society, means, as Hutcheon puts it, that the reader is constantly referred to the arena of the ‘extra-textual…a world outside the novel’ and to ‘other texts, other representations’ of the world being represented in the text itself.  Such paradoxes of fictionality/reality and the present/the past in the novel demonstrate Fowles’ breakthrough in the traditional literary narrative.

Conclusion       

Johan Fowles’ “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is one of the best novel intended to know about postmodernis. Because it contains various vivid and typical postmodern aspects. Jean baudrillad “ Simulacra and Simulation”, Francoi Lyotard “the postmodern condition, Frederic Jameson “ The cultural Logic of late capitalism”,” Postmodernism and consumer society”, Linda Huchen theorizing the postmodernism, Giles Drlauze and Guttari ideas can be apt to be observed in Johan Fowles’ “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”. The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a retrospective twentieth century examination of the Victorian novel of the nineteenth century. The writer presents us with the realistic picture of the nineteenth century compared with the twentieth century. In the novel Fowles uses postmodern techniques and strategies to produce the parody of historical fiction.

                                                  

                                                     Refrences

Allan, Graham. Intertextuality: the New Critical Idiom. London and New York: Routledge.

Didziulyte, Margarita. Imitation and Parody of the Victorian Novel in John

Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Vilnius, 2006.

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Vintage Books, 2004. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York, 2004.

Google Book Search. Web. 17 March 2013.

Dr Sibghatullah Lectures and Sir Farrukh Nadeem Lectures.

   

Written By: Muhammad Luqman Kakar

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