The Miracle of Literature. A comment on "The French Lieutenant Woman" by John Fowles
I am still a little bewildered at the thought that yesterday I spent practically the whole day, a rainy Sunday, reading the 470 pages of the 1969 novel by John Fowles, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” It was the result of relocating, which has the consequence that you find books that you didn’t remember you had. But why did I let myself be absorbed so much into learning about events that never occurred, people who never existed, and places that don’t exist anymore?
It is the miracle of literature. Something that, in the hands of a skilled author, can make you forget the real world to enter into a new one. Miraculous, because it takes place only by the written word — no images, no animations, no graphs, nothing like that. It is a pure sequence of sentences. Fowles was a genius of literature, one of the greatest of his generation.
Shall I compare this book to a summer day? Maybe, with all the teeming life buzzing, flying, chirping, flapping, and all the things that life does on a summer day. I could also compare it to a Gothic cathedral, with its glorious and intricate vaults, pinnacles, and gargoyles. Yes, because the human brain can sometimes dream beautiful dreams. It can dream of whole new worlds, an attribute of the divinity.
Dreams have no purpose just like, perhaps, God’s creation. I am reminded of Vladimir Nabokov (the author of “Lolita”) saying that (citing from memory) a novel has no other purpose than providing a sense of aesthetic beatitude for the reader. It also works for a cathedral, theoretically built to glorify a non-existing being, but in practice, to awe the faithful. Perhaps it works for the whole universe.
So, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” has no other purpose than entangling the reader in an aesthetic sensation, a spellbound trip to another world driven by the expert hand of an expert author. To be sure, though a masterpiece, this novel has some defects. In such a lengthy plot, you note a few inconsistencies, and sometimes you have the feeling that the author doesn’t know where he wants to take his characters. He starts by pretending to be a real Victorian writer, using the typical style of the time, with the author playing God, describing the most intimate details of the soul and heart of his characters. A style that, today, we find clumsy and insufferable. But, in the hands of Fowles, miraculously, it works, at least for a while. But, soon, the characters themselves take over.
With the best of good will, Fowles can’t keep playing God for the whole novel. He remains the divine being for the male protagonist, the gentle and a little clumsy Charles, but he fails at penetrating the heart of the female protagonist, Sarah, who remains a mystery for Charles, for the reader, and perhaps for herself as well. In the beginning, Fowles compares her to a computer, which is correct: none of us can penetrate the inner workings of a computer. And that’s perhaps true also for the hearth of a woman in love that works according to laws and patterns unfathomable to a male author. In the end, though, what makes the story move is that the author cares for his characters. That’s the secret of a good novel (and of a benevolent and merciful deity). Just like God does, the author of a novel looks at his creation and sees that it is good. The way the great novel called The Universe works.
As a final note, I was struck by something that Fowles says about himself, “I am a novelist.” Weird in our times, as if one of us could say, “I make a living by repairing mechanical typewriters.” Fowles was writing in the 1960s, not in prehistoric times. But some things in our age seem to have disappeared forever: one is novels, and with it, novelists. Why did that happen? How could TikTok replace Shakespeare and Netflix make people forget Borges? For everything that happens there is a reason for it to happen, and that must be true also for the disappearance of novels. They may return, or perhaps not. In any case, the Great Novel keeps unfolding towards its finale.
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About historical novels, let me cite my personal attempt at being a novelist-God and describing non-existing people and non-occurring events. My novel “The Etruscan Quest,” an attempt to recreate a world that doesn’t exist anymore, that of Italy in the 1930s, at the time of Fascism.