Various aspects of freedom in John Fowles novels The Collector and The Magus (original) (raw)

The Philosophy of Existentialism in the Magus -the Motifs of Freedom and Suicide

European Journal of Language and Literature, 2019

John Fowles' literary opus is largely based on the philosophy of existentialism, with the motifs of freedom and suicide serving as its focal points, both closely related to freedom of choice and seen as crucial to the existentialist movement, as well as the author himself. This paper analyses Fowles' novel The Magus through the prism of existentialism, which means that the basic existentialist concepts are identified and located within its text, as well as the influences of the key figures of this movement. The motifs of freedom and freedom of choice in context are interpreted and linked to the theories of Freud and Jung while special emphasis is placed on the role of the anima, that is, the female principle inside the male subconsciousness. This is precisely why a separate section of this paper is dedicated to female protagonists and their role in the novel. In his works, Fowles puts an emphasis on the freedom of the individual, which is portrayed through the freedom of the mind, ideas, choice and spirit. It is cruel, always demanding action as well as acceptance and adaptation. By remodelling our own character, we also remodel the future generations and our visions of the world. The protagonist in this novel is chosen to remodel his own character, to turn from a collector into a creator, to stop depriving people of the content and to bring about a positive creative act instead. Human border acts such as suicide also belong to this field of interest. There are three cases of suicide in The Magus and this paper analyses their role as a symbol of the protagonist's metamorphosis upon threading onto the mythical ground.

MENIPPEAN STRATEGIES IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH FICTION: JOHN FOWLES'S THE MAGUS

Celal Bayar University Journal of Social Sciences, 2013

The genre of Menippean satire is very problematic in terms of the existence of fixed definition. Numerous attempts to propose a final definition have ended up having a blindspot. The most important reason for this is that most critics have focused on what Menippean satire is. However, due to the genre's liability to change, adapt and digress, in the attempts to propose a definition based on what it is, there has always been a left out. So the focus should rather be what it does. In this context, what Menippean satire aims to do is simply to highlight the incongruities of humanity through a cynical perspective and to represent these incongruities in a carnival-like universe. Briefly, it is cynical in theme and carnivalesque in form. This study aims to exemplify and examine the genre in the light of this new focus in one of its contemporary representatives, namely, John Fowles. His perspective towards the world, the way he uses literary tools and techniques, and the references he makes to other Menippean satirists enables one to consider him as a literary figure in the line of the Menippean tradition. He is a unique practitioner of the Menippean genre who not only employs the core characteristics of the tradition but also contributes to the evolution of the genre by using certain Menippean devices in his own unique way in The Magus. MODERN İNGİLİZ EDEBİYATINDA MENIPPUSÇU STRATEJİLER: JOHN FOWLES VE THE MAGUS ÖZ Özelliklerini tümüyle içeren bir tanımın varlığı konusunda Menippusçu hiciv problemli bir tür olagelmiştir. Şimdiye kadar türün tanımlanabilmesi konusunde çeşitli çalışmalar yapılmıştır. Bu tanımların hiçbiri tamamıyla yanlış kabul edilemese de her tanımın kör noktaları olmuştur. Bunun en önemli sebebi, bu tanımların türün ne olduğu sorusu üzerinden yapılmaya çalışılmasıdır. Ancak türün değişken yapısı dolayısıyla, bu sorudan yola çıkarak üretilmiş tanımlar yeterince kapsayıcı olamamışlardır. Bu çalışmanın amacı türün ne olduğundan çok, ne yaptığı sorusunu dikkate alarak bu tanımlama problemini çözmektir. Bu bağlamda Menippusçu hiciv türünün amacının insanlığa dair çelişkileri şüpheci bir perspektif ve karnivalesk bir yazım tekniğiyle su yüzüne çıkarmak olduğu söylenebilir. Kısacası, tür, tematik anlamda şüpheci, yapısal anlamda karnivalesktir. Bu çalışmada, tür bu yeni bakış açısıyla yeniden değerlendirilmiş ve türün çağdaş temsilcilerinden John Fowles'un The Magus adlı

"The Magus and 'The Miller's Tale': John Fowles on the Courtly Mode"

Ariel, 1983

ALTHOUGH JOHN FOWLES has frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the first version of what he once facetiously termed "this wretched book The Magus" it has so far proven to be his most popular novel. 1 Begun in his late twenties when he was teaching in Greece, it will, as he remarks in his Foreword to the revised version, "remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent," its appeal mainly to youth and to that in the adult mind which continues to seek the meaningful core of existence. 2 Alluding, in a perhaps unintentionally cryptic manner, to the novel as a "metaphor" of his "own personal experience," the author described it in 1971 as expressing his obsession with "the basic idea of a secret world, whose penetration involved ordeal and whose final reward was self-knowledge." 3 The elusive nature of this self-knowledge has made The Magus almost as popular a source of controversy among critics as its youthful spontaneity of observation and its freshness of experience have made it a week's fascinated reading among its admirers. It is clear to most readers that Fowles writes with serious purposes, and that serious motivation seems to have diverted critics, in their energetic neglect of his own admonition that "Novels. .. are not like crossword puzzles, with one unique set of correct answers behind the clues." 4 "I think the thing that is good in The Magus-if one can defend oneself-is that it is readable," he says, and this quality of his achievement, the ability of the novel to draw one toward its secret world, to seduce one into sensitivity to its author's attitudes, the instruction of his audience, is ultimately what gives the book its tenacious hold upon the memory. 5

Neo-Victorian Materialisms in John Fowles's The Collector

2019

While John Fowles's (1926-2005) The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) is studied frequently as a neo-Victorian novel, his first published novel, The Collector (1963), is ignored in the critical analyses of neo-Victorian studies. This is mostly due to the fact that The Collector is neither a rewriting of a Victorian novel nor sets in the nineteenth century. However, a critical reading of the novel demonstrates how Fowles explicitly manifests the continuation of the Victorian materialist obsession in this particular novel. In other words, albeit the contemporary setting of the novel and the critical appreciation of it as a feminist fiction, the protagonist, Clegg's obsession with the material objects echoes Victorian cultural materialisation in a way that leads him to collect butterflies and women. Drawing an analogy between these two collections, it is mostly argued by the critics that Fowles discusses the issues on gender in this particular novel. From a different perspective, it will be argued in this study that Fowles actually illustrates the obsession with the material objects with respect to both the dead butterfly collection and also to the commodification of the female body as the material object. From this vantage point, the aim of this study is to analyse The Collector as a neo-Victorian novel revisiting the material culture of the Victorian period and the repercussions of the traumatic relation between the human and the object in the twentieth century. Öz John Fowles'un (1926-2005) Fransız Teğmenin Kadını (1969) adlı romanı neo-Viktorya dönemi romanı olarak sıkça çalışılıyorken, ilk romanı olan Koleksiyoncu (1963) neo-Viktorya dönemi çalışmaları alanında genellikle göz ardı edilmiştir. Bunun nedeni Koleksiyoncu romanının bir Viktorya dönemi romanının yeniden yazımı ol-maması ve de 19. yüzyılda geçmemesidir. Buna rağmen, romanın eleştirel bir gözle okunması Fowles'un bu romanda Viktorya dönemi materyalist takıntılarını gözle görünür bir biçimde ortaya koyduğunu göstermiştir. Diğer bir deyişle, romanın çağdaş ortamına ve feminist bir kurgu olarak eleştirilmesine rağmen, ana karakter, Clegg'in maddi nesnelere takıntısı Viktorya dönemi kültürel nesne bağımlılığını, kelebekleri ve kadınları topla-masına yol açacak şekilde, yansıtıyor. Bu iki koleksiyon arasında bir analoji çizerek, eleştirmenler çoğunlukla Fowles'un bu romanda cinsiyet meselelerini tartıştığını öne sürüyor. Farklı bir perspektiften bakmak gerekirse, bu çalışmada, Fowles'un aslında hem ölü kelebek koleksiyonuna hem de kadın bedeninin maddi nesne olarak metalaştırılmasına ilişkin maddi nesnelere olan takıntıları ele aldığı savunulacaktır. Bu noktadan yola çıkarak, bu çalışmanın amacı, Koleksiyoncu romanını, Viktorya dönemindeki materyal kültüre ve bunun yirminci yüzyıldaki travmatik etkilerine bakarak bir neo-Viktorya dönemi romanı olarak incelemektir.

Possession, Self-possession and Multiple Selves in the Writings of John Fowles

In his work, John Fowles (1926-2005) ponders questions of existential freedom. For him, the biggest obstacle to this freedom is the Cartesian paradigm of self-possession with its analytical and classifying obsessions. Fowles does not see freedom as emanating from an understanding of the self as a unity but rather as emanating from embracing the multiplicity of possible selves that each person has. In this paper, I trace these ideas through John Fowles's work, in particular The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Collector and The Aristos. I also outline some of the intellectual influences such as Heraclitus, Sartre, Descartes and Linnaeus who he variously sympathizes with and reacts against in his writing.

The ontology of authenticity in John Fowles's novels

2019

THE ONTOLOGY OF AUTHENTICITY IN JOHN FOWLES’S NOVELS Serdar, Hamdi Ali Doctoral Thesis The Department of English Language and Literature The Doctoral Programme in English Language and Literature Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL February 2019, vii + 127 Pages This study is concerned with the ontological analysis of the authenticity of existence in the works of John Fowles. The concept of authenticity in the ontological-existential sense has its most suggestive reverberations in the selected three novels of Fowles—The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and A Maggot. These novels portray individual characters, all male, being stranded upon the edges of their existential awakening, with the equal chances of attaining or failing to attain a substantial degree of autonomy at the cost of losing their various possessions. In contrast to the common scholarly tendency to apply the existentialist philosophy of Sartre in making statements about the degrees of authenticity of the char...