'The story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.'(John Fowles). Discuss the way in which any two texts studied on the course problematise the process of storytelling and/or the role of the author.

However, having forced his reader into a realisation that they have been living in a world of mere make-believe, Fowles taunts his audience, in telling them that ‘my characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more real than the one I have just broken.’ Whilst this may seem a confusion, and confusion most certainly is an alienation of the reader, problematising the role of both the author and the story, he is, in fact referring to the ‘reality’ he has just broken, which, as he has just told us, is no reality at all, but a mere construct. Fowles seems to torment his reader with unsure statements whilst keeping them from the narrative, the purpose of a novel.

Fowles has been described as ‘a writer stalking himself, or better, he is a novelist writing into a mirror so that each or his works reflect back upon his own mind and vision’. The reader is never sure what to believe of the novel, just as we are never sure where two mirrors reflecting in on themselves may end. It is in just this way that we cannot tell where Charles will end: indeed, even Fowles seems not to know, hence his triple ending. This too, could present a barrier for his readership: if Fowles, as the author and creator of the text, cannot discern the direction of a narrative, how then, is his readership supposed to manage such a feat? We are given the impression that Fowles is perhaps remarkably indecisive, which brings us out o our suspension of disbelief almost as much as the authorial interruptions.

This confusion over plot in his inability to come to a conclusion could be rooted in Fowle’s determination to rewrite the Victorian novel. Even character is at time confused- we are unsure as to Fowles’ intentions for Charles, or even Charles’ origins as a literary figure.

Palmer claims that the novel ‘hangs in…suspension: between the traditions of Victorian fiction, with its attendant restrictions, and the experimental, intensely-self conscious novel of the mid-twentieth century.’ He also reiterates that ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman is, in one of its many aspects, Fowles’s dramatisation of his own theory of the novel. It is a metatheatrical work of literary criticism.’ It is this idea of the ‘metafiction’ that provides the complexities of the novel, but also draws the reader away from the characters, creating a barrier between them and the story. We feel that we are, perhaps, guinea pigs for Fowles’ experiments with literature.

The same could be said of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. It has been described as ‘Woolf’s most consciously experimental novel’, as so much of the modernist movement is an attempt to break away from the Victorian style that Fowles attempts to recreate. She shies away from the normal, and particularly the narrative- Zwerdling cites her as claiming to want to ‘do away with exact place and time, this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional” . In doing this she cuts out much of the tedium of the Victorian novel, but yet has a good chance of leaving her reader floundering: we may feel at the end of the novel that we do not truly know even Jacob, let alone the peripheral characters. He has been described as ‘far too shadowy a figure’ who ‘fails to come to life. There are few reference points within the novel: Woolf has indeed succeeded in her goal of doing away with typical narrative. We see only ‘brief but typical vignettes chosen seemingly at random,’ and have little means of stringing them together to form a picture of his true character and experiences. Joan Bennett claims that the novel ‘builds up no whole that can be held in the mind’

        As such, Jacob’s Room seems not so much to problematise storytelling as to obliterate any concept of story. Zwerdling describes Jacob’s Room as ‘a surgical excision of clogged detail.’ However, we must consider the meshing of art and science in this idea. A ‘surgical excision’ seems very far from the constructive art of writing, and, whilst surgery is an exacting, science-dependant field, writing, surely, is a free art, the bounds of which are only the farthest reaches of the imagination, not the facts of textbooks.

Whereas Fowles makes us wonder as to the true reality of his characters and story, especially Charles, suggesting that he sees much of Charles in himself, Woolf admits to actively disliking Jacob. Zwerdling suggests that this is largely thanks to his sex, quoting Woolf in Jacob’s Room- ‘granted ten years seniority and a difference of sex, fear of him comes first’. Frank Kermode, in the biographical preface to Jacob’s Room suggests that this might be ‘possibly related to the sexual molestation of which her half-brother, George Duckworth is accused. He also puts points out that ‘there have been many accounts of the marriage very hostile to Leonard Woolf’. Indeed, Woolf gives Jacob thoughts that she, as a woman in the twentieth century, surely could not agree with- he compares the presence of women at the Kings College service to the presence of dogs:

No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror (should you be one of the congregation- alone, shyness is out of the question), a dog destroys the service completely.

As educated as she was, although not having attended university, Virginia Woolf could not have agreed with such ideas. As a modern reader, these ideas grate on our sense of equality. In an age where education is available regardless of gender, moments such as these create a distance between the writing and the reader and prevent a true feeling of connection with the text.

        The French Lieutenant’s Woman too has some anti-feminist moments, which could present a barrier between the text and a potential readership- Charles believes that Ernestina, as a woman could no possibly hold the same value as a man:

He could not be angry with her. After all, she was only a woman. There were so many things she must never understand: the richness of male life, the enormous difficulty of being one to whom the world was rather more than dress and home and children.

However, this could also represent the other side of the argument- whilst Fowles may alienate a segment of society which was active at the time of the novel’s publication; he was also attempting to echo the Victorian novel, in which this would very much be a recognised and accepted viewpoint- the ‘Victorian icon- the ‘angel in the house’… the presiding hearth angel of Victorian social myth’. Charles expects women to stay the same, and to be reliant on men- he expects Sarah to rely on him, and seems to find her making her own way in the world faintly repulsive. In one way, therefore Fowles is problematising his storytelling in possibly alienating a part of his readership, but also moving his story closer to the goal he set out to achieve.  

As I earlier pointed out in relation to The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the purpose of ‘storytelling’ is for entertainment; therefore making a stilted or confusing narrative will certainly problematise the process of storytelling. Jacob’s Room is very much a metaphorical text: McNichol points out that there has been too much concentration on ‘what the novel is not’ largely because of ‘a failure to grasp the originality of Virginia Woolf’s new conception of a novel’ However; she also notes that it is, in fact, ‘an abstract and theoretic work’, and so we must wonder how much of a ‘story’ it is, or whether it is, in fact, ‘a challenge to the nature of fiction itself’, and as such, more an academic treatise than a novel.

The metaphorical nature of the text is made clear in the relation of the title to the work: the ‘room’ of the title is in fact in the context of ‘the space, metal and physical, which is occupied by Jacob Flanders’ rather than the physical rooms in which we see him in the course of the novel: asleep in Cornwall with his sheep’s jaw, at Cambridge, and at Lamb’s Conduit Street, among others. As a metaphorical text, the novel is designed not so much for the process of storytelling as to make a statement on the accepted structure. Virginia Woolf is a far more solid presence in the text that any of her characters; indeed, McNichol presents Jacob’s Room as being full of ‘authorial dialectic’, just as The French Lieutenant’s Woman is full of authorial intervention.

It seems that the role of the author and the role of storytelling are, to an extent, mutually exclusive. For the author to have a role in their text, it seems they must take a presence in it, as Fowles does in chapter thirteen, and as Woolf does in making Jacob’s Room more about an experiment conducted by her than about her characters and plot, and so her readership. As I have pointed out, this concentration on the experiment disrupts the idea of ‘storytelling’: for a reader to fully appreciate a story, they must be able to view it as a reality, which the readership of both texts cannot truly do, as the author refuses to give up their place in the piece. Whilst the author is present, we are aware that the constructed world is just that, a fiction, where we would prefer to believe if as a reality, at least for a time. It seems that for storytelling to be effective, therefore, the role of the author must only extend as far as the writing of the story, not featuring in it. As such, storytelling in these texts is problematised by the role of the author, and the role of the author is problematised by storytelling.

Bibliography:

Baldick, Christopher, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/SEARCH_RESULTS.html?q=Story&ssid=1015381921&scope=global&time=0.183852142400848 (accessed 10th March 2008)

        

Bennett, Joan Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964)

Fowles, John, The French Lieutenants Woman, (London: Vintage, 2004)

Kermode, Frank, ‘Biographical Preface’ in Jacob’s Room, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp vii-viii

Langland, Elizabeth, ’Nobodies Angels: Domestic ideology and middle class women in the Victorian novel’ in PMLA, Vol. 107, No. 2. (Mar., 1992  (accessed 9th March 2008)

Lowenkron, David Henry, ‘The Metanovel’ in College English, Vol. 38, No. 4. (Dec., 1976)  (accessed 19th February 2008)

McNichol, Stella Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction, (London: Routledge, 1990)

Palmer, William J., The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, art and the loneliness of selfhood, (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1974)

Vieira, Nelson H., ‘Metafiction and the Question of Authority in the Postmodern Novel from Brazil’ in Hispania, Vol. 74, No. 3, (Sep., 1991).  (accessed 19th February 2008)

Woolf, Virginia, Jacob’s Room, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Zwerdling, Alex, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (California: University of California Press, 1986)

 

         

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