The Art of John Fowles

In "The Art of John Fowles", Katherine Tarbox explores the teeming substance of Fowles' novels, uncovering in them a demand for the reader to master what Fowles call in "Daniel Martin", "whole sight" - the ability to comprehend and unify all the seemingly disparate elements of the self and the world. Guiding the reader through Fowles's works, Tarbox reveals that the skill of seeing whole must be learned and that Fowles teaches his reader how to see whole by using as an example the education of his protagonist. Each of the novels, from "The Collector" through to "A Maggot", takes a narcissistic protagonist through a process of intense "self-deconstruction and reconstruction" on a journey towards whole sight. The intervention of a benevolent, experienced mentor draws the protagonist into a complex masque or "godgame" that plays out, in metaphorical form, aspects of the protagonist's inauthenticity until he or she is reduced to a "litter of parts". In "The Magus" the old Greek islander Conchis dramatizes Nicholas's failings, while Sarah's bizarre charade in "The French Lieutenant's Woman" enacts Charles's struggle to be free of Victorian restraints. The fictional description of this process in the novels creates a dense tapestry of allusiveness, studied confusion, moral quandry, myth, archetype, and symbol that requires the reader to undergo the same sort of reconstruction as the protagonist before he or she can see the text whole. Within the extravagant methphor of the godgame, Fowles proposes that fiction itself is the great awakener, the great teacher. Always in his novels he compares the act of reading well with the acting of living well - both of which require, Fowles would argue, the gift of whole sight.