ROBERT CAMPBELL 45

Moral sense and the collector: the novels of John Fowles

The role of the collector motif in The Collector is superfiaally obvious. Its emergence in the other novels and short stones is more puzzling. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman Charles Smithson collects fossils: Daniel Martin’s father collected seventeenth-century theology’ and the interest which initially draws Martin and the philosopher Mallory together is orchid-hunting. It barely stretches the point to see Urfe in The Magus as a sexual scalp-hunter, and the painter, Breasley, in ’The Ebony Tower‘ (in the collection of the same name) has a Breton manoir filled with twentieth-century paintings. The climax of ’Poor Koko‘ (also in The Ebony Tower) is reached when an almost irreplaceable collection of literary material for a book on Peacock is gratuitously burnt by a mysterious masked intruder.

I want to suggest an interpretation of the collector theme which simultaneously casts some light on one of Fowles’ concerns in his novels and also ties it very strongly to a venerable philosophical problem - that of immorality and the nature of moral intuition. I hope I can thereby elucidate both the problem and the novels. Ethics and literary criticism are of course distinct disciplines but it clearly matters, critically, whether what Fowles says about moral behaviour is true. Lf what he says is true, then ethics must take account of it. And an ethical approach may generate a critical account of the novels.

One way, though admittedly not as yet a very fruitful way, of summarising Fowles is to say that he writes about the ways in which people understand and misunderstand one another. Characteristically a Fowlesian misunderstanding is not an accident but a function of the nature of the actors involved. It stems not from simple error or ignorance but from lack of ability to see clearly - a kind of moral blindness.

AII the novels turn on misunderstandings based on misperceptions. These misperceptions are, quite literally, failures of vision - not seeing what is in front of you because you don’t know what it is you are looking at; not having, or not employing, the set of concepts appropriate to the nature of the thing. This experience is, in a mundane way, quite common. The non-mechanic who looks under the bonnet of his car just fails to see what the trained mechanic sees because he lacks the conceptual equipment to differentiate the tangled mess in front of his eyes. ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees’ (Blake, Complete Works, ed. G. Keynes, Oxford, 1966, p. 151).

46 CriticaZ Quarter&, voL 25, no. 1

All Fowles’s principal characters begin by fixing people as types, seeing them as form and substance, rather than act and potentiality. The attempt is shown to be dramatically wrong-headed. All the objects of these perceptions - Miranda, JunelJulie, Sarah, Jane, Diana2 - escape, betray or falsify the descriptions and explanations given of them. This elusiveness has clear links with the existentialist analysis of human beings as ’pour mi‘ (for themselves) rather than ‘en mi‘ (in themselves), as entities whose essence is not given and fixed but dynamic and indeterminate. Learning to see people as people and not merely as rathe; complex things which enter and leave one’s perceptual field means learning to see them in this light. Being able to do so is the beginning not just of perceptual but also of moral wisdom. It involves seeing people as moral agents and that in turn implies that they be accorded the rights and the consideration due to them as moral agents.

The getting of this kind of wisdom is something that could, in principle, happen quite gradually. Fowles concerns himself, however, with dramatic cases - sudden revelations and reversals which constitute almost mystical experiences. These almost invariably occur (or, in The CoZZector, fail to occur) as the result of a relationship with a woman, and a failed or abandoned attempt to sustain that relationship. This is no accident. Sexual relationships are at the sharp end of our relations with others. In this area success on anything more than a physiological level depends dramatically on an increasingly sensitive and subtle awareness of the other. Sartre’s analysis of love gives a rather depressing but illuminating account of the complexities involved: ’the man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on becoming the object of passion which flows forth mechanically . . . if the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone. Thus the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing. . . He wants to possess a freedom as freedom’.3

In other words the lover wants tocompel the beloved to love himof her m n free will. This is impossible but it doesn‘t mean that love is impossible. It means that it is an inherently unstable relationship threatening constantly to collapse into mere possession at one pole and estrangement at the other. The difficulty lies both in keeping up the effort required to sustain the relationship and also in knowing quite what kind of effort is required. This difficulty and this complexity is a feature of Fowles’s accounts of human sexual relationships.

The Collector tells not of a relationship which has collapsed into possession but one which is conceived by Clegg in those terms from the beginning. That he is capable of salvation is shown by the fact that he realises quite early on that this is not what he wants. That he never achieves salvation is the riddle

Moral sense and the collector 47

at the heart of the book which demands solution. The beginnings of an answer might lie in the fact that the way he sees Miranda rules out his seeing that any other relation except that of possession is possible. And his actions, of course, rule out any other relation from the start. So the question becomes - why does he act in that way in the first place?

Clegg is a local government clerk who wins enough money to realise a fantasy. He kidnaps a pretty young art student - Miranda - and imprisons her in a cellar beneath a cottage in the countryside. He wants her to want him - perhaps to fall in love with him - but is so paralysed by the distances between them that he cannot think of any way of bringing this about except by force. His action creates a barrier between them which means that the distances will never be lessened. His impossible dream ends in her death, but not, as she so often feared, directly at his hands. She falls ill. Clegg dithers about calling a doctor because it couldn’t be concealed that she was being held against her will. Eventually it becomes clear that he would rather risk her death than give her up. In a sense, also, she died, like Clegg’s butterflies, as soon as she was’collected’. A fully live, fully natural specimen could have had no real place in his collection.

The book is limited and incapable of development because of the situation - both literally and metaphorically static. The only possible kind of progression would make it quite a different story. The whole point is that Clegg (who calls himself Ferdinand, but is more clearly Caliban) is not going to change and Miranda is denied the space to. As a consequence the book is over-long and is less successful in some ways than even The Mugus, the most seriously flawed but also the most compelling of Fowles’s works. Fowles never attempts anything quite like it again: serious evil, a working-class protagonist, a genuine crime, a wholly negative approach to human relationships. Its power stems from the sense of claustrophobia and despair which is strongly and convincingly evoked but also from the fact that we know Clegg - in some ways - very well indeed. He is the first person narrator of over half the book. We know his inner life and its narrowness as comprehensively as we come to loathe the cliche-ridden and worn-out language which is all he has to express it in. We cannot, therefore, avoid asking why he has done what he’s done, what are his real reasons.

Clegg is selfish, but this says nothing very illuminating about his motives. He clearly wants some kind of power over Miranda and - perhaps - all that she stands for. Much of the time, however, it is Miranda who calls the shots and Clegg’s commonest feeling is powerlessness and frustration combined in equal quantities. There is, of course, the class difference. The kidnap may be intended as a kind of symbolic revenge by the working-class protagonist on middle-class values.“ This can only be a part of his motivation, however.

48 Critical Quarter&, vol. 25, no. 1

It doesn’t explain why Clegg wants his revenge in this form and it doesn’t explain his peculiar relationship with Miranda. Why, for example isn’t he more openly cruel? The keynote of the book is unwitting cruelty. Clegg doesn’t intend any of the ultimate consequences of his actions, but it is difficult to know what he does intend: he doesn’t seem to know himself. He is a collector of butterflies. Such people do not really love butterflies (or they’d leave them alone and be content to watch them), they love the act of collecting and the collection itself.

A similar idea emerges in Daniel Martin. Whilst at Oxford Martin meets two sisters, has an exceedingly brief affair with one and marries the other. The affair is virtually adulterous since the girl, Jane, is engaged to and almost immediately marries a close friend of Martin’s - the philosopher Mallory. Both marriages are disasters, though in different ways, and their failure sets the pattern of the novel and defines the character of the protagonists. The failure of Daniel’s marriage stems in part from a self-centredness which he gradually outgrows. Mallory‘s inability to sustain his marriage is, on the other hand, a consequence of something deeper in his nature. Wholly reliant on his considerable intellect he never learns to trust his feelings and thereby to come to terms with a dimension of his wife’s character. She is a highly intelligent woman whose intelligence is, however, balanced by a feeling for ’rightness’. This intuitive grasp of the moral significance of situations5 is something that Martin increasingly begins to share with her. The difference between Martin and Mallory is, at one point, brought sharply home. Both have an interest in orchids but for Daniel this is symptomatic of a love of nature ‘as a poem, a myth, a catalysis, the only theatre I was allowed to know’. Whereas Anthony ’wasn’t a nature-lover at all . . . He just happened to be a crack field botanist’ (Daniel Martin pp. 76-7). Anthony comes to realise the importance of this difference and, during a kind of confession to Daniel, remembers this incident: Dan, you once said something to me that I’ve always remembered. You’d spotted some nice orchid I’d walked past - insectifera? - I can’t recall now, but we were telling the girls about it that evening. Your nose for them. And you said that I k n m only how to look at orchids - not for them’ (Daniel Martin p. 194, my italics).

Clegg’s problem, like Anthony’s, is that he looks at Miranda, not for her. This may be appropriate for orchids and butterflies, but not for people. People are never there when you look at them, you have to discover them. ‘We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is‘.6 This characteristically Sartrian paradox is, for once, easily explained. What matters about people are their plans, aims, ambitions; what they are going to do, or want to do, next, not what they are now. These projects are doubly negative. Not only are they

Moral sense and the collector 49

future-directed - yet to come - but they will also never, or hardly ever, materialise in the idealised form in which they were first envisaged.

Clegg is genuinely infatuated with Miranda, but infatuated with a figure he has observed - looked at - ’When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name withM’ (The Collector, p. 5). This acquaintance with her as a vision, a figure in a landscape, is supplemented by pure fantasy about her beautiful and virginal appearance being matched by a pure, gentle and high-minded inner life. This, in a way, she has, but not in any way that Clegg could imagine. Miranda is a complex, frequently inconsistent, sometimes irritable, impossibly idealistic, rather snobbish fair-weather soaalist. In fact she is a typical young middle-class student. Clegg can’t accommodate his idealisation with her reality, partly because he is insensitive, inhibited and repressed but mainly because he ignores her completely. He tries to turn her into the fantasised ideal specimen he thought he’d collected. His anger, ultimate indifference and permanent, chronic inability to see what Miranda is really like springs from his reification of her as an item in a collection, an object - woman on a pedestaL His vadllation between idol(ideal)isation on the one hand and hatred and disgust on the other is like (some) Victorian attitudes to women - exaggerated respect and worship when they complied with their male created roles and contempt and vilification when they abandoned them. This historical generalisation, true or not, is exemplified in the general public attitude to Sarah Woodruffe in The French Lieutenant‘s Woman. So Fowles, at least, believes it.

Clegg is morally blind, not because he couldn’t see or because he couldn’t evaluate what he does see, but because he denies Miranda an elementary moral right. He won’t, refuses, to see her as a conscious subject who is constitutedas a subject of her world; instead she is, for h*, only an object in his. Bernard Williams makes this point very well:’ ’What is involved. . . could be explained by saying that each man is owed an effort at identification: that he should not be regarded as the surface to which a certain label can be applied, but one should try to see the world (including the label) from his point of view.‘

It is a quite literally essential characteristic of human beings that they are subjects as well as objects,s the bearers as well as objects of moral attitudes. Certain moral principles follow logically from recognition of this fact, most notably Kant’s famous declaration that human beings are to be treated as ends in themselves and not as means to ends only. If this means anything it means at least that morally sigruficant reasons must be found for treating

50 Critical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1

people differently from the way in which you would hope to be treated by them. This principle is clearly beyond Clegg's grasp because he lacks the recognition upon which it is based, that people are (usually)persons and not objects. Accordjng to Sartre this recognition is purely perceptual and is what we see when we see another person and recognise them as such.9 On the level of immediate intuition there is a phenomenological distinction between the experience of objects in themselves and the experience of something whichis simultaneously an object for me and a subject for which1 am an object. To recognise someone as a person is just to recognise this: to fail to recognise this is to fail to recognise him as a person. Moreover I only became aware of myself as a subject when I became aware of others for whom I am an object - 'my apprehension of the other in the world as probably being a man refers to my permanent possibility of being-seen-by-him . . . the look is first an intermediary which refers from me to myself' (Sartre, bc. cit.). This does not, of course, imply thateveryone who looks at a person will see

a person. Some will lack the conceptual equipment to organise the experience in the correct way and some, in a way aptly called vicious, will repress or gradually have lost the ability to do so. The lack of vision is quite literally that.

I see Every thing I paint in This World, but Everybody does not see alike. To the Eyes of a miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that Stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he Sees10

Whether Clegg is a case of pure evil or arrested emotional development is unclear but Mallory (in Daniel Martin) clearly falls into the latter category. What is more he realises this before he dies and does what he can to re* the damage his lack of vision has caused to the lives around him. His confession of this to Martin is the hinge on which the action of the second half of the novel turns - Martin's project to rescue the Jane he once knew from the emotional shell living with Mallory has forced her to build around herself. Anthony: 'I'm still defeated by the conundrum of God. But I have the

Moral sense and the collector 51

Devil clear.’ Daniel: ‘And what’s that?’ ’Not seeing whole’ (Daniel Martin, p. 196).

The French Lieutenant’s Woman is technically the most successful of Fowles’s novels in that in it he finds a form which can carry without undue stress almost all of Fowles’s major themes, including that of the collector mind and (in Blake’s phrase) ’single-vision’. Charles Smithson is a conventional upper-middle-class Victorian of rather advanced ideas. He is engaged to Emestina a bright, pretty, but ultimately rather shallow businessman’s daughter. The flow of their lives is permanently disrupted by a chance encounter with Sarah Woodruffe, the French Lieutenant’s Woman of the title. Charles becomes fascinated by Sarah whose enigmatic behaviour prompts him to try and understand her. She is almost wholly unconventional by the standards of the time, though we (the late twentieth-century reader) recognise her quite easily. She is intelligent and doesn’t trouble to disguise the fact that she’s at least as bright as most of the men she meets. She is aware of her sexuality and can’t understand why this is supposed to be sinful and refuses to feel guilty about it. Although it would solve many of her problems she refuses to marry because she won’t give up her independence.

What fascinates Smithson is that Sarah Woodruffe won’t fit any of the categories into which he so neatly tries to put her. Like one of his fossil flints he tries to find a place for her in some psychological taxonomy which he can find intelligible - the seduced innocent, the spurned lover, the tragedy queen (her nick-name in Lyme Regis is ’Tragedy’), the romantic heroine nursing burning passions and deep emotions, even the unbalanced psychotic. Every time he has her securely labelled she escapes him by refusing to conform to type. Fowles heightens this uncertainty by providing two endings to the book so that even the final pages do not confirm her in any particular role. Sarah, in fact, frequently misleads Smithson as to her true motives. She claims, not always convincingly it is true, that she is not trying to conceal the reasons for her actions but to provoke in him a state of fruitful uncertainty. This, in fact, is a recurrence of the ConchisNick Urfe relationship in The Magus and so, it would seem, both Fowles and Sarah feel that to grasp part of the truth is always to risk mistaking it for the whole of the truth. It is as if grasping some detail of the picture must always obscure the thing as a whole. It can’t be built up piece by piece without a prior feeling for the shape and the outline into which the pieces must fit.

Human beings, according to the analysis given by Sartre and with which Fowles seems to agree, are essentially dynamic. Their ability freely to choose their course of action means that their character is never fully determined, never fixed. They are capable of unpredicted and unpredictable behaviour.

52 Critical Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 1

No simple determinate classification of human nature is possible. Necessarily, however, the collector is accustomed to working within such classifications. Clegg‘s butterflies, Mallory‘s orchids or Smithson’s fossils can all be placed, distinguished per genus et differentia once and for all Though the collector might make mistakes or discoveries there will be no surprises in the taxonomy itself- it contains no inherent uncertainties.

The collector who approaches human beings in a similar way blinds himself to what is essentially human about them, what makes them objects of moral concern and not just objects. To understand an essentially changing thing one must see the pattern its changes take, not how it is at any given point. To understand a changing human being one must grasp that the human being is not just an object but also a subject for whom a world exists different from one’s own. Such an object necessarily has moral qualities and rights which are inseparable from its being that kind of object. To see it as such is necessarily to see that it has those kinds of rights. The collector is quite literally blind to a whole dimension of human reality. It is this blindness which makes it possible for him, potentially at least, to act in ways which a normal person finds inexplicable and labels immoraL

As Sartre implies (up. cit., p. 257), to learn to see others in this way is also to learn to see oneself in a different light. In the realisation that Sarah Woodruffe is a person and not merely a psychological specimen Smithson finds his own self-knowledge deepened in a rather surprising way. Thus the nature of his relationship with Sarah is no longer so vitally important: She was the cause of his flash of insight, not the object of it. Similarly the purpose of Conchis’s manipulation of Urfe’s perceptions is not to bring Urfe and Alison together, but to rid Urfe of the moral blindness which made it impossible for him to sustain a relationship with anyone, Alison not excepted.

It is not, therefore, unreasonable to see Fowles’ heroes as making discoveries about themselves as moral beings which are going profoundly to affect (for the better, one hopes) their subsequent dealings with others. These discoveries involve a painfully acquired ability to see more clearly in this sense: that they now see human beings as they really are - as selves, as subjects and as moral entities.

Notes As does Fowles himself- see L. Sage, ’John Fowles’, New Review, Od. 1974, p. 35. The Collector, TheMagus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, DanielMartin and The Ebony Tower‘ respectively. J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (London, 1969), p- 367.

1

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Moral sense and the collector 53

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The incidents of the Champagne bottle (p. 3) and in Palmyra (p. 649) are only two of many examples in the book. Sartre, op. cif. p. 58. ’The idea of equality’, in 0. Hanfling (ed.), Funhmenfal Problems of Philosophy (1st edition), Oxford, 1972, p, 179. See T. Nagel,Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1972, esp. ‘Panpsychism’, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ and ’Subjective and objective’. Sartre, up. cif., pp. 254-8. W. Blake, up. cif., p. 793 (my italics).

pp. 356-7.