The French Lieutenant's Woman

A common strategy that links postmodernist writers together despite their different agendas is a discernible shift from the objective representation of social reality found in the tenets of Realism in literature to the problem of representation, concentrating instead on the ‘process of depiction’. The shift of concern towards the latter process is apparent in the flagrant self-reflexivity of The French Lieutenant’s Woman twentieth-century narrator. John Fowles’s novel alternates from a representation of characters and events using a form of modified realism followed by a shattering of the same illusion it creates. Fowles’s Brechtian techniques emphasise the temporal distance between the ‘real’ worlds of historical data and the ‘reality’ of his fictional nineteenth-century characters. Acquainting his readers with Mrs. Poultney, the narrator relates: ‘she was an opium-addict – but before you think I am wildly sacrificing plausibility to sensation, let me quickly add that she did not know it. What we call opium she called laudanum […]It was, in short, a very near equivalent of our own age’s sedative pills’. The narrator blurs the distinction between the real world and the fictive world, in such a way that foregrounds the degree by which reality is constructed. The various kinds of epigraphs, the footnotes, the references to nineteenth-century and twentieth-century characters all serve to undermine the very concept of reality. Fowles’s technique mirrors the concern for realism in nineteenth-century novels, while underlining the fact that the novelist can never portray a true vision of reality but may create other possible realities. Fowles concludes the twelfth chapter of the novel with the question. ‘Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come? The following chapter fails to provide an answer, and Fowles breaks the narrative frame by undermining the established convention of the omniscient narrator:

I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ mind and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does.

Fowles acknowledges that his narrative is a form of pastiche of Victorian conventions and realism in literature that simultaneously mediates the nature of fictional representation in the nineteenth-century novel and the way this is perceived from a twentieth-century perspective. He goes on to address the reader:

You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that future redicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons […] I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other that the world that is. Or was.

Fowles subverts the illusion of reality he has created by claiming he does not know his narrative or his characters. He creates his illusion of life only to dismantle it, creating a paradoxical situation that ‘refers both to a reality outside the text and to the process by which that reality is fictionally constructed’. This contradictory perspective is what Gasiorek terms as the ‘double-focus’ approach that is employed in several postmodernist texts. Indeed as Brian McHale asserts, ‘the workings of all postmodernist world-making machines are visible, in one way or another, to one degree or another, this is what makes them postmodernist’.     Definition of Postmodernist Literature Postmodernist fiction overtly displays its conventions; it lays bare the illusion of reality and its artifice. Consequently, it foregrounds the problematic relationship between life, fiction, and the very existence of reality. It represents the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems’. Fowles’s novel foregrounds the dichotomy between the real and the imaginary, and the narrator implies that the world of fiction he created in inevitably intertwined in the fictionality of history itself:

A character is either real or imaginary? If you think that hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it… fictionalise it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf – your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality.

The postmodernist novel, thus, creates the illusion of reality only to dismantle it, and in the process displays ‘the fictionality of the fiction itself, and all that it’s composed of’. Consequently, postmodernist fiction incorporates within it a level of familiarity that proceeds to innovation in a recognisable fictional form; it simultaneously fulfils and subverts the reader’s expectations. As Patricia Waugh remarks, such fiction differs from experimental fiction because it ‘offers both innovation and familiarity through the individual reworking and undermining of familiar conventions’. Postmodernist authors seem to unanimously assert that ‘totalistic perspectives could not hold’. In its employment of familiar literary conventions and historical places, events and characters, postmodernist fiction poses the questions of how we know or construct history and truth, reality and events: ‘The challenging of certainty, the asking of questions, the revealing of fiction-making where we might have once accepted the existence of some absolute “truth” – this is the project of postmodernism’. The realism in literature of the nineteenth-century novels is no longer viable to represent contemporary reality, and postmodernist fiction thus explores and re-invents the novel form to discover other possible realities, creating ‘worlds as real as, but other than the world that is’. The reader no longer engages in what Roland Barthes calls the readerly text but is now confronted with a writerly text, that makes ‘him or her aware of possible alternatives to this “commonsense” reality'. List of Works Cited Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, ‘The Social Construction of Reality’ (Hammondsworth: Penguin. 1971). John Fowles, ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ (London: Vintage, 1996). Patricia Waugh, ‘Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction’ (London: Routledge, 2003). Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’ cited in Andrzej Gasiorek, ‘Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After’ (London: Edward Arnold, 1995).