Epigraphs in The Novel

The Riddler Riddled: Reading the Epigraphs in John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's
Woman"
Author(s): Deborah Bowen
Source: The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter, 1995), pp. 67-90
Published by: Journal of Narrative Theory
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The Riddler Riddled: Reading the Epigraphs in
John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman
Deborah Bowen
It may be valid to suggest, as Jerry Varsava does in his book Contingent

Meanings: Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader, that self-reflexiv-
ity in the novel has become faddish and mannered through canonization and
overuse (Contingent 146). But does this mean that a self-reflexive novel of
the 1960s has lost its audience by the 1990s? Perhaps it is, rather, a call for
new points of departure and return. I should like to propose a fresh reading
of John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman that is informed by atten-
tion to Fowles's paratextual use of epigraphs. In particular, such a reading
will foreground the power of the reader in a text where the writer plays with
plural voices but at the same time desires mastery of them.
In a brief but fascinating paper on the subversive and ironical effect of
Fowles's epigraph to The Collector, David Leon Higdon refers in passing to
The French Lieutenant's Woman as exhibiting a paratext of epigraphs and
footnotes in which "Fowles creates an interplay which broadens and deep-
ens the implications of his text." Higdon suggests that the contrasting in
paratext and text of Victorian and modern viewpoints on issues such as time,
sex, and progress, has the effect of "judging each age as lacking in some
way" ("Epigraph" 571). This implied reciprocity between paratext and text
has, however, been more carefully investigated by Gerard Genette, who points
out that the obligation felt by a reader in relation to a paratextual item is less
than the obligation the reader feels toward the text. In other words, the reader
does not have to read a paratext: "The paratext, in all its forms, is a funda-
mentally heteronomous, auxiliary, discourse devoted to the service of some-
thing else which constitutes its right of existence, namely the text" ("Paratext"
269). At the same time, a paratext, "the fringe of the printed text," may by its
suggestiveness "in reality control the whole reading" (Lejeune, qtd. in
68 J N T
"Paratext" 261). Leo Hoek refers to paratext as "cette peau qui facilite ou
occulte l'acces au texte" (al0). What happens when the reader chooses to
pay attention to the skin, the fringe, the textual threshold?
Genette calls the paratext a "zone of transaction" that is "defined by the
intention and responsibility of the author" (262). He quotes approvingly J.
Hillis Miller's description of "para" as:
an antithetical prefix which indicates at once proximity and

distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority.
... A thing in 'para' is not only at once on both sides of the
frontier which separates the exterior and the interior; it is also
the frontier itself, the screen which creates a permeable mem-
brane between the inside and the outside. It operates their con-
fusion, letting the outside come in and the inside go out, it
divides them and unites them. ("Critic as Host" 219)
Genette comments that this is "a very fine description of the activity of the
paratext" (271). He, like Hoek, discusses many aspects of paratextuality-
cover, author's name, title, "blurb," preface, notes, publicity, notoriety, and
so forth-and he asserts that specific paratextual function must be decided
empirically. The author's name, as Foucault has pointed out in his now-ca-
nonical "What is an Author?", may signal to the reader an anticipated coher-
ence and stylistic uniformity in the text to follow-or, perhaps, it may signal
certain kinds of deconstructive enterprise, as in the case of Foucault himself.
A preface may confirm an expectation of traditional reading practices-or it
may function transgressively, if it disengages writer from text and questions
textual authority. An epigraph may reinforce an irreversible movement to-
ward a satisfying closure-or it may suggest, instead, textual plurality. In
each case, however, the relationship of the reader to the paratextual item is
different from the relationship of the reader to the primary text. Genette's
translator Marie Maclean, in a companion paper to "Introduction to the
Paratext" in New Literary History, elaborates on Genette's point that this
difference extends also to the relationship of writer to text and paratext. The
paratextual message will always be illocutionary in status, whether or not it
is honest, for here is the place where the writer displays his or her intentions
and "speaks directly to the reader as sender to receiver" (278). However, like
Genette, Maclean is making general statements about a variety of paratextual
elements that need to be contextualized and specified in order to be inter-
preted. How must this notion of paratext as a free space for authorial inten-
Reading the Epigraphs in The French Lieutenant's Woman 69
tionality be moderated in the case of the epigraph, which is already written

by a previous author? Maclean herself suggests that "[t]he gap between in-
tention and practice ... is also the sphere of the art of the peripheral."
Postmodern writers, interested in disrupting the reader's traditional as-
sumptions about the status of the text, have made particular play with this
"art of the peripheral." In his 1977 jeu d'esprit "Living On," to offer an
extreme instance, Derrida plays at his own expense as writer by producing a
footnote generated by his title, of equal length to the text, and having its own
title. He calls this secondary text a "telegraphic band" that "produces an
untranslatable supplement, whether I wish it or not" (Deconstruction and
Criticism 175). In effect the text becomes paratext, and vice versa: they are
barely to be distinguished, except by the transgressive nature of the paratext
as supplement, which here specifically escapes the control of the writer, rather
than speaking directly with his voice. This notion that writing is not easily
containable, and that paratextual function must be defined empirically, finds
especially rich expression in the supplement of an epigraph.
Fairly common as the site of authoritative commentary in the nineteenth-
century romantic novel, the epigraph has become widespread in late twenti-
eth-century plural texts, where its transgressive potential may be realized in
meanings that exceed or even contradict those of the text. Unlike a preface
or a footnote, an epigraph almost always originates with a different writer
from the text, thus formalizing the notion of the "intertextual event" and
consciously admitting a polyphony of voices. Even when superscribed by
the writer of the new text, epigraphs are written in different modes, spoken
with different tones of voice, and uttered by different personae, from those
of the text that follows. They are not first-order speech acts but second-, and
represent the writer distanced from or even usurped by writing, overtly medi-
tative about it, and both directive and playful in reference to the reader. The
epigraph becomes a particular kind of writerly comment upon the whole
enterprise of the book, a palimpsest that holds out a false promise of direc-
tion to the reader-to the writer?-while it unfolds into the text its own prior
context. As a result, these paratextual voices may, for the reader, have a life
of their own. "Epigrapher est toujours un geste muet dont I'interpr6tation
reste a la charge du lecteur": because an epigraph is "souvent 6nigmatique,
d'une signification qui ne s'6claircira, ou confirmera, qu'h la pleine lecture
du texte," its interpretation is "a la charge du lecteur, dont la capacit6
herm6neutique est souvent mise g l'apreuve" (Genette, Seuils 145-46).
Thus, when in a self-reflexive fiction like The French Lieutenant's Woman
70 J N T
John Fowles reintroduces the Victorian romantic technique of providing an

epigraph not just at the opening of the book but at the opening of each chap-
ter, the plural functions of both reader and writer in the text are inevitably
foregrounded. Fowles creates with epigraphs a running and heterogeneous
subtext that he uses to counter and interpret the main text and to function in
a kind of dialogic with it. But only a kind of dialogic, because Fowles straddles
the late twentieth-century and the Victorian period with considerable dis-
comfort: he appears to desire not only the play of textuality but also the
traditional role of omnipotent author. Critical attempts have been made to
justify this apparent inconsistency by reading the text as an illustration of the
complexity of what Foucault has called the "author function." Robert Siegle,
for instance, identifies "at least three contrary strands" in the authorial voice,
but explains them as instances of the interplay of codes ("Concept of the
Author" 132). William Nelles describes The French Lieutenant's Woman as
"an example of a novel in which the public narrator is to be closely identified
with the extra-fictional voice. These narrators are also identified with Fowles
himself' ("Problems" 209). Borrowing his theoretical model from Genette,
among others, Nelles tries to extend it to allow for the narrative voice to
exceed and conflate the given categories. In a paper on "The Paradox of
Omniscience in The French Lieutenant's Woman, " Frederick M. Holmes ar-
gues that Fowles is in fact "able to have it both ways" because "[b]y expos-
ing the artificiality of the form in the very act of using it, . . . he avoids
writing in bad faith" (185); Holmes goes on to assert that "[t]he success of
this novel is inseparable from its reflexive character" (196). On the contrary,
I am suggesting that the failures of the novel can be similarly attributed:
Fowles's complicitous use of artifice disperses the authority of the narrative
voice, thus destroying his power to speak as a moralist. It is particularly in
the paratextual use of epigraphs that this tension between plurality and au-
thorial control becomes evident.
Late in the book Fowles makes specific authorial comment on the writers
he has cited in the epigraphs. This comment, like Fowles's ubiquitous intru-
sions elsewhere, has the dual effect of unsettling the nature of the reader's
engagement with the text and enlightening her about authorial intention;
Fowles's commentary stands in relation to the epigraphs like an object to its
reflection in a glass. It may be helpful to quote at length the specific passage
in question, where in Chapter 49 Fowles writes:
[T]he fact that every Victorian had two minds ... is the one
piece of equipment we must always take with us on our trav-
els back to the nineteenth century. It is a schizophrenia seen at
its clearest, its most notorious, in the poets I have quoted from
so often-in Tennyson, Clough, Arnold, Hardy; but scarcely
less clearly in the extraordinary political veerings from Right
to Left and back again of men like the younger Mill and
Gladstone; in the ubiquitous neuroses and psychosomatic ill-
nesses of intellectuals otherwise as different as Charles
Kingsley and Darwin; in the execration at first poured on the

Pre-Raphaelites, who tried--or seemed to be trying-to be
one-minded about both art and life; in the endless tug-of-war
between Liberty and Restraint, Excess and Moderation, Pro-
priety and Conviction, between the principled man's cry for
Universal Education and his terror of Universal Suffrage; trans-
parent also in the mania for editing and revising so that if we
want to know the real Mill or the real Hardy we can learn far
more from the deletions and alterations of their autobiogra-
phies than from the published versions ... more from corre-
spondence that somehow escaped burning, from private dia-
ries, from the petty detritus of the concealment operation.
Never was the record so completely confused, never a public
facade so successfully passed off as the truth on a gullible
posterity; and this, I think, makes the best guidebook to the
age very possibly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Behind its latterday
Gothick lies a very profound and epoch-revealing truth. (288-
89)
How is the reader to respond to such stridency in tone, when encouraged

earlier to question the whole convention of authorial control? It seems that,
if Fowles the story-teller is willing to submit to his characters and to his
readers, Fowles the moralist is decidedly not willing to do any such thing. In
the passage quoted above, Fowles declares that the Victorians made fictions
of their lives not only in poetry but also in politics, medicine and scholar-
ship. He singles out a work of literary fiction as the profoundest expression
of "truth" about that age because it allows the endemic schizophrenia to be
explicitly contained and revealed. By thus privileging the recognition of a
coexistence of contradictory terms, he provides a perhaps unwitting com-
mentary upon his own text, where, like that of his heroine Sarah, his own
presence may be described in terms of oxymoron: "luring-receding, subtle-
72 J N T
simple, proud-begging, defending-accusing" (267). By creating a moderately

plural text, he inevitably creates a plural author, and thus undercuts the con-
fident conclusions of the authorial voice.
Fowles's analysis of Victorian schizophrenia has two consequences for a
reading of the epigraphs. First, the epigraphs may themselves be expected to
demonstrate schizophrenia and therefore to be overlaid with authorial irony.
Second, they may be expected to create, out of their tension with the main
text and perhaps with one another, a record of schizophrenic reality that al-
lows for the coexistence of unreconciled data and may even exceed the mean-
ings foreseen by the "sovereign author" (see Spivak lxxiv-v). If, for instance,
Fowles believes that it is not in social documentation but in Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde that a true picture of the Victorian age is most likely to be found, then
the reader must be suspicious of the picture offered by the various extracts of
social documentary that Fowles includes in the epigraphs and in the text of
the novel itself. By the narrator's own definition, a fiction that is truly "ep-
och-revealing" will manifest itself in paradox and in the coexistence of ap-
parently mutually exclusive points of view. His use of paradox is not, how-
ever, a deconstructive strategy to undermine oppositions by showing their
interrelationship and demonstrating how one term of an antithesis inheres in
the other. Though The French Lieutenant's Woman is a novel that "system-
atically flaunts its own condition of artifice" (Alter x), this conscious artifice
works to highlight the necessity for moral choice rather than to explode a
conventional metaphysic. Fowles's privileging of fiction as that multi-di-
mensional world in which truth need not be propositional or singular still
requires a kind of authorial absolutism alien to self-conscious fictions.
Further evidence of a desire to be simultaneously within and above his
own text is evident in Fowles's "endeavour to renegotiate the terms of our
understanding of realism" as he exploits the felt need to keep history and
fiction apart (Johnson 291). Peter Conradi refers to this phenomenon as a
"reductio ad absurdum of the principles of authentication, exposing the
premisses of realism and exciting in the reader a pleasing discomfort compa-
rable to mild epistemological vertigo" (69). Nowhere is this renegotiation of
realism more apparent than in Fowles's use of epigraphs, through which he
effectively collapses the boundaries between art and life, the fictive and the
real. That he will necessarily then create a text of greater plurality than can
be contained within the "author-function" is a consequence that extends
textuality beyond those traditional bounds implicitly assumed by Fowles as
sovereign author.
The initial epigraph of The French Lieutenant's Woman is from an early

work of Karl Marx:
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and

of human relationships to man himself.
-Zur Judenfrage (1844)
Genette curtly cites "cette phrase exemplairement insignifiante" as an ex-

ample of an epigraph whose sole value depends upon the name of the author,
"qui fonctionne un peu ici comme une d6dicace 'in memoriam' "(Seuils 147).
Certainly a case can be made for a sympathy between early Marx and Fowles
the author: Marx's early writings have been described as disclosing "a
strangely modem youthful Marx speaking in accents almost of an existen-
tialist philosopher," and as providing inspiration for "a new, morally aware,
critical Marxism" (Tucker xxvii). What Fowles means by "emancipation"
and what Marx meant are dependent on different understandings of the pos-
sibility of human choice, but to each, emancipation is the central concept.
Marx is in fact discussing the necessity for the individual to transmute into
the "abstract citizen" and become a "species-being" in order to enjoy free-
dom (Tucker 46), which is a notion far from Fowles's understanding of per-
sonal individuation. Rather than developing in the novel the notion of free-
dom as an inalienable right, Fowles emphasizes "the anxiety of freedom-
that is, the realization that one is free and the realization that being free is a
situation of terror" (FLW 267). The epigraph therefore stands as a type of the
way in which material from one "episteme" will be interpreted differently in
another, and reminds the reader of the high degree of authorial control being
exercised in this text, at the same time as suggesting the possibility of quite
other intertextual relations.
In several of the novel's epigraphic paratexts, it is to Fowles's purpose to
highlight rather than elide conflicting polarities. In extending the implica-
tions of such polarities into the text, Fowles's manipulation of intertextual
voices is particularly suggestive. The epigraph to Chapter 14, for instance, is
from Jane Austen's Persuasion:
"My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of

clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of con-
versation; that is what I call good company."
"You are mistaken," said he, gently, "that is not good com-
pany-that is the best. Good company requires only birth,
74 J N T
education, and manners, and with regard to education is not

very nice." (Persuasion 84)
In the ensuing chapter, Charles and Ernestina pay the expected call upon
Mrs Poulteney. Where Austen has given one set of criteria for a definition of
"good company," Fowles ironically implies several more. The "good com-
pany" beloved of Anne Elliot is as absent from the Poulteney parlour as the
"good company" defined by Mr Elliot is shown to be a misnomer. The visit
to Mrs Poulteney arouses no expectation of pleasure on either side, Mrs
Poulteney anticipating that it will be her "duty to embarrass" the frivolous
young people, and Charles and Ernestina preparing to endure boredom. In
the event, the visit is more unpleasant and embarrassing than any of them
could have foreseen, since Ernestina reveals her shallowness and provincial-
ity, Charles is snubbed by his hostess and responds with cold sarcasm, and
the general absence of that humanity that would validate the possession of
birth and manners is brought into sharp relief. Like Jane Austen in the wider
context of Persuasion, Fowles moves from a societal to a more broadly moral
definition of "good company," in which the social circles of Lyme are sorely
lacking.
While Fowles extends the implications of Jane Austen's social criticism,
he both illustrates and reinterprets the personal tensions felt by a poet like
A. H. Clough. In the passage quoted earlier where Fowles describes Victo-
rian schizophrenia, he declares it to be "seen at its clearest, its most notori-
ous" in poets like Clough. The epigraph to Chapter 31 provides a striking
example of what he has in mind:
When panting sighs the bosom fill,

And hands by chance united thrill
At once with one delicious pain
The pulses and the nerves of twain;
When eyes, that erst could meet with ease,
Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun
Ecstatic conscious unison-
The sure beginnings, say, be these,
Prelusive to the strain of love
Which angels sing in heaven above?
Or is it but the vulgar tune,

Which all that breathe beneath the moon
So accurately learn-so soon?

-"Poem" (1844)
This is the epigraph to the chapter in which Charles finds Sarah in the barn
and kisses her. Far from engaging in that "concealment operation" of which
Fowles accuses the Victorians, Clough here represents those fiction-writers
who were most aware of conflicting polarities, and he explicitly articulates
the tension between love and lust, soul and body, sublimity and vulgarity, as
perceived by the Victorian eye. Charles's treatment of Sarah in this chapter
demonstrates exactly and physically the seesaw of emotion expressed in the
poem: he takes her into his arms, feels her tenderness, and pushes her vio-
lently away. But the text reinterprets the epigraph in clearly privileging the
existential moment of action above the tensions it embraces. In this way,
though he too is espousing a particular, culturally-specific theory of truth,
Fowles patronizes Clough as an instance of limited sensibility. The narrator
has commented, two pages earlier:
In spite of Hegel, the Victorians were not a dialectically minded

age; they did not think naturally in opposites, of positives and
negatives as aspects of the same whole. Paradoxes troubled
rather than pleased them. They were not the people for exis-
tential moments, but for the chains of cause and effect; for
positive all-explaining theories, carefully studied and studi-
ously applied. (197)
Applied to Charles and Sarah, the question "Is it love or is it lust?" expresses
a meaningless polarization. In Charles the physical nearness of Sarah pro-
duces a conditioned response of recoil-but just before he kisses her, there is
a moment of fusion between body and soul, so that "[t]he moment overcame
the age" (199). The reader's uncomfortable awareness here of a sovereign
twentieth-century author of course suggests that Fowles too likes all-explain-
ing theories of cause-and-effect, as long as they are his own.
Fowles's privileging of literary fiction over documentary is a significant
element in his construction of double epigraphs, in which an ironic paratextual
juxtaposition may suggest a paradigm for the novelistic text. Presumably
Fowles intends that the dialectic between oppositions will generate the
"whole" of which they are aspects and which he wants his work to embrace.
But by foregrounding both the paradoxical nature of reality and the trans-
gressive effects of contextualization, he also alerts the reader to the effects of
contextualizing writer and epigraphic paratext outside of the novel as well as
76 J N T
within it, as part of a web of textuality and history whose meanings escape
the author. A particularly productive instance of Fowles's use of plural voice
occurs at the beginning of Chapter 2:
In that year (1851) there were some 8,155,000 females of the

age of ten upwards in the British population, as compared with
7,600,000 males. Already it will be clear that if the accepted
destiny of the Victorian girl was to become wife and mother,
it was unlikely that there would be enough men to go round.
-E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Victorian
Golden Age
I'll spread sail of silver and I'll steer towards the sun,
I'll spread sail of silver and I'll steer towards the sun,
And my false love will weep, and my false love will weep,
And my false love will weep for me after I'm gone.
-West-Country Folksong, "As Sylvie Was Walking" (11)
These two epigraphs, which by their juxtaposition suggest that the shortage
of eligible men will result in female broken hearts, in context imply a num-
ber of things that the subsequent chapter does no more than hint at. This is
the chapter that introduces the three chief protagonists of the book, Charles,
Ernestina and Sarah, Charles at this stage being engaged to Ernestina and
about to be fascinated by Sarah. The epigraphs imply that these two women
will be rivals for the attention of the man, long before this is made explicit in
the story. The epigraphs further imply that there will be a broken relationship
in which one party sails off leaving a desolate lover behind. But the terms of
both epigraphs are rendered ambiguous.
The conclusions of the statistical first citation may after all be premised
upon a different kind of girl from the ones in Chapter 2. Will Sarah want the
"accepted destiny of the Victorian girl," and will Ernestina be able to fulfil
it? Is Charles in any case the kind of man who will be prepared to "go round"?
Fowles will play with the disparity between the impersonal and collective
assumptions of the statistician and the traditionally personal and individual
assumptions of the novelist. The lyrical second citation raises the question of
whether the conventions of romance assumed within the song are to be up-
held or undercut by this text. Tradition supports a plot in which the man sails
away, as the French Lieutenant has supposedly sailed away from Tragedy.
But in this novel Sarah sails away from Charles just as surely as he from
Ernestina. When he initially sees the figure of Sarah at the end of the Cobb
more clearly, Charles remarks, "Good heavens, I took that to be a fisherman.
But isn't it a woman?"(13). In the event, Sarah is both. The new context of
the song allows a further ambiguity over the identity of the "false love": is
this a lover to whom the one sailing away is being false, or a lover who has
proved false to the sailor? The contrast being drawn between reality and
romance will be redrawn with fresh parameters within the novel-indeed
within this very chapter. In this kind of redefinition lies much of the pleasure
of the text for the reader who is "mise a l'6preuve," because Fowles's skilful
evocation of voices muted in the epigraphs springs not so much from an
attitude of historical superiority as from an unfolding of their contradictory
epistemologies.
This paratextual play in Chapter 2 has found the reader as yet undisturbed
by the author's foregrounding of his own reflexive technique. In Chapter 4,
however, a similar problematization of the double epigraph contrasting po-
etry and social documentary foregrounds questions of authorial intention that
are more unsettling:
What's done, is what remains! Ah, blessed they

Who leave completed tasks of love to stay
And answer mutely for them, being dead,
Life was not purposeless, though life be fled.
-Mrs Norton, The Lady of La Garaye (1863)
Most British families of the middle and upper classes lived

above their own cesspool ...
-E. Royston Pike, Human Documents of the Victorian
Golden Age
The lines of poetry are from a much longer narrative poem which Ernestina
is later to be found reading aloud to Charles as their evening's entertainment.
Fowles uses that occasion to convey some information about Mrs Norton
herself:
You may think that Mrs Norton was a mere insipid poetastrix
of the age. Insipid her verse is ... ; but she was a far from
insipid person. She was Sheridan's granddaughter for one
thing; she had been, so it was rumored, Melborne's mistress-
her husband had certainly believed the rumor strongly enough
to bring an unsuccessful crim.con. action against the great
78 J N T
statesman; and she was an ardent feminist-what we would

call today a liberal. (95)
The narrator undercuts any condemnation of the insipidity of the scene by

his appeal to "real" facts about the poetess. Human beings are paradoxical
creatures, who can write sentimental tales but live strident lives. The illusion
created by the text is broken through the use of external information which,
though it might be expected to strengthen the sense of the real, in fact works
to confound the reader's expectations and unsettle her from traditional con-
ventions for reading.
The contrast between the two epigraphic citations in Chapter 4 lies not
only in this many-leveled life of the poet herself, who had her own cesspool
to contend with, but also in the paradox that "tasks of love" may spring from
base motivations. Of course Fowles means the cesspool initially to refer
metonymically to Mrs Fairley's "Stygian domain," but within a few para-
graphs the reference is extended metaphorically to the murky conscience of
Mrs Poulteney herself. Her very practical attitude to the afterlife, which spurs
her to action she otherwise detests, presents a facetious commentary on those
highminded "blessed" of the Norton lines. What looks to the outsider like an
act of love may spring from fear, greed and envy; what seems romantic may
be utterly pedestrian; ennobling fictions may spring from sordid realities.
Fowles says as much in the infamous Chapter 13, in the course of his most
blatant first foregrounding of his reflexive technique-"novelists write for
countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers . .." (81). The
problem arises in the disclaimer he makes about playing God, and his dictum
that "a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator." By situ-
ating himself within the network of the text, the writer renders himself fic-
tional; the authoritative pronouncements of a fictionalized writer both are
and are not the statements of a god.
If the collapsing of the traditional boundaries between art and life creates
a textual playground for Fowles, nowhere is this more evident than in his
treatment of the relationship between the French Lieutenant of the text and
the historical French Lieutenant whose case Dr Grogan instructs Charles to
read with care. Chapter 28, which concerns the case of Lieutenant La Roncibre,
is prefaced by another pair of epigraphs:
Assumptions, hasty, crude, and vain,

Full oft to use will Science deign;
The corks the novice plies today

The swimmer soon shall cast away.
-A. H. Clough, "Poem" (1840)
Again I spring to make my choice;

Again in tones of ire
I hear a God's tremendous voice-
"Be counsel'd, and retire!"
-Matthew Arnold, "The Lake" (1853)
In the course of the chapter it becomes apparent that La Roncibre did not do
what he was accused of doing, but that he did do something else, of a highly
compromising nature. This information is not, however, available to Charles:
it is communicated to the reader as paratextual information in a footnote.
Although Fowles has argued for the superiority of fiction as a hermeneutical
tool, he is by disposition inclined to give the last word to fact. But if each
construction of knowledge is contextually valid, then the reader's position is
as limited and as free as Charles's: an awareness of textual plurality is not
significant for Charles's moment of choice, so that the sense of superiority
such an awareness fosters in the reader is rendered ineffectual by the emo-
tional heart of the text, located in the fates of the characters. Fowles is not
prepared to allow different texts simply to coexist in their plurality, because
the extent to which he cannot control them is the extent to which the reader
apprehends him and his judgments as fiction.
Charles's initial response to reading the Lieutenant's story is to feel bound
by a deterministic universe, in particular because "the day that other French
Lieutenant was condemned was the very same day that Charles had come
into the world" (188). Science is reduced to astrology for him in this realiza-
tion. But his desperation spurs him to action: feeling that his allowing Dr
Grogan to judge Sarah for him was "because he had no more free will than
an ammonite," he comes to a place of "indecipherable determination" and
sets out to find her for himself (189). If science is to be equated with deter-
minism and bondage, then he will disregard its verdicts and follow the
promptings of his own integrity, choosing to write history rather than to be
written by it. Fowles apparently wants the reader to feel that Charles's re-
fusal to accept the story of the Lieutenant as written in stone is justified by
the actual contradictions of the case. The unfolding of the chapter therefore
questions the authority-figures of the epigraphs. It becomes unclear whether
Science is to be trusted in affairs of human conscience. Which "assump-
80 J N T
tions" are to be categorized as "hasty, crude, and vain"-those of the origi-

nal participants in the La Ronciere trial, those of Grogan in the case of Sarah,
or those of Charles in dismissing the "historical" evidence? There is a ques-
tion mark, too, over the voice of "God" in Arnold's poem: is this the voice of
Science, or of individual conscience, or of a transcendent Other? Is it coun-
seling Charles to retire from Sarah, or to retire from Grogan's document?
And in making his choice, is Charles using the "corks" of the novice, or the
skills of the fully-trained swimmer? Fowles uses the epigraphs not to shed
light on whether Charles has made a wise choice, but to emphasize the fact
that "being free is a situation of terror" in which the grounds for decision are
dangerous and unclear.
This foregrounding of Fowles's existential sympathies is the more note-
worthy because a reading of the Clough lines outside the context of the novel
generates a quite different meaning for the poem, one that does not tally with
Fowles's ironic exposure of Victorian narrowness in light of his concept of
freedom. First, Fowles has chosen to use a less well-attested reading of the
Clough poem. The standard edition reads, "Assumptions hasty, crude, and
vain, / Full oft to use with Science deign" (Mulhauser 11, my emphasis).
Fowles's substitution of "will" for "with" makes Science, rather than the
poet, the subject of the sentence, where in the standard reading Clough too is
privileging individual choice by issuing an imperative to the reader. Second,
in their original context the lines are spoken by the cynic whom the poet is at
pains to leave behind. The poem is about the importance of intuition, per-
sonal conviction in the face of apparent factual evidence, and the power of
the heart--every stanza opens with the line, "Come back again, my olden
heart!" It is a poem about not Science but sentiment, and is much nearer to
fighting Fowles's case for him than Fowles seems interested in showing.
Even in the Arnold poem, where the God-figure does carry authority, there is
a final stanza in which the poet shows much more strength of personal con-
viction than the epigraphic lines suggest: "Ye guiding Powers, who join and
part, / What would ye have with me? / Ah, warn some more ambitious heart,
/ And let the peaceful be!" Fowles's misrepresentative invoking of other texts
brings suspicion once again upon his own narrative authority.
Perhaps the prime instance of readerly discomfort with Fowles's anxi-
eties of authorship is in the notorious Chapter 55. Here, Fowles introduces
himself as a Victorian novelist into the railway carriage in which Charles is
traveling to London. What can he do with Charles, how can the novel end?
The epigraph to the chapter is from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-
Glass:
"Why, about you!" Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his

hands triumphantly. "And if he left off dreaming about you,
where do you suppose you'd be?"
"Where I am now, of course," said Alice.
"Not you!" Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. "You'd
be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!"
"If that there King was to wake," added Tweedledum,
"you'd go out-bang!-just like a candle!"
"I shouldn't!" Alice exclaimed indignantly. (315)
Here is an extract from a fictional tale, in which two characters are telling a
third character that she is more fictional than they are. Of course, in the
story, Alice would not "go out" if the King woke up, for in this story Alice is
effectively "more real" than Tweedledee and Tweedledum, by virtue of hav-
ing come from a "real" world into a looking-glass world. In fact, since the
character of Alice is based upon that of the little girl for whom Charles
Dodgson wrote the book, one might argue that she has a still more solid
claim to reality. But Through the Looking-Glass is a story. It is not part of the
story to have characters through the glass question their own reality:
Tweedledee and Tweedledum have no doubt that they are materially "there."
And The French Lieutenant's Woman is a story. Sarah and the French Lieu-
tenant, like Alice, may have analogues in the everyday world, but these ana-
logues are not under the author's control in the way his own characters are.
Or can this argument be turned on its head? Fowles, like many more
traditional novelists before him, suggests that his characters dictate to him-
thus he calls into question not only the fictionality of his characters but also
the reality of their analogues. Fiction, he seems to say, is the game we all
play. The author, like the King in Through the Looking-Glass, controls the
fiction from within its own conventions; at the same time, like Carroll, the
author manipulates the fiction from outside. But the King sleeps and Carroll
does not intrude: the "real" presences are those of the characters, each sure
of his or her existence above that of the others. And here is a significant
difference between the looking-glass world and the world of The French
Lieutenant's Woman. The levels of fictionality revealed in the Carroll epi-
graph paradoxically imply an authorial control over the looking-glass reflec-
tions that Fowles lacks over his material, since Carroll takes that silent stance
82 J N T
outside his text which Fowles seems both to want and explicitly to reject.
Carroll's lines exceed the meanings intended for them by Fowles's super-
scription, and stand in a transgressive relationship to the new text.
Returning finally to the first chapter of The French Lieutenant's Woman,
the initiated reader of epigraphs throughout the novel is struck by the appro-
priateness of this initial epigraph-an enigmatic one which appears set to
provide a key to the questions of the novel, but which may instead generate
deeper confusion. It is from Hardy's "The Riddle":
Stretching eyes west

Over the sea,
Wind foul or fair,
Always stood she
Prospect-impressed;
Solely out there
Did her gaze rest,
Never elsewhere
Seemed charm to be. (9)
The title of this poem establishes the major theme of the novel. David Walker
has described Sarah as "an emblem of the enigma at the heart of reality"
("Subversion" 199), and by association with Hardy's lines that emblem is
rendered timeless and motionless as a statue. The epigraph points a contrast
between land and sea, stability and flux, which will in the novel be elabo-
rated into a distinction between fossilization and freedom. And the bridge
between the two elements is the woman, "prospect-impressed"-both im-
pressed by the prospect and, for anyone observing her, impressed upon it,
part of it. It seems that only the sea can charm her, though the succeeding
chapter specifically states that the land-prospect, if she would only turn to
look at it, is a pleasant and harmonious one, and that the "empty sea" is a
place of madness (10, 14). There is an implied association between the woman
of the poem and the sea-rampart, the Cobb, of the novel. Not only has the
Cobb too "always stood [in] wind foul or fair," but it too is paradoxical,
"[p]rimitive yet complex, elephantine but delicate; as full of subtle curves
and volumes as a Henry Moore or a Michelangelo; and pure, clean, salt, a
paragon of mass" (9-10). It is of the land but formed for the sea; it has the
stability of earth but the flow and line of water--a blend of raw material and
human artistry. And on the farthest tip of this great sea-wall stands Sarah, "a
figure from myth" described at first as so integral a part of the scene as to be
without gender: "It stood right at the seawardmost end. ... Its clothes were
black" (11). The French Lieutenant's Woman is the deconstruction of this
riddle, the enigma of a charmed and charming woman.
But the text is more than this. By interpreting the riddle as paradox, Fowles
makes it metaphoric of his understanding of truth, the coexistence of oppo-
sites in tension within Sarah and within the landscape of the text. The reader,
however, experiencing the authorial presence itself as riddle, and Fowles
himself as "prospect-impressed," is less able to solve the riddle by recourse
to the notion of paradox, since the terms of this riddle do not coexist in the
same dimension. The Fowles impressed upon his own created world speaks
with a quite different voice from the Fowles impressed by it. Moreover, the
reader has access to Hardy's full text, and knows that his "riddle" was of a
different order. Hardy's poem has a second stanza which draws a contrast
between the stance of the woman as she used to look out to sea and her
present gaze in precisely the opposite direction: "Always eyes east / Ponders
she now- / As in devotion- / Hills of blank brow / Where no waves plough.
/ Never the least / Room for emotion / Drawn from the ocean / Does she
allow" (in Moments of Vision). Hardy's riddle concerns the change from the
woman's charmed communion with the sea to her determined concentration
upon the land. Can this be applied to Sarah's turning to the Pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood? Perhaps; but it seems clear that Fowles is more concerned with
the riddle of her single enigmatic stance by the sea than with any future
inconsistency in her behaviour. This image is in any case the one that he says
haunted him into writing his novel ("Notes" 136-37). Quoting the first stanza
of the poem without the second heightens the aura of timeless myth around
the woman and suppresses the oppositions of the poem's original puzzle. Of
course in his play with textuality Fowles is at liberty to make whatever use
he likes of what he finds within a poem. But writing a novelistic text that
explicitly encourages critical distance must also lay him open to losing con-
trol to the reader, who may undermine his apparent intention by recognizing
the transgressive potential of his epigraphs.
Furthermore, as if to reinforce the notion that in this novel life is a series
of riddles, and a series of solutions that open into more riddles, Fowles de-
velops in the reader a suspicion of language itself. The epigraphs, with their
ironical and enigmatic relation to the text, already foster a distrust of verbal
surfaces and emphasize the power of context. But more than this: an ex-
tremely self-conscious and cautious attitude to language is epitomized in
Sarah, the riddle personified: her sending of a three-word address to Charles
84 J N T
is "perfectly in key with all her other behaviour, and to be described only by
oxy-moron: luring-receding, ..." etc. (267). Whereas Charles is introduced
as the "scientist, the despiser of novels" who is drawn to mystery and ro-
mance (15), Sarah in the final d6nouement speaks from the perspective of a
highly-disciplined artist who is as concerned for truth as the most meticulous
scientist:
"I have since seen artists destroy work that might to the ama-
teur seem perfectly good. I remonstrated once. I was told that
if an artist is not his own sternest judge he is not fit to be an
artist. I believe that is right. I believe I was right to destroy
what had begun between us. There was a falsehood in it .... "
(351)
Charles in response is awakened to the dissonance of:
Two languages, betraying on the one side a hollowness, a fool-

ish constraint-but she had just said it, an artificiality of con-
ception-and on the other a substance and purity of thought
and judgment; the difference between a simple colophon, say,
and some page decorated by Noel Humphreys, all scrollwork,
elaboration, rococo horror of void.
The artistry that is not artificial is, however, deceptive in its simplicity, as
Sarah's face is "naturally" tragic though she is supremely playing a part.
There is no such thing as non-fictional existence: artistry is necessary in the
play of life. However, art can be a barrier to playing well if it is interpreted as
static, or if it is mere decoration in reaction against the void. In discussing
the horrors of "real" Victorian lower-class life, Fowles writes, "Each age,
each guilty age, builds high walls round its Versailles; and personally I hate
those walls most when they are made by literature and art" (129). Fowles
calls for the reader to accept that both reader and writer are creating fictions.
But Fowles's strongly moralistic message-that distinctions must be made
between artistry and artificiality, and that one's fictions must be in dynamic
relationship with living-necessarily cannot itself escape the suspicion of
language.
It is significant that Sarah creates fictions specifically to escape reality.
Her confession sharply contrasts for Charles the real and the ideal:
It was not strange because it was more real, but because it was
less real; a mythical world where naked beauty mattered far
more than naked truth. (144)
Sarah, the "figure from myth," has composed a mythical world for herself to
inhabit. She is not, in the sense she leads Charles to suppose, the French
Lieutenant's woman; but the fiction she has created is the most flexible and
powerful within the world of the novel, because it is constantly relevant to
the present. It is doubtful, however, whether such myth-making should es-
cape the censure of Fowles the moralist, since it involves Charles in a tissue
of deceit and pain. Though Fowles says he wants to privilege noble fictions
that will deal realistically with sordid life outside the walls of Versailles, he
actually capitulates here to the magic of art and the lure of mythical beauty.
Sarah's reality is a functional meaning that she has created for herself; her
being is, as it were, permanently deferred, and as such infinitely attractive
not only to Charles but also, it appears, to Fowles.
The riddle of Sarah is the strongest force in the text to encourage Fowles
to avoid closure. It is certainly when confronting the problem of endings that
Fowles reads most clearly like an author under duress. His overt declaration
that he privileges fluidity, and his attempts to escape closure by offering
alternative endings, are at odds with the reader's powerful sense of Fowles's
specific philosophical purposes in writing, and with the didactic authorial
voice. That suspicion of paradigm that has been fostered in the reader through-
out the novel is finally foregrounded by Fowles in his much-discussed play
with the three endings-but the same suspicion undermines the authority of
his constant need to be directive. The most generally accepted critical view
of the endings is that they are clearly hierarchical, each one, from the per-
spective privileged by the author, an improvement over the one before, so
that the third ending is the least conventional, the least sentimental, the least
reductive, and a full-blown apologia for existential choice (see Conradi 66-
67; Holmes 190; Olshen 88-89; Wolfe 165). Some critics have argued differ-
ently: Frederik N. Smith, for instance, maintains that "Fowles has not cho-
sen" between endings, but presents a "bifurcated conclusion [as] . . . the
most obvious formal characteristic of a novel bifurcated on every page" (87).
But his appeal to a historical theory of narrative may also historicize Fowles's
final choice as the inevitable one: Smith suggests that an examination of "the
precise kind of narrative reality each [ending] presupposes" legitimates the
authenticity of each as reflecting "a fictional universe intimately tied to a
86 J N T
specific historical period and the characters' relationship to it" (97-98). This
argument can be used to explain how, in the final paragraph of the novel,
with Sarah's riddle revealed and re-veiled, and with Charles cut adrift, the
open-endedness of paradox and mystery is itself invoked as closure. Fowles
encourages the reader to see the endurance of Sarah and the predicted endur-
ance of Charles as demonstrative of the strength and artistry necessary in
response to life's "unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea" (366). The voice here is
directive. It brings together nineteenth- and twentieth-century diction, and
repositions an Arnold poem which the narrator has earlier described as "per-
haps the noblest short poem of the whole Victorian era" (334) within an
overtly existentialist morality.
But the attentive reader must feel suspicious of this Arnoldian cadence
and of the voice of this final demi-god. The most significant of the textual
voices that Fowles is not able to control point to the tensions within the
narrator himself. He has asked the reader to be distanced and critical-but
not so critical as to be immune to his authoritative interjections. He has sug-
gested that his characters have a life of their own-but not to the extent that
they can make moves undreamt of in his philosophy. He has encouraged the
reader to understand him as fictional-but not so fictional that he cannot
make definitive pronouncements about the nineteenth-century world from a
twentieth-century perspective. Fowles wants to indicate the contradictory
parameters of reality, but to demonstrate through his characters the possibil-
ity of living with consistent choice in light of such contradictions. An origi-
nal approach to exonerating the insufferable condescension of the narrative
voice is offered by Jerome Bump. He argues that the narrator's attitude
changes during the course of the novel, to the extent that we witness "the
conversion of the protoreader to the Victorian view of sexuality," thus "sub-
tly revealing how the Victorians transcended our own simplistic dualism of
pleasure versus repression" with their "reflexive asceticism" ("Narrator as
Protoreader" 18). Too subtle to be helpful, perhaps, this reading actually
reinforces the judgment that, in the final analysis, Fowles is not serious in his
postmodern play; his desire for control is as great as that of any traditional
novelist, and his apparent discrediting of this desire makes it both more devi-
ous and less effective.
In a novel entitled The French Lieutenant's Woman, where the title itself
is the invention of a powerfully controlling will (Sarah's), the reader whose
distance from the text has made it possible to see the contradictions must
also perceive the distance between reader and writer. If as reader she is both
to suspend disbelief and to unravel textuality, she must feel that she has the
author's respect; in The French Lieutenant's Woman such respect seems to
be only that of a teacher for his pupils. The choice to be made is the one that
Fowles advocates. The resultant and traditional metaphysical desire to mas-
ter anxiety creates in the novel just that "contradictorily coherent idea of a
centre" that Derrida berates. Fowles's play with postmodernist techniques
effectively deconstructs his own position, by creating a text whose contra-
dictions and pluralities will not centre themselves upon the truth he appar-
ently intended.
As a result, this novel is a prime example of the way in which textuality
escapes the author. If "the text belongs to language, and not to the sovereign
and generating author" (Spivak lxxiv), then by presenting himself as a plural
author Fowles has made the reader more thoroughly the producer of the text
than his strident tone suggests he intended. It is Roland Barthes who writes,
'"The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author" (Barthes
148)-but the reader of The French Lieutenant's Woman is never sure if
Fowles really means to die. His use of epigraphs is an extension of the tradi-
tional Victorian model which gives more power to the author rather than
calling him into question, but the effect of the epigraphs within the playful
context Fowles creates is a transgressive one. Without the epigraphs, he would
have been more likely to produce a book; as it is, he has generated what
Derrida terms "the disruption of writing" (Of Grammatology 18). Attention
to the epigraphic paratext does indeed suggest that it controls the whole read-
ing: the servant turns out to be the master.
But there is another way to read. Fowles writes that the truly epoch-re-
vealing fiction manifests itself in paradox and apparently exclusive points of
view. The French Lieutenant's Woman demonstrates the impossibility of rec-
onciling a postmodern strategy of textual plurality with the interventions of
an authorial narrator clearly attracted to omnipotence. I have argued that
Fowles seems to want to be both within and above his text. Never assume,
says Margaret Drabble in an address on "Mimesis: The Representation of
Reality in the Post-War British Novel," that any author is ever really pre-
pared to be other than sovereign, whatever the games he or she plays ("Mi-
mesis" 13-14). Perhaps, then, Fowles's novel is indeed epoch-revealing, in-
sofar as this tension between writer and reader as meaning-makers is pecu-
liarly an obsession of our times. Metafictional games, argues Derrida, lead
to "an untranslatable supplement, whether [the writer] wish[es] it or not,"
88 J N T
and the protective notion of the book is lost in the riddled labyrinth of readerly
intertextual events. I suggest that Fowles has, after all, produced the quintes-
sential twentieth-century fiction, because, in the process of playing with sov-
ereignty, he has rendered himself and his opinions fictitious too.
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ontario
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The Riddler Riddled: Reading the Epigraphs in John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's

It may be valid to suggest, as Jerry Varsava does in his book Contingent

an antithetical prefix which indicates at once proximity and

tionality be moderated in the case of the epigraph, which is already written

John Fowles reintroduces the Victorian romantic technique of providing an

Kingsley and Darwin; in the execration at first poured on the

How is the reader to respond to such stridency in tone, when encouraged

simple, proud-begging, defending-accusing" (267). By creating a moderately

The initial epigraph of The French Lieutenant's Woman is from an early

Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and

Genette curtly cites "cette phrase exemplairement insignifiante" as an ex-

"My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of

education, and manners, and with regard to education is not

When panting sighs the bosom fill,

Or is it but the vulgar tune,

So accurately learn-so soon?

In spite of Hegel, the Victorians were not a dialectically minded

In that year (1851) there were some 8,155,000 females of the

What's done, is what remains! Ah, blessed they

Most British families of the middle and upper classes lived

statesman; and she was an ardent feminist-what we would

The narrator undercuts any condemnation of the insipidity of the scene by

Assumptions, hasty, crude, and vain,

The corks the novice plies today

Again I spring to make my choice;

tions" are to be categorized as "hasty, crude, and vain"-those of the origi-

"Why, about you!" Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his

Stretching eyes west

Charles in response is awakened to the dissonance of:

Two languages, betraying on the one side a hollowness, a fool-

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. 1818. London: Macmillan, 1963.

Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" 1969. In Harari 141-60.

. Seuils. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987.

Johnson, A. J. B. "Realism in The French Lieutenant's Woman." Journal of Modern Litera-

Miller, J. Hillis. "The Critic as Host." Deconstruction and Criticism, 217-53.

Olshen, Barry N. John Fowles. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978.

Spivak, Gayatri, trans. Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,

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