From The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

Here, for your contemplation and in the hopes of stimulating a discussion, is the best description of creating fiction that I can imagine.  It is the beginning of Chapter Thirteen of Fowles’s masterpiece. *

“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’ minds 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.  But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Gillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.

            So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in one of the houses I have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself disguised.  Perhaps is it only a game.  Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have never understood them.  Or perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed book of essays on you.  Instead of chapter headings, perhaps I should have written “On the Horizontality of Existence,” “The Illusion of Progress,” “The History of the Novel Form,”  “The Aetiology of Freedom,” “Some Forgotten Aspects of the Victorian Age” . . .  what you will.

            Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and intentions.  Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteen—unfolding of Sarah’s true state of mind) to tell all—or all that matters.  But I find myself suddenly like man in the sharp spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper window in Marlborough House; I know in the context of my book’s reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leaned down and delivered a chapter of revelation.  She would instantly have turned, had she seen me there just as the old moon rose, and disappeared into the interior shadows.

            But I am a novelist, not a man in a garden—I can follow her where I like? But possibility is not permissibility.  Husbands could often murder their wives—and the reverse—and get away with it.  But they don’t.

            You may think that novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen.  But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back.  I could fill a book with the reasons, and they would all be true.  Only one true reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is.  Or was.  This is why we cannot plan.  We know a world is an organism, not a machine.  We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world.  It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.  When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis.  But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy.

            Oh, but you say, come on—what I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind as I wrote that it might have been more clever to have him stop and drink milk. . .and meet Sarah again.  That is certainly one explanation of what happened; but I can only report—and I am the most reliable witness—that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself.  It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I wish him to be real.

            In other words, to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs. Poulteney, their freedoms as well.    There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows all other freedoms to exist.  And I must conform to that definition.”

*I have copied this out carefully, word by word.  I consider this a fair use of John Fowles’s sentences.  I type them here out of a sense of admiration and wonder, because having just yesterday read them for the fourth or fifth time, I cannot think of anything better I can say about what it means to write fiction.

Annamaria - Monday