Fiction:
The Ebony Tower Daniel Martin Non-Fiction:
“Eliduc and the Lais of Marie de France”
“My Recollections on Kafka”
“Hardy and the Hag”
The publication of The Ebony Tower in 1974, a compilation of short stories, comprises the first gesture of Fowles‟s receding interest in existentialism, while looking for innovative areas in fiction writing, which furthermore finds outlet in his next work, Daniel Martin. In an interview to Susana Onega, Fowles had commented after the success of The French Lieutenant’s Woman that, “I am no longer an existentialist in the social sense…I am really much more interested, in terms of the modern novel, in what fiction is about” (Onega 181). Doubtful of this concept, he however continued in the existential premises in his works, accepting the view that the world is essentially composite and inexplicable. In Daniel Martin, Fowles comes closest in incorporating the necessity of art in political change in the struggle of male supremacy, and proposes a veiled prescription of his leanings to Left Winged politics. As he remarks on this principle, “I think now of existentialism as a kind of literary metaphor, a wish fulfillment” (Bigsby 117)
The essence of the self in The Ebony Tower and its reorganization, the fragmentation of
part of this chapter. The second part will comprise of the essays “Eliduc and The Lais of Marie de France”(1974), “My Recollections on Kafka”(1970), and “Hardy and The Hag”
(1977). The first essay reflects a considerable impact of Celtic influence in the projection of the self in The Ebony Tower. The detective genre also reverberates in three of the stories in The Ebony Tower, which show Fowles‟s preoccupation with a dissimilar framework in the stories. The sequence of the self in his work is thus, never compartmentalized, but seeks more ambiance. “My Recollections on Kafka,” and “Hardy and The Hag,” studies on the paradigms of the writer‟s self. The mysteries of existence, and a constant paranoiac fear of being victimized had a cathartic flavour in Kafka‟s writings, and an underlying link with the self in Daniel Martin. “Hardy and The Hag,”
scrutinizes Thomas Hardy‟s novel, The Well Beloved and Fowles‟s own comments on Hardy as a writer. The essay also analyses the effort, which a male novelist undertakes to situate the lost figure of infancy in building his creativity, which plays a crucial role in the reorganization of the self in Daniel Martin.
A compilation of five stories, The Ebony Tower is Fowles‟s fourth endeavor in fiction.
Comparable features of these stories find resonances in his earlier works, but if taken into contemplation, they project depths of different genres. The four original stories here are The Ebony Tower, Poor Koko, The Enigma and The Cloud. A striking feature is the inclusion of a story which is not Fowles‟s original, namely Eliduc. His version of a medieval French tale “translated accurately and self-effacingly”(Loveday 82) into English, is included in the assemblage, which is preceded with an introduction where
Fowles highlights a personal and a general theory of fiction. This theory lays stress on the origins of the novel directly from Celtic romance.
In the title story, the protagonist is a young English painter, critic and art teacher, David Williams. He goes to meet Henry Breasley, an elderly emigrant and an artist living in Coetminias, Brittany. Williams is tangled in a close encounter with the elderly man, and the “assignment turns into an appalling revelation of his shortcomings as an artist and a man”(Bevis 114).The second story, Eliduc, a translated Celtic romance, records the moral traditions which try to establish human emotions and their absurdities. Poor Koko questions on the maxims of existential authenticity, with elaborations on the writer‟s self.
The fourth tale The Enigma, is in a detective genre, delving into a mystery, which remains an ambiguity. The final story, The Cloud, comments on the dichotomies of the self, in the presentation of the uncertainties that characterizes life in the modern century.
Structurally, the five stories expand and amplify ideas, which are prominent in Fowles‟s other works: “matters of love and sex, the functions of art and the artist, the uses and abuses of language, the demands of freedom and the responsibilities of free choice”(Olshen 92). He also amplifies that on account of the different themes and varying modes of narration, he had previously intended to name this collection as Variations, but the title was eventually discarded, due to the judgement of the editor, that it was without justification, except as “a very private mirage in the writer‟s mind”(ET 117).
The Ebony Tower can be grouped in the genre of the short story. To give the short story a precise definition in disparity to the novel, is intricate because “the main formal
characteristics of the modern novel and the modern short story are the same” (Ferguson 14). In both the genres there are narrators, points of views, dialogues and settings. In a finality to the problem, Ferguson tries to sketch an open definition:
Short stories are defined in terms of unity (Poe, Brander, Matthews), techniques of plot compression (A.L. Bader, Norman Friedman, L.A.G.Strong), change or revelation of character (Theodore Stroud), subject (Frank O‟Conner), tone (Gordimer), lyricism (Moravia), but there is no single characteristic or cluster of characteristics that the critics agree, absolutely distinguishes the short story from other fiction. (Ferguson 13)
In a catching phrase, Fowles remarks that in reading stories such as Eliduc, “the writer of fiction…is watching his own birth” (ET 120). Each story varies in length from forty-four to a hundred and ten pages. The compatibility of the self in the stories in The Ebony Tower do not recur, but vary in premises and mode of narration.
The Ebony Tower by virtue of its narrative device, has underlying connections, which are sometimes implied and are at times overt. Fowles‟s “A Personal Note”(ET 119), before the second story can be regarded as an explicit link in the self here, because he justifies here the interlinking of the stories. The epigraphs in the beginning of each story, the similar settings, and some of the incidents are the implicit devices of the collection.
Though each story has diverse examples of love, detective fiction and fantasy, there is a balance in them, while upholding the diverse facets of the self. Fowles has interwoven the texture of the five tales closely in The Ebony Tower, although they vary in their modes of narration and presentation