Chapter 13 John Fowles

Out of what shadows does she come?
13
For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil
-- Tennyson, Maud (1855)
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
lmow 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-Grillet 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 it is 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 Illusions 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
a 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 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 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 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 be 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 freedom as well. There is only one
good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And
I must conform to that definition.
The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most aleatory
avant-garde modern novel has managed to extirpate its author completely);
what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image,
omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological image, with freedom
our first principle, not authority.
I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and
in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction
is woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years
ago. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I would have you
share my own sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind, any
more than you control--however hard you try, however much of a latterday
Mrs. Poulteney you may be--your children, colleagues, friends, or even
yourself.
But this is preposterous? 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 ... fictionalize 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.
That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.
So if you think all this unlucky (but it is Chapter Thirteen) digression has
nothing to do with your Time, Progress, Society, Evolution and all those
other capitalized ghosts in the night that are rattling their chains behind the
scenes of this book ... I will not argue. But I shall suspect you. I report,
then, only the outward facts: that Sarah cried in the darkness, but did not
kill herself; that she continued, in spite of the express prohibition, to haunt
Ware Commons. In a way, therefore, she had indeed jumped; and was
living in a kind of long fall, since sooner or later the news must inevitably
come to Mrs. Poulteney of the sinner's compounding of her sin. It is true
Sarah went less often to the woods than she had become accustomed to, a
deprivation at first made easy for her by the wetness of the weather those
following two weeks. It is true also that she took some minimal precautions
of a military kind. The cart track eventually ran out into a small lane, little
better than a superior cart track itself, which curved down a broad combe
called Ware Valley until it joined, on the outskirts of Lyme, the main
carriage road to Sidmouth and Exeter. There was a small scatter of
respectable houses in Ware Valley, and
it was therefore a seemly place to walk. Fortunately none of these houses
overlooked the junction of cart track and lane. Once there, Sarah had merely
to look round to see if she was alone. One day she set out with the intention
of walking into the woods. But as in the lane she came to the track to the
Dairy she saw two people come round a higher bend. She walked straight
on towards them, and once round the bend, watched to make sure that the
couple did not themselves take the Dairy track; then retraced her footsteps
and entered her sanctuary unobserved.
She risked meeting other promenaders on the track itself; and might always
have risked the dairyman and his family's eyes. But this latter danger she
avoided by discovering for herself that one of the inviting paths into the
bracken above the track led round, out of sight of the Dairy, onto the path
through the woods. This path she had invariably taken, until that afternoon
when she recklessly--as we can now realize-- emerged in full view of the
two men.
The reason was simple. She had overslept, and she knew she was late for
her reading. Mrs. Poulteney was to dine at Lady Cotton's that evening; and
the usual hour had been put forward to allow her to prepare for what was
always in essence, if not appearance, a thunderous clash of two brontosauri;
with black velvet taking the place of iron cartilage, and quotations from the
Bible the angry raging teeth; but no less dour and relentless a battle.
Also, Charles's down-staring face had shocked her; she felt the speed of her
fall accelerate; when the cruel ground rushes up, when the fall is from such a
height, what use are precautions?

Chapter 13 John Fowles

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Chapter 13 John Fowles

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Out of what shadows does she come?

I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I

So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in

Form," "The Aetiology of Freedom," "Some Forgotten Aspects of the

But this is preposterous? A character is either "real" or "imaginary"? If you

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