Abstract
Daniel Martin is an epic novel about a writer’s effort to write an epic novel that turns out to be Daniel Martin. As epic, the novel displays the conventions defined by Homeric tradition modified by the artistic self-awareness of a late twentieth century intellect; as novel, the epic presents the kind of contemporary realism defined by Lukacs. It fulfills the function of novel in tracing the protagonist’s progress toward self-recognition and the function of epic in presenting a history of the culture that the hero embodies and represents. In doing so, Daniel Martin becomes formally and contextually self-defining, both stating its ideology through its form as well as referring to it through its content.
I know of no better image for the ideal of a beautiful society than a well executed English dance, composed of many complicated figures and turns. A spectator located on the balcony observes an infinite variety of criss-crossing motions which keep decisively but arbitrarily changing directions without ever colliding with each other. Everything has been arranged in such a manner that each dancer has already vacated his position by the time the other arrives. Everything fits so skillfully, yet so spontaneously, that everyone seems to be following his own lead, without ever getting in anyone’s way. Such a dance is the perfect symbol of one’s own individually asserted freedom as well as of one’s respect for the freedom of the other.
Letter from Schiller to Korner,
23 February 1793, quoted by Paul de Man,
The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984)
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Notes
George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), I, 527.
Jeremy Treglown, ‘Generation Game’, New Statesman, 7 October, 1977, p. 482.
George Steiner, ‘Literature and Post-History’, in Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 389.
John Fowles, ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, Harper’s Magazine, July 1968, pp. 89–90.
Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), p. 29.
For discussion of the traditional metaphors for the relation of art to life, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).
John Fowles, ‘On Being English But Not British’, The Texas Quarterly, VII (1964), 154.
Short references are to John Fowles, Daniel Martin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977).
Eberhard Otto in Ancient Egyptian Art: The Cults of Osiris and Amon (New York: Abrams, 1967), p. 18, defines such a place as follows: ‘This would mean that the occupant of the house was not the person of the king concerned but rather the spiritual power of personality called the ka which is not identical with the bodily appearance, but surpasses it in influence and permanence’.
John Fowles, ‘The Trouble with Starlets’, Holiday, June 1966, p. 18.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), pp. 360–361; 58.
Quoted by Kerry McSweeney in Four Contemporary Novelists: Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, V. S. Naipaul (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), p. 103.
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), p. 187.
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© 1991 George H. Gilpin
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Gilpin, G.H. (1991). The Contemporary English Epic: Fowles. In: The Art of Contemporary English Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21746-5_8
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