The Secret Place of Literary Creativity in John Fowles’s Daniel Martin: A Phenomenological Perspective

Abstract

The motto of John Fowles’s Daniel Martin is “Whole sight, or the rest is desolation.” The gaining of “whole sight” in this novel depends greatly upon attaining a sense of “place” in a way that the phenomenological perspective helps to explain. When Daniel Martin, the title character of John Fowles’s novel, wishes to regenerate himself, he decides to write an honest autobiographical novel. Accepting this task, Daniel concludes, gives him a greater chance at honesty than does the writing of film-scripts which he has been doing. Partly, Daniel feels that the film cannot be the medium of honesty in “a culture all of whose surface appearances mislead, and which has made such a psychological art of escaping present, or camera, reality” (DM 273). We “go elsewhere” for our private reality, and “above all to words” (DM 273). “With film-making,” Daniel continues, “our real `block’ is our secret knowledge that any true picture,” of our selves, “must express what the camera cannot capture” (DM 274). Daniel says that he might “reverse the proposition”: no novel “that can be successfully filmed” presents a true picture (DM 274).