Behind the Scenes with John Fowles

 

As I was working on my project, I came across a 7 page forward by John Fowles.  I thought it was extremely insightful and gave the reader a “behind the scenes” look into John Fowles’ philosophies. I have posted some of my favorites below.

Quotes from John Fowles from the Foreword in  The Timescapes of John Fowles

 

I write fiction very much to discover myself through texts-more precisely during the process of writing them and very little to stake a claim on the flagrant quicksand of contemporary reputation.  My fictions are far more experiments than anything else-that is, in search of something, or things, always beyond the outward narrative and themes. 

There may be nothing divine whatever in the published fiction; there is always something divine or time-escaping in its creation.

Even the simplest and shortest act of literary text, as brief as a haiku, is a surreptitious bid for immortality, or freedom from ordinary time. I have long believed that this perhaps special ability of the word to help us escape from time (both in facilitating the escape and in sharing it) is as important a factor for the reader as for the writer.  The reader is just as eager, if not more eager, to escape from linear or “clock” time, even though it is only aboard someone else’s poem, novel, whatever it may be.  All fiction, from the noblest to the basest, from Homer to the clumsiest pulp-market pornography, is first a private act, then a public offer, of escape from the surrounding world.

This obsessive pursuit of timelessness, of an eternal present, (deeply rooted, I believe, in buried recollection of the time-free primal relation between mother and infant), is also a moral problem for most novelists, made worse by the necessarily long and solitary nature of the fiction-writing process.  But, I have long had to realize that I live in a state of almost perpetual fugue from the present around me, and not only when I am writing.  Even with old friends, or people with whom one ought no doubt to be all ears and attention, such as interviewers, I rarely feel fully present.

It is only when I am writing, in fact, that I can safely feel fully present, a reasonably whole identity.  Many would say that the ability of the novel to help people escape present time-and circumstances-for a few hours is a quite sufficient justification in itself, and has no need of the artistic and moral bonus we expect from great art.

 I have been called an existentialist, but I am essentially a pagan.  Like every other being, I am here to enjoy life and to help others enjoy it, and now.  Even more importantly I think it is high time we liberated ourselves from the narrow blinkers imposed on us by the notion, both social and scientific, of time as an inexorable onward machine, a clock whose face we must constantly watch and respect and obey from the moment we first go to school.  Psychological time, as every novelist can vouch, is enormously richer and more complex… and more pleasurable. 

I don’t of course know if I am right in assuming that the unconscious is timeless (in the strict sense, without time, or chronology) as well as wordless.  A novelist must cherish all his ages, perhaps his child self most of all; the cost is that he will always be in exile from his society, above all from the society of his contemporaries.   What I like (in personal experience) is in fact the interaction of ‘timeless’ time and ordinary time.  It is an essential part of the meaning and pleasure of the event ‘outside’ time that it is transient, ephemeral, clock-devoured. 

Art has a very limited respect for any absolutes besides those of beauty and moral truth.  It laughs at clocks and chronologies; so also, I believe, would an intelligent human society.