"The French Lieutenant's Woman": A Review Essay.

April 10, 2011 at 10:34 A.M. Newly reinserted "errors" will be corrected. Due to hacker-inserted viruses and worms, I cannot create space between my paragraphs except by using the block quote device. As a way of saying goodbye to Sydney Lumet, I will review "The Verdict." I will make sure to dedicate that review to New Jersey's legal system.

Telephone calls were received from "Time/Warner" concerning a bill not yet due, which is very unusual, ostensibly by a man named "Marcel" (as in Marcel Proust?) on August 9, 2011 at 1:10 P.M. from 718-670-0200, then again at 4:12 P.M. How very strange?

July 13, 2010 at 1:12 P.M. "Errors" were reinserted in this text which had been left alone for a while. I hope that I have made all necessary corrections. I cannot say how many other writings have been vandalized overnight. I will make corrections as quickly as possible.

March 27, 2010 at 10:23 A.M. A word was deleted from this text since my previous review of the work. I have corrected this inserted "error." Is it true that Mr. Ginarte has been suspended from the practice of law in New Jersey? New York? Ms. Hernandez?

October 17, 2009 at 10:47 A.M. Three "errors" inserted since my previous review. Two scans resulted in the removal of 26 viruses in total. ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles" and "Corzine in Bed With Casinos and More Corruption.")

James C. Mckinley, Jr., "Vast Drug Case Tries to Disrupt Cultlike Cartel," in The New York Times, October 23, 2009, at p. A1. (Money laundering in Hudson County, New Jersey?) Senator Menendez, do you know about "money laundering"? Mr. Ginarte? I wonder how my old friend Alex Garcia is doing? John McGill, did you "partner-up" with Alex Garcia? ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")

October 14, 2009 at 10:35 P.M. "Carpet bombing" attacks from New Jersey damaged numerous essays today. I have done my best to repair the harm done. I cannot say how many more writings have been damaged. I will try to discover all new "errors" and to make corrections overnight and tomorrow morning. I have run two full scans of my computer, so far, and I will try to continue doing so.

October 12, 2009 at 7:50 P.M. An "error" was inserted -- as a word disappeared from my conclusion -- since this afternoon. I have now corrected that "error." Evidently, Sybil R. Moses has joined the "lesbian love-fest." Any chance these cybercrimes will be prosecuted, Ms. Milgram? Give my regards to Sybil. Tell your friends in law enforcement about these interesting developments. ("Trenton's Nasty Lesbian Love-Fest!")

October 12, 2009 at 1:35 P.M. new "errors" inserted overnight. I will do my best to revise and correct these "errors." Insulting and patronizing suggestions will be ignored. I will respond in kind. Further arrests in New Jersey are rumored to be about to take place. A bank fraud investigation emerging from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office (not Newark!) is focusing on events in New Jersey, allegedly. How curious? Hudson County, here we come. ("Hudson County is the Home of Political Corruption in New Jersey.")

October 12, 2009 at 4:45 P.M. I am writing from a public computer because several scans were unsuccessful in restoring the connection to my security system's updating feature. The most likely conclusion is that writings are being damaged to maximize so-called "frustration effects" with the cooperation of some public officials from New Jersey or Florida. This harassment has taken place over a period of years in a nation lecturing to the world about free speech, a right which is protected in the nation's foundational documents, if not in practice.

October 12, 2009 at 10:45 A.M. A new attack against my security system prevents me from updating my protection. I will run scans throughout the day. I will "move on" to public computers (plural) later today. This cybercrime usually means that essays will be vandalized. I will repair the harm done as quickly as possible. The reason censorship and blatant, obviously unconstitutional abuse of government power is dangerous is that America must not become "Honduras-like" in its disdain for the rule of law. If I am censored today, then you will be censored tomorrow. We must struggle against this overreaching by government functionaries. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")

You cannot prevail in debate in this country through intimidation and censorship. Florida and New Jersey must not become Batista's mafia-controlled Havana. In the case of New Jersey, it may be too late to prevent this catastrophe. I will continue to struggle to write. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me'" and "Another Mafia Sweep in New Jersey and Anne Milgram is Clueless.")

October 11, 2009 at 11:17 A.M. I expect continuing defacements and insertions of "errors" in this review. I will do my best to repair the harm done as quickly as possible. This struggle against censorship is a DAILY experience for me. ("Is Union City, New Jersey Meyer Lansky's Whore House?" and "New Jersey is Lucky Luciano's Havana.")

The French Lieutenant's Woman, United Artists (1981), Director Karel Reisz; Script by Harold Pinter; Sarah Woodruff/Anna (Meryl Streep); Charles Smithson/Mike (Jeremy Irons); Sam (Hilton McRae); Mary (Emily Morgan); Mrs Tranter (Charlotte Mitchell); Ernestina Freeman (Lynsey Baxter); Mrs. Poulteney (Patience Collier); Dr. Grogan (Leo McKern).

Introduction.

The subject of this book and film is the mystery of woman as duality. This duality is dramatized in terms of oppositions of a temporal, stylistic, philosophical, psychological and gendered sort. Woman is seen as symbolic of art. Woman is literature, painting, then cinema in the film. These works -- novel and film -- establish their own dialectic by being made to symbolize erotic couplings.

Literature and cinema exchange masculine and feminine roles -- first the novel is the "suitor," then film-narrative takes over. We are the objects of seduction -- as, indeed, the characters in this work do the same "flirting." Power, repression, conformity are aligned with the masculine principle. This movie and novel, sharing a title, are engaged in "love-making" with you. Care for a post-coital cigarette?

"Business" and "society" are given power; while art and beauty have only moral superiority. Is this also power? This novel and film are profoundly feminist works. The French Lieutenant's Woman was published at the height of Fowles public "feminist commitment," a commitment echoed in Pinter's masterful script, which is explicitly concerned to establish a "relationship" with the novel that inspired it: "I hope I am a feminist in most ordinary terms, but I certainly wouldn't call myself one" -- Fowles did, repeatedly -- "compared with many excellent women writers. Part of me must remain male." (Vipond, p. 381.)

There is in all of the works by this English novelist -- whose book is translated to the screen by a Nobel winning playwright -- a fascination with the elusiveness and ambiguity of women and literature. These two strange phenomena -- women and literature -- are equated in Fowles' psyche. Fowles is resigned to never really understanding either novels and novel-writing or women. I share his predicament and delight in that predicament. Worse, women and literature are entangled with the mystery of time for this British author.

"The female characters in my books tend to dominate the male ones. I see man as a kind of artifice, and woman as a kind of reality. The one is cold idea, the other is warm fact. Daedalus faces Venus, and Venus must win. If the technical problems hadn't been so great, I should have liked to make Conchis in The Magus a woman. The character of Mrs. de Seitas at the end of the book was simply an aspect of this character, as was Lily. Now Sarah exerts this power. She doesn't realize how. Nor do I yet."

"Notes on an Unfinished Novel," in Wormholes, p. 23.

Fowles is taking on the Victorian novel, time as it "flows" in fiction, character as revelation through language in time, woman as literary enigma and as symbol for the paradoxes of literature and life -- a theme that recurs in all of Fowles' writings and in his life -- along with explorations of the fictions surrounding the authorial "I." Fowles' novel is a love letter to George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens and a tipping of the hat to Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier).

I suggest that you see Kate Winslet's performance in Enigma and study the novel bearing the same title by Robert Harris which analogizes the "enigma" of human character to the puzzle of the Nazi codes broken by British genius during World War, II. Ms. Winslet is an obscure British thespian living somewhere in New York. Obviously, it is Ms. Winslet's character who "breaks the code" by figuring out the lonely genius at the center of the story, thus allowing him to decipher the German encryptions. Alan Turing meets Ludwig Wittgenstein and they fall in love with a "bright young thing" in sensible shoes. This is all very English.

Mr. Harris was kind enough to sign my copy of the book to someone I love and smiled at what he perceived to be my intention. Or was "irony" my intention? I still have that book. Compare Robert Harris, Enigma (New York: Ballantine, 1995) with the return to similar themes by Mr. Harris in The Ghost (New York & London: Pocket Star, 2007). We discussed the analogies between Mr. Harris' work and the novels of Sebastian Faulks. Today, I would add Ian McEwen's The Innocent. All of these novelists, in my opinion, have been influenced by John Fowles.

The characters in Fowles' story meet in "the sacred combe." Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot travels in some of the same directions as did Fowles in this lovely novel. John Fowles influenced Barnes and A.S. Byatt, stylistically and substantively, in terms of the thematics of Mr. Barnes' and Ms. Byatt's novels. Pinter's script is about cinema and drama as well as literature, together with the epistemological mysteries that fascinated Pinter throughout his career. Sebastian Faulks must have read all of John Fowles' novels. Martin Amis is clearly another admirer of the man from Dorset.

I begin with a summary of the plot; historical and temporal motifs in the construction of "realities" will be explored. Fowles and Pinter were self-professed existentialists for whom Being and Nothingness (Sartre's subject is freedom) is a crucial work. I turn next to the literary and hermeneutic elements, together with the deconstructive enterprise in both film and novel. Fowles was a French studies expert at Oxford University. Pinter approached these themes through the gnomic masterpieces of Samuel Beckett. Fowles was well-aware of Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and of the highly apt "ethics of ambiguity" of Simone de Beauvoir. I explore identity themes associated with feminism and the sixties revolution. An analogy between liberation from Victorian prudishness and hypocrisy against the sixties cultural revolution for "free love," also against fifties' conformity (as well as contemporary feminism as liberation from stubborn sexist repressions) is deliberately underlined for readers (by Fowles) and for viewers (by Pinter). Both writers are engaged in "deconstructive" enterprises: Pinter explodes the boundaries of cinema even as Fowles reinvents the "relationship" (as they say in California) between writer and reader. (Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Hans Georg-Gadamer) The French Lieutenant's Woman was published in 1969.

".. 'I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes,' says [Fowles,] in his first personal intrusion into the nineteenth-century setting. During the course of his narrative, he refers to Freud, Hitler, Henry Moore, and Marshal McLuhan, to film, television, radar, the jet engine, and so on. Thus the reader is invited to enter an expertly depicted Victorian world, but constantly reminded that he is, after all, merely an observer from a great historical distance." (Olshen, "The French Lieutenant's Woman," p. 65.)

What is (are) the "reality(ies)" depicted in these works?

I. Time and Narrative.

The opening shot establishes the emotional core of the film. A movie is about to begin "shooting," music is heard, a glamorous, romantic figure in a hooded cape walks on to a stone promontory in the midst of a "tempest." She is in a nineteenth century costume (we know that she is an actress and that we are seeing a movie). The "reality" we are entering in this narrative is already in question. We see a man in nineteenth century attire and his companion, a pretty young woman who is more expensively dressed than the person standing on the embankment staring out at the "tempestuous sea." This entire film takes place within quotation marks. This is a deconstructive gesture. All of us in the age of media images must live within quotation marks. ("Slipstream" by Anthony Hopkins and then "'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Film and novel work only if the reader is as intrigued and beguiled by this lonely female figure -- who is established immediately as a symbol -- as the "hero" of the story must be seduced by her idealized form, then more fully later in a "real" meeting in the "woods." The identification with Charles must be total for the male reader or viewer, while the fascination of the classic love triangle must be intense for all recipients of this work. The woman standing alone (a feminist icon) is Sarah Woodruff; the man is Charles Smithson; and his companion and betrothed is Ernestina Freeman.

We know that all of these people are characters in a story, each persona is "really" an actor playing a part. Neither "reality" -- cinematic or literary "realities" -- will be given special status in the film. Ultimately, the subject of the film and novel is the aesthetic encounter that allows the work to come alive, now. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "Beauty and the Beast.")

Fowles is "deconstructing" the standard potboiler plot: boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back. At each stage in this narrative, we are forced to wonder who is in control and which "entity" is doing the "getting." We are aware -- at some level of the passive mind -- that there are actors (Meryl Streep) playing the fictional movie actor (Anna) who is transformed into "Sarah Woodruff." Shakespeare's Prospero has cast a spell over this production. Let us examine this opening scene in both script and novel before moving on to plot developments that will draw out the implications of this "godgame" (John Fowles called the author's/director's bag of tricks the "godgame"). First the movie:

1. Exterior. The Cobb. Lyme Regis. Dawn. 1867.

A clapperboard. On it is written: THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN. SCENE 1. TAKE 3.

It shuts and withdraws, leaving a close shot of Anna, the actress who plays SARAH. She is holding her hair in place against the wind.

VOICE (off screen)

"All right. Let's go."

The actress nods, releases her hair. The wind catches it.

VOICE (off screen)

"Action."

SARAH starts to walk along the Cobb, a stone pier in the Harbour of Lyme. It is dawn. Windy. Deserted. She is dressed in black. She reaches the end of the Cobb and stands still, staring out to sea.

Now the novel:

"The young lady was dressed in the height of fashion, for another wind was blowing in 1867: the beginning of a revolt against the crinoline and the large bonnet. The eye in the telescope [-- that is, the reader --] might have glimpsed a magenta skirt of an almost daring narrowness -- and shortness, since two white ankles could be seen beneath the rich green coat and above the black boots that delicately trod the revetment; and perched over the netted chignon, one of the impertinent little flat 'pork-pie' hats with a delicate tuft of egret plumes at the side -- a military style that the resident ladies of Lyme would not dare to wear for at least another year; while the taller man, impeccably in a light gray, with his top hat held in his free hand, had severely reduced his dundreadies, which the arbiters of the best English male fashion had declared a shade vulgar -- that is, risible to the foreigner -- a year or two previously. The colors of the young lady's clothes would strike us today as distinctly strident; but the world was then in the first throes of the discovery of aniline dyes. And what the feminine, by way of compensation for so much else in her expected behavior, demanded of a color was brilliance, not discretion."

Think of A.S. Byatt's Angels and Insects.

"But where the [observer] would have been at sea himself was with the other figure on that somber, curving mole. It stood right at the southwardmost end, apparently leaning against an old cannon barrel [phallic] upended [as it were] as a bollard. Its clothes were black. The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the pretty provincial day."

The French Lieutenant's Woman, pp. 10-11.

Two subjects are clear from the outset: historical and fictional time (1867) is set against contemporary views (now), our smug superiority as late twentieth century persons and beyond. Fowles was writing in 1967. As noted, publication came two years later during the crucial year 1969. The interweaving of time orders, the ingredient of temporality in the medium of cinema and literature, "a figure from myth," the self-aware and self-criticial as well as intertextual quality of both narratives, conjuring Derrida and Sartre, also strident feminism in the form of both the woman "on the edge" of her world and the boundaries of conventional society, along with the only other option for women then and now, "adjustment," coupled with creative decoration of her prison cell and the resort to feminine wiles, in the form of Ernestina, who seemingly "got her man." ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "Master and Commander.")

Sarah and Ernestina are one woman. They are Victorian womanhood -- perhaps woman in sexist society -- torn between safety and existential freedom. Some women can only be one of those two characters. Most women alternate between these options, finally selecting or accepting one of those "roles" in a life that must have regrets, losses, and pains. This story is about struggling for freedom and the cost of freedom which is exceeded only by the price of losing freedom.

Women are in a no-win situation. The smartest women figure that out early in life and come as close to "winning" as possible in an imperfect world. To win is to become free, or oneself, through loving and being loved, which is the only real achievement or kind of "success" that matters in this world. (Again: "Master and Commander.")

I have spoken of Fowles' feminism and deconstruction, both are discussed in his interviews with Katherine Tarbox and Diana Vipond. Pinter and Fowles admitted to a fascination with Derridean deconstruction and "play" in writing that is associated also with the hermeneutic tradition: " ... the sort of thing that deconstruction is trying to do -- you know, the implicit contradictions in texts or social institutions. And certainly by putting far more stress on self-knowledge ..." (Tarbox, p. 185.)

This fascination with meta-literary effects may account for Fowles' interest in an early self-aware work -- Claire de Dura's Ourika -- even in his smiling gestures in the direction of a novelist with some political success, Benjamin Disraeli. Fowles is not homosexual. However, he is self-described as "female-minded":

"I consider myself a sort of chameleon genderwise. I am a novelist because I am partly a woman, a little lost in midair between the genders, neither one nor t'other. I certainly think that most novelists are a result of not being clearly typed sexually." (Vipond, p. 367.) ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")

Exploration of these contradictions of character, mystery in the psyche, the anima figure that haunts Fowles' fiction, is balanced by the concern with freedom in Sartrean terms. Freedom as a problem of self-knowledge as well as a social-ethical-political challenge for individuals and epochs. Movie and novel hint at the impossibility of escaping time and the human need to do just that, to live outside one's epoch in the case of a few eccentrics. Sarah's freedom was an absurd ambition for a woman in 1867. It is difficult enough today. We are all in prisons of various kinds. Time is one such prison. Time is also liberation. Time is eventually absolute liberation from all prisons through death. Dasein lives in the form of a question. Sarah is a question in search of an answer; Charles is an answer in search of a question.

Charles is to marry Miss Freeman. Sarah Woodruff is employed as a governess by the ogre of Mrs. Poulteney (Diana?), a hell that Sarah seeks out. Mrs. Poulteney is representative of the oppressive power of society to impose conformity. Charles is a Darwinist and forward-looking. Dr. Grogan is an amiable quack, offering banalities passed off as wisdom, little better in his methods than an earlier generation of bleeders and users of leeches in the medical profession. The nineteenth century novel is a subject (Jayne Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tess, "Sue Brideshead" from Jude the Obscure) as is the mystery of this woman, Sarah, who weaves a net of narrative-fictions to capture or create her past and future by enlisting this useful "knight of sound heart" that is Charles. ("Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure" and "The Northanger Arms on Park Avenue.")

A free woman in a sexist world must enlist the services of a servant masculine power who fulfills her wishes, often unconscious ones. Sarah selects Charles for this challenge and quest, captures him with a story of her deflowering by a French lieutenant (who is really Charles as foreshadowed in her tale), then she sets forth his life-journey, as a prophecy, even as the poor man succumbs to her magic. ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review.")

We audience members also succumb to the magic of the story-teller's talent which is the delicious invitation contained in all art. Fowles and Pinter/Reisz are Sarah; we are Charles. Fowles speaks of the mysterious creative energy within himself that is feminine. The woman inside every man that he must find in the world -- especially in the woman that he loves -- who is always anima to his animus:

"Anima ... it's very difficult for me to say where it came from originally." Fowles said to an interviewer: "I'd have to be analyzed to do that. But it's the idea of the female ghost inside one that's always been very attractive to me. Perhaps it's bound up with my general liking for mystery -- the idea that there's a ghost like that inside one." (Tarbox, p. 188.) ("Master and Commander" and "God is Texting Me!")

Men who are comfortable with mystery and highly articulate, at ease with the ambiguities of language, usually like as well as love or desire women. Most men are uncomfortable with what they cannot fully understand or control, including women. This is less true of male artists and/or intellectuals. ("Raymond Chandler and 'The Simple Art of Murder.'") This term and concept ("anima") is, of course, derived from Carl Jung:

"The struggle with the anima [men] and animus [women] sometimes leading us deeper into the unconscious, sometimes blocking the path, brings us into contact with other archetypal figures along the way. Each plays a role in the archetypal drama which has as its theme the fall of man from his original state of onenness with the primordial unity, to separation and loss of integrity and despair, and then at last to regeneration in a new unity that is marked by awareness of all the component parts and by harmonious functioning between them. The drama of transformation is played on many stages."

June Singer, "Circumambulating the Self," in Boundaries of the Soul (New York: Anchor Books, 1973), p. 283. Carl Jung, Aspects of the Feminine (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 170-171 (esp. sec. 29) and Joseph Campbell, "Goddesses," in Fraser Boas, ed., The World of Myth: Talking With Joseph Campbell (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), pp. 57-81. (All movie stars are "goddesses" in the mythic sense, including those women who think of themselves as anything but divine, like Marilyn Monroe or Melanie Griffith.)

This is to outline the hermeneutic circle which is central to all of Fowles' novels. The problem of interpretation and the creative act of encounter (or meeting) is crucial in all of this man's texts or as a feature of Pinter's scripts and plays. The reader senses both opening gambits and a kind of chess game in each of Fowles' books, also the author's almost desperate plea for affection and the effort to win that affection by dazzling us with cleverness. Archetypes include wise child, goddess, Philemon and others. Among contemporary philosophers, only Jacques Derrida seems to offer a similar combination of qualities as a "genius child." I like the films of Tim Burton because he seems to embody this figure of the "genius child" that plays a vital role in Western culture. ("A Review of the Television Show, 'Alice.'")

I don't know whether this is a significant detail, but (for me) the best film directors are always boys and girls -- emotionally and socially child-like persons -- playing with the dolls and wooden soldiers that are their actors and writers as well as special effects people. The James Cameron "Terminator" films are subconscious confessions by their creator of a view of actors and film-ingredients as "cyborgs" -- or toys -- that he uses in order to enchant you, the viewer of his works. Mr. Cameron demands that you be impressed in order that you will like or love him. I have little doubt that Mr. Cameron is a film genius, but he must be difficult to live with.

Movies are attempts to seduce audiences. A single close-up with an actor or actress who appreciates this truth may mean billions of dollars at the box office. Take a look at the scene early in "Titanic" when the Kate Winslet character arrives to board the ship, notice her slow looking up at the "ship" (you!) that is about to be boarded for a three-hour journey. As Titanic will be destroyed, so will your emotions collide with the iceberg of this film-narrative and adventure. ("The Art of Melanie Griffith.")

Time as revealer in the Fowles/Pinter narrative (liberation) is contrasted with time as limitation in the form of suffocating Victorian repressions (prison). Individuals against society. Tantalus in English tweeds. Sarah chooses her suffering as a kind of suicide to escape from the prison of a life of "adjustment." Sarah must find herself as an artist who is a free woman, a person, only then will she decide on her love. Charles must suffer and struggle for his love and freedom (I opt for the happier ending), as the new man emerging, somehow, in the age of Mr. Freeman, where intellectuality is a dispensable luxury, where middle class hypocrisy and mendacity (the worst of all prisons) will come to rule society. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")

I find myself forced to correct inserted "errors" in this review, once again, after several previous revisions have only allowed for further vandalism of this work. I believe that politically active Right-wing Cuban-Americans making use of corrupt political alliances in New Jersey and Florida are responsible for these disgraceful (if revealing) efforts to destroy intellectual work and to deny a tortured dissident freedom of speech. They embody the qualities I find most repulsive and evil in humanity -- fascism, dogmatism, literalism, pride in stupidity, delight in cruelty, indifference to the pain and suffering of those less fortunate than themselves, racism, sexism, crass and vulgar materialism, disdain for all art and thought. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")

I regard people inserting "errors" in these writings as the opposite of civilized. I hope that they will never wield power in any society. Their form of totalitarianism is depicted by Fowles in The Collector and The Magus. Perhaps they are best represented in the character of the hood who tortures an academic writer in "Poor Koko." There was a time in America when such people would not be permitted to commit their crimes publicly. Anthony Burgess, shrewdly, assesses Fowles' achievement in The French Lieutenant's Woman:

"Fowles ... plays a game in which he pretends that his characters have escaped from his control and have a kind of existential freedom that renders them wayward and unpredictable. The author himself appears, disguised as an old man in a railroad compartment, bewildered, not knowing where his personages are. [Cervantes enters the text of Don Quixote; Garcia-Marquez is a presence in Love in the Time of Cholera, a work which should be read alongside of Fowles' book, then John Banville's ironic comment on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in Ghosts, the ultimate "godgame."] The piquancy lies in the conflict between Victorian convention and the modern view of fiction. The author, when not sitting in that railway compartment, is a contemporary anthropologist who surveys this strange world of a century ago with a kind of fascinated horror, knowing far more about the Victorians than they could possibly know themselves [time] but unable fully to understand them. [also time] We have here a highly readable and informative book, compelling, thrilling, erotic, but we are not permitted to relax as if we were reading Dickens or Thackery. A very modern mind is manipulating us as well as the characters."

Ninety-Nine Novels, p. 105. ("Gore Vidal is 'Someone to Laugh at the Squares With.'")

Charles pays the terrible price of social ostracism and ruin for rejecting his conventional prospective marriage and middle class respectability in pursuit of freedom as authenticity and love.

Prostitution of various kinds is a theme of these works. This is true not only in the obvious sense that, apart from the conventions of the Victorian novel -- which are brutally and cynically set aside -- Sarah would have become a prostitute in London and died before age forty, most likely of a venereal disease. The theme is explored also in the less obvious form of prostitution to which even Ernestina was consigned by her society -- the marriage contract. Charles chose not to be a whore. Did the women have a similar choice? Or was there no escape from such a fate for any of these "ladies"? Fowles feels compelled to provide these women with such an escape. Ian McEwen's Atonement provides an obvious parallel. ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review" and Ian Urbina, "For Runaways on the Street, Sex Buys Survival," in The New York Times, October 27, 2009, at p. A1.)

Fowles sees himself and his fellow ink-stained wretches -- also actors and directors -- as prostitutes who give readers conventional "happy endings" to satisfy the pacifying strictures of society, thus blinding oppressed masses to the reality of their situation. Mr. Fowles' socialism shows throughout the novel. We are all whores under capitalism. The book opens with a quotation from Marx. Fowles makes a pretty penny in this book and by selling his rights, referring to himself, repeatedly, as a "whore," saying something similar (if more veiled) about actors and all artists in his celebrated essay, "Gather Ye Starlets." No, Manohla Dargis, this does not mean that it is permissible to see "The Reader" as a movie that allows Kate Winslet to "open her legs" to use your elegant phrase in The New York Times. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and, again, "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")

"All writers are rather like prostitutes," Fowles writes, "they know they have to sell by physical appearance, though underneath they may have far more serious intentions and meanings." (Vipond, p. 373.)

Fowles struggles to reject excessive commercialization, even as I am desperate to "open my legs":

"I find that the truth seldom lies too far from socialism and Marxism." (Vipond, p. 374.)

What makes Sarah maddening and ambiguous (to herself and all men) is a paradoxical quality in her identity that Fowles will not resolve for the reader. The film makers will not "explain" what the movie is about or whether you should "like" Sarah Woodruff. Art is about mystery and freedom, like Sarah's and Charles' adventures. You decide whether you like these characters. You must determine what you think their story is about. You decide who is good or evil. Both?

Sarah's undefined and ambiguous persona is intentionally "invitational." Sarah is woman opening the doors of perception (not necessarily her legs), connecting psychic and social dominations and powers. Hence, woman's so-called "mythic essence." Sarah is Fowles' Lily in The Magus and every Fowles woman. Sarah is the anima that rules man's universe. The role of goddess is divided in my life between two women who have me surrounded. For Fowles, the goddess was Elizabeth, his second wife who died in 1990. ("The Allegory of the Cave.")

"Not only was Elizabeth Fowles the inspiration for the unforgettable story and character of Sarah Woodruff, but her editing actually altered the structure and published impact of the novel in very significant ways. She did not read the book until June 17, 1968, when Fowles was ready to make his third and final revision. Her typed and handwritten comments survive, with Fowles's note: 'Comments of my sternest editor, otherwise my wife. They made me change the text considerably before it was sent out for professional editing. J.F. 1977.'"

Eileen Warburton, John Fowles: A life in Two Worlds, p. 294. ("A Review of the Television Series 'Alice.'")

Meryl Streep should have received an Oscar for this performance (did she?) because she understood this role perfectly. The mirror-like effects in the movie -- Anna with Mike's wife (Sonia?), Sarah and Ernestina -- placing on display women's options and mutual hostilities are designed for an audience that recoils in horror from both options offered to women. Women can have it all. Women can't have it all. Women are told both of those things all the time. Schizophrenia in suburbia. Become the dutiful wife; become the scarlet woman. To opt out of this dialectic -- created by men! -- may be to opt out of your culture's definition of womanhood and the feminine. This is not easy. A price is paid in this work by male and female principles, equally, a price eased only by their mutuality of concern, tenderness and compassion, love for one another. You got something better than love, humanism, compassion, beauty. No? Neither does Fowles or Pinter. Meryl Streep fans should see Ms. Streep's subtle, intelligent performance in David Hare's Plenty.

Before turning to the fancy lit-crit stuff, Derrida and Lacan as well as more philosophers -- performances should be acknowledged: Jeremy Irons is excellent, as always, in his sympathetic portrayal of Charles' suffering and tragedy, also as the love-hungry "Mike." I like Charles more than Mike. The great Leo McKern (in pre-Rumpole days) is delightful as the distracted mediocrity in the medical profession. Mrs. Poulteney (Patience Collier) almost frightens us when we see her at the piano in the contemporary version of the tale at the "wrap party" for the fictional film -- where the "real" actors seem to be enacting, brilliantly, the experience of "having a good time" while munching on potato chips. Seeing these people -- who are, clearly, much more boringly ordinary than their characters and who have the effrontery to live in the same age that we do -- is disconcerting. Time, time ... and narrative. I much prefer for all of you movie actors to stay on the big screen. You will do less harm that way. Have we really seen the actors in this movie at a party?

I would have happily married "Ernestina Freeman," but certainly not the excellent actress playing her, Lynsey Baxter, who was recently seen as a sociopathic murderess in a "Mystery" series. Scary.

"We could say that there are two sorts of time in every story told: on the one hand, a discrete succession that is open and theoretically indefinite, a series of incidents (for we can always pose the question: and then? and then?); on the other hand, the story told presents another temporal aspect characterized by the integration, culmination and closure owing to which the story receives a particular configuration. In this sense, composing a story is, from the temporal point of view, drawing a configuration out of succession. [How else can we make life meaningful?] We can already guess the importance of this manner of characterizing the story from the temporal point of view [since,] for us, time is both what passes and flows away and, on the other hand, what endures and remains. ... " Paul Ricoeur, "Life in Quest of Narrative," in David Wood, ed., On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London & New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 22 (emphasis added). For a discussion that, unconsciously, parallels Paul Ricouer's philosophical speculations in amazing ways, see physicist Brian Greene's, "Time and the Quantum," in The Fabric of the Cosmos (London & New York: Penguin, 2007), pp. 175-216, especially at page 189: "The actual past, of course, did not change one bit. Yet a different experience now would lead you to describe a different history."

Was Marcel Proust a physicist? Love is all that endures and remains. ("The Art of Melanie Griffith" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.") Please see: "Is it rational to believe in God?" I urge you to search for George Santayana's classic essay "Proust on Essences."

I regret that Cuban-Americans have defaced this essay once more by removing a word from the foregoing sentence. I have restored that word to the text. ("Cubanazos Pose a Threat to National Security.") If I were writing a film script today exploring these themes, I would entitle the project: "And then ..."

II. "Woman is the aporia, or impass of meaning, where man comes unstuck, becomes undone. ..." (Derrida)

Terry Eagleton summarizes a crucial insight in Derrida's work symbolized by Sarah Woodruff inviting Charles to walk out to the edge of their world with his hand in hers:

"First principles ... are commonly defined by what they exclude: they are part of the sort of 'binary opposition' beloved of structuralism. Thus, for male-dominated society, man is the founding principle and woman the excluded opposite of this; and as long as such a distinction is tightly held in place the whole system can function effectively. 'Deconstruction' is the name given to the critical operation by which such oppositions can be partly undermined, [Sarah versus Ernestina,] or by which they can be shown partly to undermine each other in the process of textual meaning. [Ernestina as Sarah] Woman is the opposite, the 'other' of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, [or her,] and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is not just 'other' in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him in the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is."

"Post-Structuralism," in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 114-115. (My copy is the revised edition of this book that appeared in 1996.)

The "deconstruction" of woman is man; but then, the "deconstruction" of man is woman. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory" and "Pieta.")

Fowles sees Sarah as the feminine liberation that is sought in all of his works and life. Less or not at all a maternal figure (Freud) as opposed to erotic power (Jung). Woman is the goddess of discovery or learning, philosophical wisdom -- personified by Boethius as "Sophia" -- the guide who ushers us into self-understanding through revelation of the meaning-systems in which we are necessarily implicated. Anima is Venus-Athena-Juno. Sarah embodies the paradox that we are all hopelessly trapped in her narrative, also only free through that narrative. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "Sinbad's Excellent New York Adventure.")

Narrativity is a feminine power in world mythology. Literature is feminine territory. Artistic genius is woman's magic. I am reading a triumvirate of women or a "coven" of novelists these days -- Barbara Pym, Penelope Lively, Iris Murdoch. More English women have me in their grasp, as it were: A.S. Byatt, P.D. James, Rachel Cusk, Zadie Smith. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")

Alain Badiou, Conditions (New York & London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 179-198 ("What is Love?") and Luce Irigaray, "The Eternal Irony of the Community," in P. Jagentowicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hegel (Penn.: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), pp. 45-69. Badiou (the forces of goodness and light) contrasted with Irigaray (forces of darkness and hatred in the form of hostility to men). Yes, I am joking. Both philosophers are brilliant even as their differences on the subject of love are illuminating. A volume in this series is devoted to "feminist interpretations of Derrida."

The hermeneutic challenge and distinction between "knowledge" and "understanding" is articulated by Fowles in an interview where he is playing (jouissance) with an interlocutor who is, seemingly, unfamiliar with this crucial distinction: "Of course one begins to 'look at' [art, philosophy, religion] very often by first 'looking for.' [science] I do vaguely attach to science, to wanting to increase scientific knowledge. 'Looking at,' in a full sense of existential awareness of the now, is an art we have more or less lost in the West, which is far more common with peasants and, I'd guess, with women than with intellectuals of either gender. I do try to suggest a realization of that. I called it a sense of existingness in a recent essay. It is abominably difficult to define, but I think both D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf -- and indeed Golding in his last and posthumous novel, The Double Tongue -- at least sensed it." (Vipond, p. 378.) Zadie Smith, "E.M. Forster, Middle Manager," in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009), pp. 26-27. ("Here's the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later.")

This is a religious -- indeed, a mystical insight. "Looking at" is primarily feminine; "looking for" is primarily masculine. This is not gender-specific. The place of meeting where understanding takes place between artist and recipient, writer and reader, actor and audience (which is always now) is the fascinating subject shared by Fowles, Pinter, Reisz, probably all of the actors in this film as well. (Please read Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge.) These artists are seeking encounters with you by affecting your life (invitationally). Much the same may be said of Derrida and all great philosophers. Where does the narrative of The French Lieutenant's Woman take place? Where is the story "located"? When does the narrative unfold? ("Conversation on a Train" and "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")

This need on the part of artists and thinkers to affect others is only necessary for those who experience a terrible childhood lack, or who want to be loved in order to be understood and, perhaps, "forgiven for being." (See Sartre's "The Words.") Every artist -- especially any performing artist -- is asking you to notice him or her. Nothing forced on a person is art or therapy. This place of forgiveness and love is the the garden entered after the desert of pain or loss. The deconstructive project is akin to a metanoia of the spirit. This explains Derrida's late turn to religion. ("The Art of Robert Downey, Jr.")

As Henry James complained of  Trollope's metafictional asides, so philosophers challenge Richard Rorty's and Jacques Derrida's game-playing in philosophy. Traditionalists fail to appreciate that their values and positions may also be advanced or defended in terms of the literary games brought into the philosophical enterprise by these gentlemen and others, like William Gass or Rebecca Goldstein. In a small way -- when I am not censored -- I try to communicate philosophical ideas through short stories and plays, soon novels and detective stories. Most of my texts will be plagiarized, then suppressed or destroyed despite copyright protection and the Constitution of the United States of America. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "Metaphor is Mystery.") I will continue to write them, nevertheless, because I need them. This "need" defines the writer.

"It seems to me to give [the novelist] a great character, the fact that he has so much in common with the philosopher and the painter; this double analogy is a magnificent heritage." (Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 189.)

First Fowles, then I move on to Derrida:

"Vipond: You have written in Islands and in several other contexts that the 'genesis of all art lies in the pursuit of the irrecoverable, what the object relations analysts now call symbolic repair.' Would you comment on this?" (Gadamer's Truth and Method.)

"Fowles: 'I agree with all this. It seems so obvious it needs no commentary. Deep down, I write today because I shall die tomorrow -- the final loss!' ... " (Vipond, p. 375.)

One of the desperate needs in American society today is to return to and repair our deepest symbols which are seen by some very foolish public figures as dispensable luxuries in the midst of our "War on Terror." These symbols are what will allow us to win the "War on Terror." I am fighting a "War on Terror" right here. Fowles echoes the call for "strategic silences" of George Steiner, when he says:

"Fowles: 'I'm a deep believer in silence -- the 'positive' role of the negative. Yes, certainly it can be an obvious way to oblige the reader to help form and to experience the text. Although I feel no ambition to imitate them, I have long had sympathy and respect for writers like Beckett and Pinter. I feel very strongly that reading should almost always be a heuristic (that is, a 'teaching by revealing self') process. I like it that in the Middle Ages, literature was the domain of the clerics, of clerks. [Hermeneutics.] Of course that religious parallel can lead to mere preaching, a boring didacticism, but I cherish the reminder that we writers have inherited a moral, ethical function.' .. " (Vipond, p. 372.)

This is also a Chinese insight: The stillness and silence at the center of Being is truth. For this reason, phenomenology and hermeneutics have been well-received in China. Chinese philosophy is contributing to these traditions. I urge readers to study the recent work ("Postphenomenology") of the American philosopher, Don Idhe. This crucial insight opens on to Derrida's creative reinterpretation of Western metaphysics.

For Derrida, all of Western thought is concerned with the ontological mystery of the human condition -- the "metaphysics of presence" -- he calls it. This refers to the attempt to capture the presence of being in thought as language, that is, through language's figurative power, or what cannot yet be fully thought which may be pictured in words. This impulse and necessary capacity of subjectivity or thought is inescapable, for it is the essence of language from which we cannot flee because we live as subjects or persons, i.e., as linguistic animals. (See the film "Chinese Box.")

I see the same cinematic magic in Gong Li as in Ms. Winslet, the curious fascination and enchantment of the light and shadows on screen is easy for them. Something about those women and many others in movies seduces the camera. (Compare "Farewell My Concubine" with "Sense and Sensibility.")

Derrida argues persuasively that this presence of being in thought-language is totalizing and imperial in our civilization, directed for millennia at the domination or even destruction of the Other. This intellectual aggression is reflected in the attitude to nature as well as other civilizations in Western thought. The culmination of Western metaphysics in Kant-Hegel may be inescapable for anyone born into our civilization. This culmination is the resolution of the encounter with the Other through Aufgehoben. The Other is absorbed into the one, the Absolute, in an eternal higher synthesis. Deconstruction is a form of idealism -- methodological idealism. Derrida was a phenomenologist and co-founder with Paul Ricoeur of the "Center for the Study of Phenomenology" in Paris. A dominant form of philosophizing in the world of the twenty-first century is phenomenological-hermeneutics, which New Jersey lawyers dismissed as "nonsense." This would be a good time to insert another "error," Senator Menendez. ("Senator Menendez Struggles to Find His Conscience" and "Is Senator Bob 'For' Human Rights?")

Things may be worse than Derrida supposed. This tendency of the mind may well be universal, not just Western. The totalizing tendency of Being, as expression, may coincide with higher thought everywhere in the world. Derrida and other thinkers at the end of the twentieth century (and beyond) came to suspect that this presence of Being (Heidegger, Gadamer) was associated with the phallus. (Lacan) This masculine principle of logos created the other as recepticle, or lesser being, or female. (John Austin) This meant that destruction and absorption of the other was assured in Western metaphysics. This totalizing tendency of the Western mind is what Chinese scholars describe as "hegemony" within the Marxist-Maoist terminology. (Gramsci-Mao-Che)

Along with many feminist philosophers (myself included), Derrida came to see this aggressive transformation of the Western project as leading, inevitably, to a fissure or schizoid break in thought, erupting in empires and witch crazes, Holocausts and progroms -- all in the never-ending quest for an other to absorb -- because of a lack of balance between masculine and feminine principles in logos or thought. ("Friedrich Nietzsche on Self-Realization.")

Return to the sources of Being in the pre-Socratics and to the rediscovery of logos and/as Being was possible only with a return to the feminine, Eros, in the origins of Western and all human languages. Diotima counters Socrates. ("The Allegory of the Cave.") The feminine that is associated with the principle of love balancing the phallocentric logos. This return to the feminine entwined with the masculine principle -- eros in logos -- was central to Simone de Beauvoir's "ethics of ambiguity" and concept of "freedom" which begins with a rejection of nihilism as well as all denials of truth:

"Rejecting his own existence the nihilist must also reject the existences which confirm it. [Nihilists are given the masculine pronoun.]" (de Beauvoir, "Ethics of Ambiguity," p. 55.)

Then:

"Love then, is a renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One renounces Being in order that there may be that being which one is not." (de Beauvoir, "The Ethics of Ambiguity," p. 67, emphasis added, then "'The American': A Movie Review.")

Late in his life, Derrida discovered love as well as Being at the center of language as the product of philosophy's deconstruction in his quest for justice. Feminine "is" within masculine and can always be revealed through a "deconstructive process of unveiling." (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, de Beauvoir) Maculine can only "be" or exist within feminine. Anima within animus; animus within anima. Equals and balance. I will offer some quotations leading to my concluding assessment of The French Lieutenant's Woman. ("The Taming of Somebody.") Finally, I will comment on the dramatizing of this "post-structuralist" metaphysics of "differences" and freedom:

"... 'Philosophy has always insisted upon this: thinking its other. Its other: that which limits it, and from which it derives its essence, its definition, its production.' [Derrida] Rather, Derrida wants deconstruction and differance and play [sexual and otherwise] to subvert and unsettle traditional forms of thought from within. 'How to interpret -- but here interpretation can no longer be a theory or discursive practice of philosophy -- the strange and unique property of a discourse that organizes the economy of its representation, the law of its proper weave, such that its outside never surprises it, such that the logic of its heteronomy still reasons from within the vault of its autism?' Here we find the monolithic, Hegelian Derrida, who demonstrates how Western thought 'infinitely reappropriates' every other in a process of expropriation (Hegel again, always) that finds in its other (its negation) simply another occasion to move towards its final all-inclusive unity. ... " (McGowan, p. 90.)

This is not about another absorption of masculine by feminine, or feminine by masculine. This is about plurality, difference within Being and beings. Derrida's intellectual life resolves into a quest for an understanding of freedom (as love) that dissolves the aporias of Western metaphysics. This understanding culminates in insights that are religious as well as deeply illuminating in a philosophical and aesthetic sense. At the end of his life, Derrida rediscovers his Jewishness. Spinoza's "intellectual love of God" hovers in the background of Derrida's late work. I am still reeling from a close reading of Gilles Delleuze's book on Spinoza. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")

This complexity and richness in Derrida's thinking was evident when he lectured. Derrida did not read a tightly organized formal lecture, divided neatly into tripartite units, leading to a conclusion. He preferred an element of play in his talks by approaching a topic from several directions, shifting into a formal argument, then back to illustrations, or puns, or lateral associations. Freedom was both method and conclusion. Similarly, Sarah is a kind of Derrida, leading Charles (F.H. Bradley?) into new forms of awareness, even as she persuades the rest of us to come along for the ride. ("Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author" and "The Art of Melanie Griffith.")

"Freedom in Derrida, then, is linked to a disengagement from philosophy's 'law' and logic, [the Lacanian phallus,] but his work continually insists that such disengagement, although deeply desired, is well-nigh impossible. Hence, I find Derrida's thought marked everywhere by the tragic revelation of irresolvable contradictions, of aporias, that we also find in Nietzsche." (McGowan, p. 91.)

John Fowles said to an interviewer:

"Freedom for me is inalienably bound up with self-knowledge. I would say the two words are almost synonymous in this context. And so it's really that, you know, the ability to withstand the appalling brainwashing that we all get now through the media, ["Psychological Torture in the American Legal System"] to think of yourself and know yourself. I must see that as a vital kind of freedom. And, honestly, it's an unhappy freedom at the moment because it doesn't exist very much. That's certainly how I see political freedom. It's more self-knowledge, and thus knowledge of others, too, and that's why I'm definitely on the socialist side." (Tarbox, p. 184.)

Sarah's and Charles' freedom is one. Her independence is also his emancipation. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?" soon: "What is it like to be raped?")

"Perhaps she [woman] stands as a sign of something inside man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definite limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien is also intimate -- so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as well as he does because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears." (Eagleton, "Post-Structuralism," p. 115.)

There is no self without other. (R.D. Laing) For a dramatization of this dialectic, see again: "The Taming of Somebody."

Conclusion.

"Doesn't your admiration for Derrida mean that everything is relative?" Well, no. I read and admire many philosophers with whom I disagree about a great deal. Derrida is always fascinating and instructive, especially at the end of his life. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")

Derrida is a phenomenologist or "methodological idealist" (this is Terry Eagleton's apt term for all phenomenologists) whose criticisms of Western metaphysics -- as with Kant -- have led to the creation of a new metaphysical system and profound religious insights. Derrida would be the first to say that metaphysics is probably inescapable. Like Hume -- whose writings were admired by Derrida -- Jacques Derrida left the lecture hall through the front door and did not leap out of the window. Derrida was perfectly willing to accept the existence of the "real" world. He merely asked that we think, very carefully, about which world is ontologically "real." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")

Derrida's concern was that the central aspect of Western metaphysics, the "metaphysics of presence," was exclusive or dominating in relations with the Other. This was seen as a limitation and undesirable. Derrida was never a nihilist. Derrida was certain that tendencies opposed to this totalizing feature of Western thought were already a part of our thinking and associated with the feminine side of the Western mind. Even more than Foucault, Derrida is a philosopher of feminism as liberation. The American legal thinker and philosopher, Drucilla Cornell, is a foremost interpreter and developer of Derrida's work in a feminist political-legal direction.

"Deconstructive" efforts were designed by this good humored philosopher to reveal what is already present at the bottom of our contradictions and opposed to the central or dominant intellectual tendencies, whether in our conceptions of the novel or cinema, politics or society, language or thought concerning truth and justice, ethics as well as freedom. It was certainly NEVER Derrida's intention to deny either the importance or reality of these concepts. Many of Derrida's debates with John Searle and other top philosophers seem (to me) irrelevant because these philosophers were speaking different languages. ("John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.") This is a Derridean observation.

John Fowles and Harold Pinter/Karl Reisz were "deconstructing" genres and the expectations of novel readers and film viewers in these works. I am sure that -- with the magnificent performances of great actors -- they succeeded in causing us to question the reality under investigation in this project by forcing us to accept the Kantian move: We help to make this movie "real" because the people in this movie become persons we care about and "know." ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "Serendipity, III.")

"Since the creation can find its fulfilment only in reading," Jean Paul Sartre was referring to literature even as the same insight applies to movies, "since the artist must entrust to another the job of carrying out what he [or she] has begun, since it is only through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard himself as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal. To write is to make an appeal to the reader that he lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language." (Sartre, "Why Write?," p. 54, emphasis added, then "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")

The appeal in art is to the freedom of the recipient of the work who becomes a collaborator or co-conspirator in the "godgame." All of the characters in this work -- Charles and Mike, Anna and Sarah, etc. -- are much more fascinating than boring old Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep. Who is to say that they are more fictional than the identities which the so-called "real" artists who create them construct in their daily lives? This is to say nothing of the obviously unconvincing personas many of us adopt in our professional roles and private lives.

We often fail to realize that our social realities and systems of meanings are elaborate fictions constructed for political or ethical purposes ("What is the value of paper money?") requiring all of us to pretend or "act" as if we agree with the script. All of us are actors in society, but some of us are method actors exploring the boundaries of the script. Please see again: "'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review."

Is Meryl Streep's least convincing performance "Meryl Streep"? Is Kate Winslet really believable as "Kate Winslet, Movie Star and Oscar Winner"? Not to herself, I suspect. This may be part of the appeal of such actors. They are as amazed by the characters they play on screen as the rest of us, but they may be more astonished by the roles they play in life. ("God is Texting Me!")

Would you rather meet someone as ordinary as Leonardo Di Caprio or that mercenary adventurer played by Di Caprio in "Blood Diamond"? Most people -- including Mr. DiCaprio, probably -- would prefer to meet the guy in "Blood Diamond." Sartre's "waiter who is only a waiter ..." could just as easily be a movie star who is only a movie star.

Consider Leonardo Di Caprio's witty interpretation of such a "movie star" character in Woody Allen's "Celebrity." Di Caprio had a lot of fun and made a postmodernist point in that movie by becoming the bizarre and mythic character bearing the name "Leonardo Di Caprio" who was seen only on the cover of teen magazines and in the pages of People. Mr. DiCaprio "deconstructed" the movie star, "Leonardo Di Caprio." I am sure that many people who meet the actor, Mr. Di Caprio, expect to meet "Leonardo Di Caprio" the persona invented by journalists. Every once in a while Di Caprio must delight in breaking the furniture in a hotel room only to live up to the legend. ("A Doll's Aria.")

Living in the "society of the spectacle" (Gaston Bachelard), where t.v. and movie screens always surround us, we begin to wonder just how "real" is the "reality show" that history has become? Is this the theme of "Inception"? "Shutter Island"? Do we live in a hall of mirrors called "postmodernity"? Most people in New York today seem to be waiting for someone to shout: "O.K., cut. That's a final print." Is "reality" ever a "show"? 9/11?

Sources:

My discussion is based on the following primary sources, other works may also be cited:

Works by John Fowles:

John Fowles, The Collector (Boston: Little & Brown, 1963).

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (New York & London: Penguin, 1969).

John Fowles, The Aristos: A Self-Portrait in Ideas (Boston: Little & Brown, 1970).

John Fowles, Poems (New York: Eco, 1973).

John Fowles, The Ebony Tower (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974).

John Fowles, Daniel Martin (New York: Little & Brown, 1977). (One of the masterpieces of English literature in the twentieth century.)

John Fowles, The Tree (Boston: Little & Brown, 1980). (See my review of "The Fountain.")

John Fowles, Mantissa (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1982).

John Fowles, A Magott (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1985).

John Fowles, Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings (New York: Henry Holt, 1988). (Features an interview with Fowles by Diana Vipond.)

Critical Commentary on John Fowles:

Barry N. Olshen, John Fowles (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978).

Katherine Tarbox, The Art of John Fowles (Athens and Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1988).

Eileen Warburton, John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds (New York & London: Viking, 2004). (Highly recommended literary biography.)

Periodicals:

Ian Urbina, "Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways," in The New York Times, October 26, 2009, at p. A1.

Ian Urbina, "For Runaways on the Street, Sex Buys Survival," in The New York Times, October 27, 2009, at p. A1.

General Literary and Film Criticism and/or Philosophy:

Alain Badiou, Conditions (New York & London: Continuum, 2008).

Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (New York & London: Routledge, 1992).

Harold Bloom, et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979).

Fraser Boa, ed., The Power of Myth: Talking With Joseph Campbell (Boston & London: Shambala, 1994).

Anthony Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (London: Alison & Busby, 1984).

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999).

Claudia Card, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel, 1978), (1st ed., 1948).

Jacques Derrida, "The Ends of Man," in K. Baynes, J. Bohman, T. McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 125-161. (Perhaps Derrida's most important essay.)

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). (The comment concerning "methodological idealists" is found in the discussion of phenomenology.)

Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California, 1982).

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (London & New York: Penguin, 2007).

Luce Irigaray, "The Eternal Irony of the Community," in P. Jagentowicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel (Penn.: University of Pennsylvania, 1996), trans. by Gillian C. Gill.

Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," (1884) in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 186-207.

Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982).

Allan Megill, "On the Meaning of Jacques Derrida," in Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California, 1985), pp. 257-339.

Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London & New York: Pneguin, 1992), pp. 185-216. ("Derrida")

Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 142-172.

Richard Rorty, "From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida," in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 122-141. ("Fiction ... gives us the details about the kind of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended.")

Jean Paul Sartre, "Why Write?," in What is Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 48-69.

Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel Press, 1957).

June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul (New York: Anchor Books, 1973).

Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Script and film notes:

Harold Pinter, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Other Screen Plays (London: Methuen, 1982).

For Purposes of Comparison:

Eliette Abecassis, L'or et la cendre (Paris: Ramsay, 1997). (A gift from a Normalienne.)

John Banville, Ghosts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

Julian Barnes, Talking it Over (New York: Vintage, 1991).

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot (New York: mcGraw-Hill, 1984). ("Flaubert teaches you to gaze upon the truth and not blink ..." I would say the same of Kate Winslet.)

Sebastian Faulks, On Green Dolphin Street (New York: Vintage, 2001).

Christopher Fry, The Lady is Not for Burning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). (Par vous, M.S.)

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (London & New York: Penguin, 1988).

Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773). (New York: Washington Square Press Edition, 1972). (For you, I.G.M.)

Robert Harris, Enigma (New York & London: Ivy Books, 1995). (See the film of the novel by the same title.)

Robert Harris, The Ghost (New York & London: Pocket Star, 2007).

Muriel Spark, Reality and Dreams (Boston: Houston Mifflin, 1996).

Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindications of the Rights of Woman (New York: Dover, 1996).

Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary & Maria (New York & London: Penguin, 1996).