| "The Geography of the Mind's Total Being": The Edenic Archetype in the Fiction of John Fowles is a comprehensive reading of Fowles's first five novels through the analysis of the central motif of the works. The Edenic archetype, with its essential components of the garden, or locus amoenus, man's exile or "fall" from the sacred place, and his subsequent efforts to deal with this loss, is established as the Jungian place of the mother, the unconscious, experienced individually as pre- and post-natal unity with the mother. Because this objectification of the creative unconscious is a dominant component of the pastoral pattern, the examination of the novels in the light of the paradisiacal archetype is broadened to include various pastoral elements seen as central to Fowles's ethical, philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic concerns. The structure of each of the novels is shown to follow a pastoral pattern of oppositions, as well as parallel journeys to and from gardens both actual and metaphoric. Such a structure reflects Fowles's ontological concepts of tensional oppositions and allows him to examine "the contrast between nature and culture...the debit-and-credit of human progress and civilization," his own definition of the pastoral.; In Fowles, however, the pastoral ethos and its fundamental image of the garden are presented ambivalently. While periodic returns to the garden are indispensable for creativity, prolonged residence leads to arrested psychic development. Conventional pastoral forms frozen into rigid patterns provide an analogy for outmoded systems which man has constructed in an effort to gain security by limiting the role of hazard and contingency in life. Fowles undercuts traditional pastoral elements with realistic commentary or juxtaposition of wild nature to the literal or figurative garden. He also employs ironic inversion: the gardens are revealed negatively as regressive paradises while the forests and, ultimately, the deserts are seen positively as sacred places because they are representative of reality, both internal and external, the knowledge of which Fowles believes is vital for the artist's creativity, man's evolution, and society's improvement. |
