"the French Lieutenant's Woman," The Poetic Form

In this thesis I analyze John Fowles' employment of various kinds of postmodernist narrative techniques in The French lieutenant's Woman in the explication of ideology, creation of characters' subjectivities and embodiment of themes. In addition, from the discourse stylistic perspective I use Sperber and Wilson's language theories in my analysis of the narrator's manipulation of the reader from evocational process of language to referential language process. Fowles' novel does not comply with the characteristics of realism, rather it inclines more towards postmodernism in the construction with its abandonment of realistic representation and its high degree of aesthetic self-consciousness. This novel invites the reader to verify, to compare and to contrast the realistic Victorian norms and styles of narration with the postmodernist narrative techniques embodied in its horizontal movement of multiple texts. In my thesis I demonstrate Fowles' use of the postmodernist narrative techniques in The French Lieutenant's Woman.The French Lieutenant's Woman deploys history as narrative and establishes narrative as history. The interaction of history and narrative opens up the boundaries of both in order to contain each other and indeed foregrounds the novel's ideology. The historical narrative subverts the traditional narrative. Thus it subverts the traditional concept of subjectivity. The French Lieutenant's Woman exploits both descriptive and interpretive language, but because it is less representational than the realist one, it inclines towards the metaphoric terrain. The author uses highly metaphorical language right from the beginning in order to force the reader into evocational processing as the marked processing norm for this particular text. But such a locally established evocational-processing norm is subverted from within at the very end of the text, with the reader being forced back into inferential processing.Sperber and Wilson's cognitive theory of interpretation, because it allows for an active role played by the reader, thus provides a number of highly valuable tools to probe the depths of the author, text, narrator, and reader relationships in literary texts.The traditional view of the relationship between the author and the text is hierarchical and authoritarian. The author gives existence to the text and is the owner or possessor of his text. The French Lieutenant's Woman foregrounds the indeterminate, the polyphonic, and undecidable functions of the author. Fowles emphasizes the split between the author and narrator. Indeed both author and reader participate in the various connections that are made among the points on which the different layers of the text hinge. Intertextuality foregrounds the role of the reader and is thus a means of releasing narrativity from authorial determination. The interrelation between the reader and the text displaces the author's monopoly of meanings.There are thematic implications of Fowles' self-conscious narration in this novel. We shall find that the five themes are of primary importance: domain, contrast between men and women, contrast between Few and Many, freedom, and time.