Containment, Fictionality And Subversion In A Maggot

John Fowles is one of the contemporary British novelists who have won worldwide reputation. As an outstanding representative who initiates and promotes the development of postmodernism in1960s’Britain, his novels are characteristic of innovations. But compared with his other celebrated works, his last novel A Maggot has been somewhat neglected both at home and abroad. As a matter of fact, A Maggot presents a more innovative ideology and more overt features of postmodernism.In A Maggot, Fowles, by abandoning traditional mode of novel, intends to express his idiosyncratic understanding of power, historical representation and marginal characters. Chapter one focuses on the new interpretation of power in the context of postmodernism. Fowles believes that knowledge and conventions are basically the representation of and the controlled by power. With the aid of knowledge and conventions, the power manages to contain all other forces covertly. In A Maggot, Fowles introduces a multiplicity of witnesses’testimonies, journal reports and private letters so as to generate dialogues between different voices. Only in the chorus of conflicting voices can the established order be overturned.Chapter two investigates how history is approached in A Maggot. Although Fowles declaims that A Maggot is a historical novel, it is filled with mysterious and marginalized elements-lies, wasteland, solitary town, and mysterious caravan. Moreover, the hybridity of heterogeneous texts not only blurs the core event (the disappearance of Bartholomew) but also arouses readers’suspicion as to whether the representation of history in this novel is credible. In fact, there is no objective representation of history; the past only exists in diverse texts by diverse authors with diverse ideologies and personalities. The historical truth is available only in dialogues between different texts instead of a single text. Chapter three analyzes the minor characters in A Maggot. To intensify the dialogic spirit in A Maggot, Fowles deliberately depicts a number of marginalized characters who are wandering about in bordering areas. However, it is in these minor characters that we find energetic carnival potential, for their grotesque behaviors harbor a strong tendency to degrade and decrown the mainstream culture.In sum, by highlighting the fictionality of history and the subversive energy of minor characters, Fowles intends to construct a carnivalesque square in A Maggot, so that true dialogue between texts of diverse sources is guaranteed and the voice of the marginalized could be heard. In this sense, A Maggot is not only a challenge to the dominating power but also a transgression of literary convention.