Daniel Martin by John Fowles

First published: 1977

Type of work: Autobiographical novel

Time of work: The 1970’s, with flashbacks to earlier periods

Locale: Hollywood, England, Egypt, and Syria

Principal Characters:

• Daniel “Dan” Martin, a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter
• Jenny McNeil, an actress and Daniel’s paramour
• Anthony Mallory, an Oxford don, formerly Daniel’s closest friend
• Jane Mallory, Anthony’s wife
• Nell, Daniel’s former wife and Jane’s sister
• Caro, Daniel and Nell’s daughter

The Novel

Daniel Martin is, ostensibly, an autobiographical novel that portrays the life of a middle-aged British playwright who has betrayed himself and his craft by marrying the wrong woman and by selling out to Hollywood as a highly successful screenwriter. In a sense, the novel is the script, or reinscription, of Daniel Martin’s existence: Called to the deathbed of Anthony Mallory, a friend whom he has not seen in many years, Daniel is forced to confront a land and a past he had formerly forgotten and repressed. Through a variety of cinematic techniques grafted onto the writing of the novel (flashback, cuts, angled shots, rewrites), the reader sees Daniel as he sees himself—at times narcissistically, at other times with a seeming objectivity that compels him to refer to himself in the third person. In this way, Daniel recounts his Edenic existence as a minister’s son in the village of his youth, where he gains and loses his first love, Nancy Reed. He reconstructs his days at Oxford, particularly one day when, while boating, he and his fiancee’s sister, Jane, discover the body of a dead woman in the marshy reeds of the river. The trauma of the event leads to a declaration of love between Dan and Jane—and a onetime tryst—but immediately afterward, Jane insists that they marry the people to whom they are engaged and that their “affair” be buried forever. Dan’s marriage to Nell, while he struggles for success as a dramatist, is a disaster; his divorce from her, the reaction of Jane and Anthony Mallory to Dan’s play, The Victors, a thinly disguised rehearsal of their Oxford years, and an unsuccessful affair with a woman who, later, commits suicide, precipitate his departure from England, Nell, and their daughter, Caro, for a new life as a Hollywood screenwriter. Dan has a number of sporadic and temporary relationships, and in the “present” of the novel, he is deeply involved with a young British actress Jenny McNeil. Their affair, represented as almost a parody of the crise de quarante stereotype in which the older, middle-aged father figure seeks a daughter who will restore his youth, is already in decline at the beginning of the novel, when Daniel receives a phone call from Jane asking him to return to England to see Anthony in his last hours.

Dan’s return is a catalyst for a number of related events: his decision to turn away from Hollywood screenplays and to write a novel, his reunion with his daughter, Caro, and most important, the rekindling of his relationship with Jane. As a final wish, Anthony (who, hours later, will commit suicide by jumping from the balcony of his hospital room) asks Daniel to unbury Jane’s “former self”—the self which Anthony believes has been lost in their marriage. In his desire to respect Anthony’s “last will,” and with an increasing sense that he would be serving his widow as a friend by doing so, Dan invites Jane with him on a weeklong journey down the Nile which he takes in order to conduct research on Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the British war hero, who is the subject of Dan’s next screenplay. On this symbolic journey, Dan and Jane rediscover each other as they research their own past while delving into Kitchener’s history and the more ancient history of Egypt. They decide (Jane, unwillingly) to take a detour on their return to England by going to the ancient city of Palmyra, in Syria. As Egypt was a lush, tropical Eden for the voyagers, so Palmyra is a wasteland representing the loss that Dan believes has characterized both his and Jane’s lives of misplaced opportunities. In this most unromantic setting, Jane and Dan renew their love and acquaintance; they return to England engaged. In the novel’s final scenes, Dan explains the turn of events to Jenny McNeil, breaks off their affair, and gazes, tellingly, at Rembrandt’s self-portrait in an art gallery, watching the painter’s eyes which “seemed to follow Dan . . . as many years before . . . his father had once unwittingly terrified him by insisting that Christ’s eyes followed . . . wherever you went, whatever you did, they watched.”

The Characters

A summary of Daniel Martin would seem to indicate that it is a romantic novel portraying a successful self-discovery and the rediscovery of lost love. Yet it is far from this—or rather, it is a questioning parody of that version of romanticism which places the self, the individual ego, at the center of the universe. The protagonist of John Fowles’s novel is, arguably, the only character in the novel, since all else seems to be focused upon the discovery of the self in its relation to the other, represented by Jane. Yet “character” or “self” in any traditional sense is precisely what is at issue in a novel in which the final lines read:

That evening, in Oxford, leaning beside Jane in her kitchen while she cooked supper for them, Dan told her with a suitable irony that at least he had found a last sentence for the novel he was never going to write. She laughed at such flagrant Irishry; which is perhaps why, in the end, and in the knowledge that Dan’s novel can never be read, lies eternally in the future, his ill-conceived ghost has made that impossible last his own impossible first.

This last sentence is purposefully convoluted: It suggests that Daniel’s novel (the one the reader has supposedly been reading) has never been written, that the self-portrayal he has been contemplating remains unfinished, ghostly, and that the “last” upon which he has been stitching his identity is not located in narrative time but in some impossible “before” that precedes time, self, and language. Characteristically, for Fowles, Daniel Martin is filled with allusions to masks and roles; the merging of reality and illusion, or past and present is always at issue, so that the “self” is deeply questioned in regard to its makeup and presence. Is one always engaged in playing some role or other, and is there any authentic, single self behind the social masks one assumes? Is the “I” nothing more than a syntactic element, a prescripted device, a convenient fiction that allows one to forget to what extent the seemingly free individual is imprisoned by his personal history and the larger History within which he is situated? These questions emerge from a work containing an author/protagonist (or the ghost of an author) who conducts an intense self-scrutiny within the framework of a novel that keeps reminding the reader that he is only reading a script, watching the evolution of characters in a fiction.

While Dan attempts to relocate himself within a past—the fragments of which he recollects as the novel progresses—he also attempts to “resurrect” those aspects of Jane which have been subsumed in her tedious, cerebral marriage to Anthony. For Dan (indeed, this may be seen as a sign of his egotism), Jane is more of a philosophical concept or an obstacle than she is a person. She is the “other” to which he is magnetically attracted; she is all that is “not-Dan.” Indeed, the remaining major characters are drawn into the dialectic of self and other figured by the relation between Dan and Jane: Either they are cast within those roles which Dan wishes to assign them (he is, in fact, producer, director, writer, and hero of his own screenplay) or they are replaced, forgotten, turned away from the set. Jane refuses to be cast into a role, yet Dan finds, in the end, that to place or to replace her would be to murder a vital, unseen part of himself. On the surface, their reunion might be seen as Dan’s acceptance of “otherness” preliminary to his own self-discovery. Yet this reunion takes place in a strange manner: Fowles will not let the reader forget that Dan and Jane are characters in a fiction, and at that (if the last lines of the novel are to be believed), characters in an unwritten novel. In the Palmyra chapters, against an apocalyptic background representing the modern condition, Jane is seen—almost in the pose of the classic Victorian heroine, quiet, head bowed—submitting to Dan’s insistence that they live the remainder of their lives together, despite her earlier decision to remain alone. In short, Fowles insists on complicating, rather than resolving, the issues surrounding the discovery of self and other. Novelistic endings often imply that this process is dialectical, historical, closed. The ending of Daniel Martin suggests that, while “self” and “other” may be roles that can be assigned to characters in a fiction, they are also open-ended positions which individuals occupy at one time or another, often simultaneously, in the numerous social relationships in which one engages in a lifetime.

Critical Context

In many ways, Daniel Martin is Fowles’s most ambitious novel, notwithstanding the complexities of the labyrinthine The Magus (1966, revised 1977). While it has been accused of being self-indulgent and, oddly enough, “too” autobiographical, Daniel Martin addresses more fully than any of Fowles’s other works his concern with the plight of the individual subject caught within the historical and political frameworks of the modern world. This has been Fowles’s predominant interest throughout his work, even though the ostensible subject of The French Lieutenant’s Woman may be a “lost” woman in Victorian culture, or the manifest historical framework of A Maggot (1985), mid-eighteenth century England. These, more precisely, are lenses which Fowles asks the reader to gaze through in contemplating the representation of the past and its fictionalization in the present. Perhaps it might be said that Daniel Martin is the most “personal” of Fowles’s novels, as it collapses the comparisons to be made between epochs onto the individual life: The relation between Daniel’s own past and his present existence is analogous, in many ways, to the relation between Victorian and modern ways of seeing as portrayed in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In many ways, though, Daniel Martin is much more than “simply personal.” Indeed, it may be seen as an encyclopedic narrative concerned with situating the problem of the individual within numerous contemporary contexts; one may find in it varying theories of history, a tracing of the developments of psychoanalysis from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan, or the mythic contents of modernism. As such, Daniel Martin is Fowles’s most important novel; it bears comparison to Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959), Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and thus stands as one of the masterpieces of the late twentieth century novel.

Bibliography

Conradi, Peter. John Fowles, 1982.

Olshen, Barry N. John Fowles, 1978.

Palmer, William J. The Fiction of John Fowles: Tradition, Art, and the Loneliness of Selfhood, 1974.

Runyon, Randolph. Fowles/Irving/Barthes: Canonical Variations on an Apocryphal Theme, 1981.

Wolfe, Peter. John Fowles, Magus and Moralist, 1976, 1979.