I Can’t go on, I’ll Go on

The Beckettian Paradox in John Fowles’s Mantissa

Abstract: John Fowles’s Mantissa is a metafictional novel, which illustrates the Beckettian
paradox: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Miles Green’s amnesia is the bliss of partial oblivion. It
paves the way for the freedom of the characters. The protean muse (Erato) is entitled to having
free access to the writer’s mind and to having dialogues with the writer. The writer’s partial
oblivion also makes the process of literary creation transparent. Due to Erato’s treatment,
which stands for the intervention of literary imagination, the writer sways between oblivion
and recovery of memory. The self-contradictory narrative is the genuine account of the
possibility and impossibility of literary creation.
Key words: Beckettian paradox; partial oblivion; Erato; self-contradictory narrative

John Fowles said around the time of his writing of the first draft
of Mantissa, “My imagination is highly erotic. I think almost
everything in terms of erotic situations.”(qtd. in Gotts 84) In this
specific context, eroticism means literary imagination. John Fowles’s
extravagant description of erotica in Mantissa is his weapon to wrestle
with contemporary theory for the sake of the survival of the novel. In
this sense, the erotica is a kind of artistic freedom within the scope of
fictional narrative, without which the writer’s responsibility of literary
creation may be abortive.

The bliss of partial oblivion

The underlying mechanism in Mantissa is the amnesia of the
writer. In the first place, the writer’s amnesia enables Miles Green to
break away from the writer’s block, which results from his anxiety
over his responsibility to write another novel. In the second place, it is
the writer’s amnesia that entails Erato’s sexual therapy, which will
otherwise become a mantissa to or an unadvisable intrusion into the
novel. The amnesia of the writer is a kind of freedom, without which
the freedom of the characters will be impossible. If the freedom of the
characters is unattainable, the writer’s responsibility to write another
novel will be abortive. Even if he manages to “invent” his novel, the
novel is most likely a mantissa.

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 At first sight, Miles Green seems to be “mantissa” and his novel
writing seems impossible. Miles Green is a mantissa in that he begins
and ends with his amnesia. At the very beginning of the novel, Miles
Green is a novelist who completely loses his memory and then wakes
up inside the hospital room. He is being treated by Doctor Delphie and
Nurse Cory through sexual therapy and trying his best to recover his
memory. He fails to recognize his own wife when he first sees her in
the hospital. He feels disgusted with the sexual therapy. The novel also
ends with Miles Green, unconscious on the hospital bed, repeating the
same murmurs of the Greek alphabet and hearing the unexpected
ticking of the cuckoo clock. Throughout the novel, he is unable to
manipulate his characters. Instead, he is manipulated by them. He is
the victim to the Muses’ game.
Erato plays a very important role throughout the novel. In a way,
she is the dominant figure who performs the function of arousing the
writer’s creative imagination. She is helping Miles Green to recover
from his amnesia in the disguise of Doctor Delphie. She is inviting
Green to rethink about his position in the novel and the role of critical
theory in literary creation. She is contending with Green about the
women characters in his novel. She has a journey to and from Miles
Green’s hospital room and his fictional world, which reminds the
readers of the fictionality of the novel and the hospital room. The
hospital room turns out to be nothing but Miles Green’s own
fantasized skull. At the surface level, Mantissa is Erato’s game over
Miles Green. Nevertheless, what Mantissa mainly concerns with
remains to be Miles Green and his creativity as a novelist.
As the first part of the novel indicates, the novel Mantissa is the
“baby” of Miles Green’s sexual intercourse with Doctor Delphie, who
seems to be the transformed muse in the novel. Erato has claimed that
she has written the Odyssey without her own signature, but she has
never claimed that she is the author of Mantissa. Erato has deprived
Homer of his “patent right” of the authorship of Odyssey, but she fails
to justify herself. Her role in the novel is to stimulate the writer’s
creative imagination to complete his novel writing. She comes to
rescue the writer from his amnesia. It is Miles Green’s responsibility to
write the novel itself.
It seems that Miles Green is enjoying the privilege of his amnesia
rather than suffering from it. Miles Green’s amnesia is not the

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indication of the death of the author or the literature of exhaustion. In
Roland Barthes’s opinion, “the author is nothing but the one who
writes, just as I is nothing but the one who says I”. (qtd. in Adams
1257) In Mantissa, the narrator takes a third person point of view to
evade his responsibility of being the surrogate of the author. Miles
Green has become he instead of I in the story and “he” is not doomed
to death. By succumbing to amnesia, he has succeeded in shifting from
his role of the author to the role of a patient-character, thus inviting the
readers’ compassion for him. He enters the novel as a patient and exits
from it as a patient. His recovery from his amnesia becomes the
ultimate goal of Doctor Delphie’s therapy, which serves as the major
plot of the novel.
Though he declares that he feels disgusted with his nudity before
a woman doctor and claims to be uninterested in sexual intercourse, he
is willing to give in to the sexual therapy. Doctor Delphie concludes
that his memory-loss may well be partly caused by “an unconscious
desire to fondle unknown female bodies.” (Mantissa 21) Since his
memory-loss is due to his unconscious sexual desire, the best way to
cure it ought to be a sexual therapy. In light of this medical practice,
Doctor Delphie may justify her way of treating Miles Green. In the
same token, Miles Green may justify his acceptance of the sexual
therapy. Miles Green’s “reluctant” acceptance of the sexual therapy is
an indication of the admission of erotica to the novel, which casts light
on the possibility of novel writing.
Though there is no underlying difference between pornography
and erotica for common readers, writers and critics insist on the
differentiation. The Macquarie Dictionary defines erotica as “literature
or art dealing with sexual love” and pornography as “obscene
literature, art, or photography, designed to excite sexual desire.”1 In
terms of this differentiation, the sexual therapy in Mantissa should be
labeled as erotica. As Susan Gubar has put it, pornography constructs
gender, “displays men’s social, economic, and sexual power, denies
women’s subjectivity”(qtd. in Salami 211), and orders ways of seeing
the relationship between men and women. That is to say, in
pornographic writing, men are dominating and women are dominated.
In Mantissa, however, this is not the case. Miles Green is being
manipulated by his muse instead of manipulating her, if we take Miles
Green as one of the characters in the novel.

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 Miles Green’s amnesia has legitimated the erotica in the novel.
Instead of being merely “fantastic sexual games” labeled by
Publishers Weekly, the erotica has been transformed into light and
lively sex scenes that is accessible to the readers. Since sex is one of
the most effective therapies to cure Green’s amnesia, it is supposed to
be agreeable in the medical practice. Doctor Delphie chooses the
sexual therapy at her own will and Miles Green seems to be cured by
the therapy. Miles Green claims to feel disgusted with the sexual
therapy for him; however, his physical reaction to it is “normal” in
medical terms. He succeeds in being “raped” by the doctor. Doctor
Delphie may justify the sexual therapy in medical ethics while Miles
Green may justify it as his passivity in his amnesia. John Fowles may
justify it by stating that it is an inalienable part of an amnesiac novel.
In Mantissa, sex is transformed into a literary metaphor, which serves
to define the origin of the literary work. The hospital symbolizes the
literary world and medicine may be compared to literary art. Good
lovemaking is the metaphor for good writing, a symbolic harmony of
writer and Muse. While Miles Green and his muse are in harmonious
intercourse, their baby will be delivered without great difficulty. As
Part I of the novel indicates, their baby is nothing but the novel itself.
In Part IV of the novel, Erato, in the disguise of Doctor Delphie tells
Miles Green that she chooses to resort to sexual therapy because he is
such an incompetent writer that she is sure that he will never succeed
in telling their sexual intercourse in the novel. If Miles Green
continues to suffer from his amnesia and fails to shoulder his
responsibility for the novel he is writing, the sexual therapy may have
been well confined within the hospital room. The fault lies in that
Miles Green is only partially oblivious. His partial oblivion has not
prevented him from keeping the record of the sexual intercourse,
which accounts for the erotica in the novel. The erotica is not an
addition of comparatively small importance; it is the dominant literary
metaphor of the novel, which stands for the possibility of novel writing
in the context of impossibility.
The writer’s amnesia also enables the writing process of the novel
to be accessible to the readers. As mentioned above, the hospital room
turns out to be nothing but Miles Green’s fantasized skull. In this
sense, what happens in the hospital room is in essence what happens in
the writer’s mind. In Mantissa, sometimes the hospital room is

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equipped with quilted walls but at other time it is transparent. The
hospital room becomes transparent while Miles Green and Doctor
Delphie are making love. The transparency of the walls has cast light
on the workings of the writer’s mind and his “intercourse” with his
female characters.
The writer’s amnesia and the sexual therapy to cure it symbolize
the writing process of the novel. The writer’s amnesia is due to the
writer’s block and his inability to manipulate his characters. Miles
Green becomes impotent when he realizes that the novelist’s ultimate
goal is to write another novel about novel writing. The sexual therapy
is prescribed for his amnesia since Erato’s sexual intercourse with the
writer may stimulate the writer’s literary imagination. Unfortunately,
while Miles Green attempts to jump on Erato, he is usually knocked
out either by Erato’s kick or by his hitting on the wall. The writing
process is interrupted. Only when he is in harmony with Doctor
Delphie can he give birth to his baby, which is none other than his
novel.
Since Miles Green is suffering from or enjoying his amnesia, he
is unable to manipulate his characters at his own will. In Part I of the
novel, when Miles Green asks Doctor Delphie how long he has been in
the hospital, she answers, “Just a few pages.” (Mantissa 14) By telling
Miles Green that he has been in the book for just a few pages, Doctor
Delphie succeeds in reducing the writer to a minor character in his
own novel. Since Miles Green is the patient and Doctor Delphie is the
doctor, the writer has been put in a disadvantageous situation. In most
cases he is passive, even when he is making love with the doctor. His
characters have changed shapes throughout the novel while he remains
unchanged in the hospital room.
The writer’s amnesia may be taken as the parody of Roland
Barthes’s declaration of the death of the author. In Roland Barthes’s
point of view, in the novel “it is language which speaks, not the
author.”(qtd. in Adams 1256) Since novel is nothing but language
speaking for itself, the author’s role has been greatly reduced. The
writer is locked in his own skull, which has been transformed into the
hospital room. What the writer needs to do is just to overcome his
amnesiac death and to let language speak. The characters have their
free access to the writer’s mind. In light of Barthes’s theory, the
author’s amnesiac death is good for the automatic writing of the novel.

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That accounts for the muse’s game over him. While he is suffering
from oblivion, the muse-doctor tries to treat him with sexual therapy.
While he is going to dominate his muse after his recovery, he is
knocked out. However, in Mantissa, though the writer has been
reduced to an incapable patient, the muse has to appeal to him for the
writing. Only when the writer recovers temporarily from his amnesiac
death does the novel continue. It is language that speaks in the novel,
but language must speak through the author’s mind, if it can go
without the author’s mouthpiece. Roland Barthes asserts that writing
begins as the author “enters into his own death” (qtd. in Adams 1256),
but this is not the case in Mantissa. When the writer enters into his
amnesiac death, the novel comes to a halt. When the writer recovers
his memory, writing begins. The author has given way to the freedom
of his characters and the emancipated characters come to rescue the
author from his amnesiac death. Sexual love may be the best therapy
for the amnesiac author to go on with his writing when he can’t go on.

The Protean Muses

In Mantissa, the muses’ top task is to inspire the writer’s literary
imagination. Erato’s protean self stands for an ideal freedom of the
characters, which is the underlying mechanism of contemporary novel
writing. The muses adopt various disguises and sexual roles (the
doctor, a pop singer, Erato and even a Japanese geisha). She eventually
turns out to be Erato, who shows up to inspire Miles Green’s creative
imagination. Erato performs a variety of sexual acts with Miles Green,
which he finds disgusting but intriguing at the same time. Erato is
ever-changing and a bit elusive, but her role in the novel remains
unchanged. She serves as the woman to inspire Mile Green’s creative
imagination through sexual therapy, which seems to be her unified
core of identity. In classical mythology, the Muses are the daughters of
Zeus and Mnemosyne, Goddess of memory. From the time of Homer,
writers appeal to the help of the muses to inspire their work. The
muses were originally three goddesses of song appeared only in a
chorus. Later the group evolves into the nine muses, each of whom is
assigned a special function. The nine muses are Calliope, Clio, Erato,
Euterpe, Melpomene. Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania.
Erato is the goddess who is in charge of lyric and erotic poetry who
plays a lyre.

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 Erato is not the traditional muse who has been submissive to
inspire the writer’s imagination. She is allowed to appear as an
independent muse, a fiction maker who offers some suggestions for
Miles’s new novel. She is given the freedom to imagine their
relationship and how she would like to manipulate Miles with her text.
In the game of changing roles, she writes him into the role of a man
who is trying to possess a woman. If we interpret the legitimating of
erotica as the writer’s freedom of literary imagination and the
transparency of literary creation as the reader’s freedom to peek into
the novel, Erato’s freedom to intrude into the writer’s mind and her
dialogue with the writer may be well taken as the idealized freedom of
the characters. In this dissertation, idealized freedom has double
meanings. First, Erato enjoys more freedom than Miranda in The
Collector, Alison and Julie in The Magus, or Sarah Woodruff in The
French Lieutenant’s Woman. Her freedom is an ideal freedom of
women characters in John Fowles’s fiction. Second, the freedom that
Erato enjoys refers chiefly to the freedom within narrative fiction.
Such freedom cannot be ensured outside the novel itself.
Freedom within narrative fiction is the pivot of the freedom in
Mantissa, the deviation from which will get us nowhere. Though in a
way Mantissa is a novel tainted with phallocentric ideas, it is “well
aware of this.”(Stephenson 59) Fowles intends to offer his characters,
especially female characters, freedom of choice within narrative
fiction. He tries his best to be in line with, or at least makes a
compromise with feminist ideas:
I hope I am a feminist in most ordinary terms, but I certainly
wouldn’t call myself one compared with many excellent
women writers. Part of me must remain male. Masculinity is
like the old pea-soup fog, a weather condition I remember
from youth. It takes you a long time to realize not only where
you are but where you ought to be. True humanism must be
feminist.(Wormholes 452)
His compromise with feminist ideas lies in the fact that he has
endowed his muse with modern life and protean narrative subject.
Since Miles Green has succumbed to amnesia, he has to accept
Doctor Delphie’s sexual therapy with a view to recovering his
memory. He is invalid in the hospital room and is at the mercy of the
doctor and the nurse. In his art studio, which is no other than his own

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brain, he is no better. Miles Green cannot go on with his novel writing
without Doctor Delphie’s help. Miles Green’s amnesia is the bliss in
that it enables the writer to find his shelter in the hospital room to
evade from the writer’s block for a while. The amnesia is also the bliss
for Erato, since she has been given the opportunity to find out the heart
of the matter for the writer’s oblivion and to play a role in the novel
writing. She resumes her shape as the goddess of lyrical and erotic
poetry and comes to inspire the writer’s literary imagination. She has a
face-to-face encounter with the writer and has aired her own view of
the right-way portrayal of women characters in the novel. Erato is
active throughout the novel while Miles Green remains passive in the
hospital room as well as in his novel writing. The active versus passive
relationships between Erato and Miles Green is best reflected in the
erotica in the novel. In Part I, as Doctor Delphie takes an active part in
her sexual therapy on the writer; they get along with each other. The
nurse has carried their baby, namely the manuscript of Mantissa, to the
hospital room. On the contrary, in Part IV of the novel, when Miles
Green is about to jump on Erato at his own will, he is knocked out by
the wall.
Erato is endowed with the freedom of metamorphosis. She has
undergone a series of metamorphoses. In Part I, she changes into
Doctor Delphie. In Part II, she first shows up as a pop singer and then
changes back into the muse. In Part III, she changes into Doctor
Delphie once more. In Part IV, she changes back into the muse, but in
Miles Green’s eyes she is a Japanese geisha. When Miles Green tries
to jump on her, she suddenly disappears. In the above mentioned
metamorphoses, Erato and Doctor Delphie are the two most important
roles she plays in the novel. The images of a pop singer and a Japanese
geisha have been overshadowed. Those images are partly due to
Erato’s metamorphoses, partly due to Mile Green’s imagination.
Doctor Delphie and Erato show up when Miles Green is comparatively
conscious. Doctor Delphie’s role is to cure the writer’s amnesia while
Erato’s responsibility is to inspire the writer’s literary imagination so
that he can continue his novel writing. As a whole, Erato’s roles are in
line with her roles in Greek mythology. Since Erato’s mother is the
goddess of memory, Doctor Delphie is at her best with the treatment of
amnesia. Since Erato is the goddess of lyrical and erotic poetry, she
takes it for granted that sexual therapy is the best way to cure amnesia.

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In the age of Homer, the writers tend to appeal to Erato to inspire their
imagination. At first sight, Erato’s subjectivity seems to be elusive, but
she has a kind of unified core of identity as the muse to inspire the
writer’s imagination. In light of postmodernist ideas, the construction
of subjectivity is “a process in a continual state of dissolution”(Malpas
57), however, even in the continual state of dissolution, Erato’s unified
core of identity remains unchanged throughout the novel.
Through metamorphoses, Erato has the free access to the writer’s
mind, which has been transformed into the hospital room. By contrast,
the writer seems to be at a disadvantage. Just as Erato has told him, he
cannot walk out of his “own brain.” (Mantissa125) He has to stay in
the hospital room for the sexual therapy, though in his opinion “loss of
clothes was more shocking than loss of memory”. (Mantissa 10) Since
Delphie is the doctor in charge of Miles Green’s treatment, she is
capable of doing whatever she thinks is right in terms of medicine. She
has the free access to the hospital room. She has the freedom to put her
sexual therapy into practice in the hospital. She has the freedom to
allow or forbid the nurses to enter the hospital room. The nurse who is
allowed to enter the hospital room is Nurse Cory, a colored woman
who has the tendency of voyeurism. The nurse with whom Delphie
cannot reconcile is a senior woman who is bold enough to accuse
Delphie of making the hospital room in a mess. The senior nurse looks
like Erato’s sister Clio, the muse of history. Doctor Delphie has the
free access to the writer’s brain and Miles Green is totally at the mercy
of her. When Erato shows up in the novel as Doctor Delphie, she
seems to be a bit arrogant. When Erato appears in her original identity,
she becomes more elegant. Anyway, she is the goddess of lyrical and
erotic poetry and claims to be the author of Odyssey. She knows that it
is hard to be the muse of lyrical and erotic poetry, so she feels
sympathy for Miles Green’s writer’s block. Her discontent with Miles
Green lies in the women characters in his novel. She thinks that Green
invents a woman on paper so that “he can force her to say and do
things no real woman in her right mind ever would.” (Mantissa 85)
Erato thinks that the women characters in Miles Green’s novel lacks in
freedom. The writer has the authority to dispose of his characters and
he is entitled to killing a woman character off in five lines and
throwing her into the wastebasket whenever he wants to.
Erato comes to negotiate with Miles Green on an equal footing.

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She knows that she is just a few pages old, but her a-few-pages age
rivals with that of the writer. In Part I of the novel, when Miles Green
asks how long he has been in the hospital, Doctor Delphie’s answer is
“just a few pages”. As far as their age or qualification is concerned, the
writer is no better than the muse. As far as their roles in the novel are
concerned, Miles Green seems to be a minor character as compared to
Erato. Erato calims to be the genuine author of Odyssey and Homer is
only the person who has his signature on the book. It is obvious that
Mantissa will be overshadowed by the Homeric epic. History has
become the past and the modern writer is unable to resume history to
justify or falsify what Erato says. Miles Green is intelligent enough to
wrestle with Erato by drawing upon contemporary literary theory. He
has the presupposition that the ancient muse must be ignorant of
contemporary literary theory. Erato pretends to be astonished at the
latest literary theory at the outset, but she turns out to be not so
ignorant as she poses. She is at home with contemporary literary terms.
When Miles Green asks her how she is able to know the male writer’s
imagination, she says that his question is stupid. In the postmodern
context, the word “know” is an “epistemological nonsense”. (Mantissa
86) It seems that Erato knows such contemporary literary theory as
phenomenology quite well. When Miles Green tells her about French
structuralism and argues that a person is not qualified for the
discussion of structuralism unless he has read Todorov, Erato says that
she has never heard of Tzvetan Todorov. Miles Green has never
mentioned Todorov’s full name, but Erato knows it well in advance.
If we take Doctor Delphie’s treatment of Miles Green as the
metaphor of literary imagination’s wrestling with the writer’s block,
the dialogue between Erato and Miles Green may be well taken as
literary tradition’s wrestling with contemporary theory. Miles Green
had expected that Erato had known nothing about contemporary
theory, so he is in the illusion that it is a piece of cake to subdue Erato
with the weapon of contemporary theory. Unfortunately, Erato seems
to have a kind of prophecy of contemporary theory. The supposedly
stupid person is not stupid at all. By contrast, the supposedly
intelligent person seems to be unintelligent. Contemporary literary
theory is overshadowed by literary tradition, as Miles Green is
overshadowed by Erato as a character in the novel. In Mantissa, Erato
stands for literary imagination and literary tradition while Miles Green

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stands for the modern writers obsessed with literary creation and
literary theory. Miles Green’s obsession with literary theory does not
mean that he is totally antagonistic toward literary theory. In a way he
fails to be reconciled with contemporary literary theory, nevertheless,
he has to resort to contemporary literary theory in his confrontation
with Erato. Green’s utilization of contemporary literary theory is
justifiable in that even “the worst philosophies have their good points.”
(Mantissa127) He is ambivalent about literary theory. Many defects as
it has, contemporary literary theory seems to be an inalienable catalyst
for literary creation if it is reconciled with literary imagination.
Though Erato has got the upper hand in her confrontation with Miles
Green, she cannot take the place of the writer. Anyway, it is up to
Miles Green for the novel writing and Erato is just a partner.
Through her free access to the writer’s brain and her dialogue
with the writer, Erato succeeds in inventing a genuine woman
character on paper in the fictional narrative of Mantissa. In her own
narrative in Part II of the novel, she writes the satyr into a character.
The satyr has been given modern life. Erato was raped by “twenty-four
young black Marxist guerillas” in her African mission-house.
(Mantissa110) Twenty-four is the number of Greek alphabet, which
links the modern rapes to their Greek origin. In Greek mythology,
Erato is raped by the satyr. In Part IV, Miles Green is transformed into
the satyr in Erato’s imagination. In the frame narrative of Mantissa,
Miles Green is raped by Doctor Delphie in the name of medical
practice. In Erato’s embedded narrative, the muse is raped by the satyr
in the disguise of twenty-four young black Marxist guerillas. In a
sense, Miles’s rape by Doctor Delphie and Erato’s rape by the satyr are
the same story. Erato is constructed as a split and contradictory subject.
Curious enough, she seems uncertain of her age when she was raped
by the satyr. At first her age is fourteen, then she changes her minds
several times: from fourteen to thirteen, to twelve and to eleven. It may
happen at any age. The indefiniteness of literary imagination offers a
new orientation to the possibility of novel writing.

Self-contradictory Narrative
Since Miles Green is writing his novel while he is suffering from
his amnesia, he cannot envision a whole-sight layout of his novel. He
has to be confronted with “the difficulty of writing serious modern

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fiction” (Mantissa118) Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman,
Mantissa is another novel about novel writing. In John Fowles’s
fiction, the word “another” lays more emphasis on the latter’s
deviation from the former instead of on the similarity between the two
objects. In The Collector, immediately after Miranda’s death, Clegg
plans to kidnap another girl. Since the would-be victim’s name begins
with the letter M, she is called “another M” by Clegg. Another M is
not the replica of Miranda; instead, the girl is in no way similar to
Miranda. In light of this, we may as well interpret another novel about
novel writing as a brand-new metafictional novel. While The French
Lieutenant’s Woman lays more emphasis on the principles of novel
writing, Mantissa seems to lay more emphasis on the impediments to
novel writing. The former is a novel about the possibility of novel
writing while the latter seems to be “fiction about the impossibility of
writing fiction.”(Fawkner 134)
In The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett has laid down the paradox that
a novelist must be confronted with in the world of absurdity. The
paradox reads, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”(Beckett 382) Right before
the final draft of the paradox, it is uttered in a negotiable tone and in an
alternately first person and second person point of view: you must go
on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on. The final draft of the
predicament is not the permutation of the negotiable utterance, but the
conveyance of the unnamable writer’s block. Miles Green says that he
is going to “follow in Joyce and Beckett’s footsteps.” (Mantissa 127)
To follow in Beckett’s footsteps means to be confronted with the
unnamable writer’s block in which the novel must go on when it
cannot go on. Miles Green reveals his writer’s block to the public in
his stream-of-consciousness account,
(Dot dot dot) to resume (dash) but I must insist that it is on
the understanding that although I could go on like this forever
(comma) until you would have to lie on the bed anyway out
of sheer exhaustion (comma) we agree that the formal basis
for our discussion must be your recognition of the
indisputable fact that if you had only manifested yourself
earlier in the text to which you object so much…(64)
The muse shows up in the text to which they object. The writer suffers
from amnesia during his writing process. However, they must
collaborate with each other to continue the novel writing. The fictional

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world is not a submissive world in which the writer has the authority to
manipulate everything and the characters just serve as puppets.
Chapter 13 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman reads, “a genuinely
created world must be independent of its creator.”(81) The narrator
orders Charles Smithson to walk straight back to Lyme Regis when he
leaves Sarah, but Charles has violated his will and goes down to the
dairy. The narrator can only propose to the character and it is up to the
character to dispose of their own whereabouts. The fictional world is a
world full of contradictions. With the treatment of the writer’s
amnesia, Miles Green swings between the state of unconsciousness
and consciousness. Due to the protean subjectivity of Erato, the
writer’s scope of manipulating the characters has been greatly reduced.
His position in the fictional narrative has been lowered. Erato embeds
her own narrative into the frame narrative of Mantissa and threatens to
make the frame narrative mantissa. Erato’s narrative disrupts the frame
narrative in its peculiar way. Since the fictional world is a world full of
contradictions, Mantissa is tainted with self-contradictory narrative.
An obvious self-contradictory narrative is about the cuckoo clock.
According to Doctor Delphie, the clock is left in the hospital by an
Irish gentleman. It is an absurdly fussy and over-ornamented Swiss
cuckoo clock that disturbs Miles Green. Doctor Delphie has its striking
mechanism disconnected for the sake of Miles Green’s amnesia. It
does keep silent in Part II and Part III of the novel. However, the
cuckoo clock makes its most strangely single cuckoo at the end of the
novel. As far as the British fiction since 1945 is concerned, such an
obviously self-contradictory narrative is not the patent of John Fowles.
William Golding, one of John Fowles’s most admired contemporary
English novelists, has employed this technique in his third published
novel Pincher Martin. When his warship is torpedoed under the water,
Pincher Martin struggles to climb up a crag, which turns out to be
nothing but his fantasized tooth. He struggles for survival and appeals
to Prometheus for spiritual support. He dies a heroic death. At first
sight, Pincher Martin’s story seems to be line with that of Robinson
Crusoe, but the ending of the novel has subverted the whole story.
Pincher Martin turns out to be a villain in his life and he even has no
time to kick off her boots before he finally meets his death. Pincher
Martin has two deaths: one is the heroic death in his imagined
narrative; the other is the death in the impartial third person narrative.2

13
The self contradictory narrative indicates that the protagonist
Christopher Martin has a split and self contradictory subject. Since his
real given name “Christopher” includes the word “Christ”, he is
supposed to be a Christ-like figure. However, in real life, he is known
as “Pincher”, i.e. a crab-like person who is always ready to take rather
than to give.
In John Fowles’s Mantissa, the self contradictory narrative about
the Swiss cuckoo clock is by no means mantissa to the novel. The
cuckoo clock “represents the obsessively repetitive activity of
writing.”(Tarbox 121) It is constructed as a symbol that awakens and
disturbs Miles about his reality and his monotonous and absurd
surrounding. It is the knell that tolls for the death of the novel. As the
British novelist-critic Christine Brooke-Rose has put it, the novelists
now have nothing new to tell since what should be told have been told
altogether. It is most likely that Miles Green’s writer’s block is partly
due to his anxiety of the death of the novel. As is indicated in the
novel, he asks Doctor Delphie to have the striking mechanism
disconnected because the cuckoo clock is something he fears. Miles
Green lives in an era in which the death of the author or the novel, or
the exhaustion of literature is rampant. He tries to continue his novel
writing, though he is suffering from amnesia and his novel may be
regarded as mantissa. In order to cure the writer’s block, the striking
mechanism of the obsessively repetitive activity of writing must be
disconnected. To our amazement, the disconnected cuckoo clock
makes its ultimate sound at last. One possible interpretation of the self
contradictory narrative about the cuckoo clock is that the knell for the
death of the novel tolls again and the writer becomes unconscious once
more. Another possible interpretation is that the writer has partly
overcome his writer’s block and tries to continue his novel writing on
the road to impossibility. Thanks to the treatment of the muse’s literary
imagination, the writer is determined to follow the footsteps of Samuel
Beckett. He is going on, though he cannot go on. The disconnected
cuckoo clock has made its ultimate sound heard in the novel. Likewise,
the amnesiac writer has made his repetitive writing evade from being
just mantissa. As Erato says to Miles Green, the death of the novel is
nothing but “a laugh” (Mantissa 66) or a cuckoo.
Mantissa has been tainted with some anti-poststructuralist
descriptions, but it does not take anti-poststructuralist ideas as its

14
ultimate goal. Fowles shows his disgust for the kind of literary
criticism that gives rise to such kind of novel he satirizes. He objects to
the drabness and unimaginativeness of much of contemporary fiction
and criticism. In this sense, Mantissa may as well be taken as the
“clearest expression of Fowles’s definitive rejection of Beckettian
solipsism and noveau roman formalist excesses.”(Onega 46) However,
if the novel is nothing but Fowles’s rejection of avant garde literature
or poststructuralist ideas, it will fall victim to the literature of
exhaustion and become “mantissa” in its real sense. Mantissa has its
intention to be a parody of poststructuralism, however, whether it
fulfills its intention or not is open to discussion. First of all, in British
literary tradition, the novelists are not likely to be indulged in parody
though they tend to employ the technique in their novel. The parody
“complex” dates back to the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth
century. Henry Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews serve as his
parodic reaction to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Pamela becomes
such a bestseller that noble ladies in public places like to show the
novel to each other to suggest that they have the very book about
which everyone is talking. Henry Fielding is discontented with the
hypocritical virtue-rewarded theme of Pamela, therefore, he is making
fun of the novel in his first two published novels. His forty-odd-page
Shamela has dedicated its most part to the parody, but his second novel
Joseph Andrews deviates from its original scheme and shifts to the
adventure story of Joseph Andrews and his friend Parson Adams. It is
his deviation from the parodic intention that makes Henry Fielding
stand out as one of the most eminent English writers in the eighteenth
century. As seen from the above, parody is seldom the ultimate goal of
British novelists. John Fowles seems to have the knowledge of this
tradition consciously or unconsciously. Secondly, unlike Russian
formalism or French structuralism, which has a comparatively well-
defined scope of principles, poststructuralism is so ambitious and so
kaleidoscopic that even its great masters may fail to make its own
tenets clear to the public. It is true that John Fowles has the elementary
knowledge of Roland Barthes, but there is no evidence as yet of John
Fowles’s reading of Jacque Derrida or other deconstructivists. Though
John Fowles mentions postmodernism in the novel, it is
chronologically impossible for him to have a good understanding of
this critical approach in 1982. As is generally acknowledged, the term

15
“postmodernism” is first used as early as 1947, by the English
historian Arnold Toynbee to describe a contemporary western world in
crisis. Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, the first monumental
work of postmodernism, comes into being as late as 1979 and its
popularization comes still later. The target of John Fowles’s parody is
elusive; therefore, his parody falls short of being a whole-sight parody.
The parody in Mantissa is unable to rival the parody in Shamela,
which has a relatively clear-cut target to ridicule. Even if John
Fowles’s transcendent perception of poststructuralism is just in line
with poststructuralism in the world of reality, his parody cannot remain
to be nothing but a satire on poststructuralist theories. Parody is based
on the comical imitation of the original work; therefore, a parody of
poststructuralism is an illustration of poststructuralist theories. As
Ommundsen has put it, Mantissa is bound to be “an illustration of the
very thing it emphatically condemns.”(Ommundsen 319) This is the
dilemma of the novel.
The self contradictory narrative also resides in the interpersonal
relationships between Miles Green and Erato. In the frame narrative,
Miles Green is a writer and Erato is a character written into his novel.
Erato is given modern life by the writer, though the writer suffers from
amnesia. In Erato’s embedded narrative, the muse has been
transformed into the writer and Miles Green is written into her
narrative as a satyr. Miles Green is given an ancient life and the satyr is
given modern life. The satyr is metamorphosed into the twenty-four
young black Marxist guerillas in Part II and Miles Green is
metamorphosed into the satyr in Part IV. The writer-character
relationship varies with the metamorphoses of Erato and the shift of
focus from the frame narrative to the embedded narrative.
The writer fails to recover from his amnesia completely. Likewise,
Mantissa fails to subdue poststructuralist theories partly because the
parody of poststructuralist theories is not the ultimate goal of the
novel. Since the writer is unable to overcome his own amnesia, literary
imagination represented by Erato comes to rescue. Literary
imagination has counteracted the rampancy of literary theories. The
modern writer armed with contemporary theories seems to be so
impotent before Erato, who stands for literary imagination and literary
tradition alternately. The writer’s wrestling with his amnesia gives way
to the freedom of the characters and has legitimated the erotica of the

16
novel. Erato has the free access to the writer’s brain so that she can
participate in the novel writing. Since the writer’s status in the novel is
uncertain and his state of mind is unsteady, his novel writing is full of
self contradictory narratives. Miles Green is discontented with
contemporary theory, but he has to resort to contemporary theory with
a view to getting the upper hand of Erato in their dialogic argument.
The author’s amnesia gives rise to the narrative freedom of the novel.
It serves as the basis of the characters’ freedom. The protean muse
stands for the freedom of the characters’ choice of their subjectivity
and their freedom to take part in the novel writing. The self
contradictory narrative, which is the result of the writer’s amnesia and
the novel’s wrestling with contemporary theory, indicates that the
writer nowadays is going on with his or her writing when it cannot go
on. It is the writer’s freedom to make his narrative go on when it
cannot go on. It must be noted that the narrative freedom in Mantissa
is a kind of freedom within fictional narrative, which may not be
fulfilled in the world of reality. Miles Green is enjoying the bliss of
partial oblivion and seems to be enjoying his privilege of Doctor
Delphie’s sexual therapy in the fictional narrative. However, when he
attempts to break through the narrative to have his freedom of love
with Erato, he is knocked out by the wall, which is no other than his
fantasized brain. He cannot walk out of his brain, which is his studio
for literary creation. As a contemporary novelist, he has to shoulder his
responsibility while enjoying his freedom in the hospital room: he
can’t go on, but he will go on.

17
1
Quoted in “Erotia vs. Pornography.” http://www.aussiediary.com.
2
For a detailed study of Pincher Martin’s two deaths, please see Wang Weixin “The Two Deaths of Pincher Martin: A
Narrative Perspective.” Journal of PLA Foreign Studies University, 2005.2.
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------ Wormholes: Essays and Other Occasional Writings. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998.
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