What is "whole sight"?

[drkellyindc]

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METHOD BEHIND THE CRITIQUE

Following up on the last post, I want to explore some of the method behind Fowles’s critique of the Western tradition in Daniel Martin.

The last part of the chapter “The River Between” finds Jane and Dan in close conversation with the Herr Professor near the stern of the Nile-cruise ship. During their talk, the Herr Professor brings a number of serious charges against their English heritage--its stiff decorum, its impracticality, and its limited notion of freedom. In this conversation England is termed "the Sick Man of Europe." However, it's no accident that during this conversation, the other European representatives aboard the ship are engaged in dancing and reveling at the evening’s gala cabaret, and are not privy to the Herr Professor's views. It is to Dan and Jane’s credit that they seek out his more rarefied company and patiently listen as he chastises their culture; doing so toughens and fortifies them for the journey ahead. Though they haven’t yet put Syria and Palmyra on their travel itinerary, this conversation establishes that their moral constitutions are sturdy enough to face the challenges they will soon find there. The trip to Palmyra will require them to let go of all remaining false comforts and illusions. By submitting to the Herr Professor’s dissection of their national identity, they are vetted for the journey and earn their right of passage.

In the Syria and Palmyra scenes, Fowles draws together many of the threads he has laid out in the novel, and treats them with new urgency. In the following passage from the chapter “The End of the World,” the setting is the Crusader fortress in Syria known as the Krak des Chevaliers, built in the year 1031. (For an image of the fortress, see the wikipedia entry under "Krak des Chevaliers.") The fortress is a brief stop during Jane and Dan’s trip to Palmyra:

They hardly listened anymore to the guide; were far more aware of a kind of quixotic English rightness in being at this monument to primitive power politics and human greed at this totally unsuitable time of year. Europe, out of gear since the beginning; one’s permanent inner exile from its endless historical errors.

Looking at some of the keywords in this passage—

English
Europe
inner exile
historical errors

--one can see that Fowles correlates them in various ways throughout in the novel. Three examples of this include 1) the discussion at the end of “The River Between,” 2) the Krak des Chevaliers scene above, and 3) the first chapter of the novel (I underline the keywords for emphasis):

1) During the Nile-cruise discussion mentioned above, the Herr Professor speaks about his inner exile from Germany’s historical errors; as the talk continues, he compares the national character of England and Germany in the context of Europe after WWII.


2) At the Krak des Chevaliers, Dan and Jane are reminded of their long inner exile from Europe’s historical errors, and find that their English heritage offers a strange kind of refuge. However, it is a chastened Englishness that they find refuge in, since it has successfully passed through the checkpoint guarded by the Herr Professor. It is an Englishness purged of affectation--they no longer have the option of playing “Little British” (520), or of resorting to the other ways Dan has devised of putting on Englishness as a social mask (see 33, 73).

In Syria, Dan and Jane's nationality helps them make sense of an otherwise unnerving encounter with the Crusader fortress. Instead of being merely alienated from the fortress, their English background enables them to affirm a certain strange "rightness" in the situation, despite its bleakness. This and other passages suggest that they've worked through alienation and begun to locate its opposite. The passage also comes as a tiny further indication that Dan, earlier described as "permanently mid-Atlantic" and "semi-expatriate," is by degrees becoming reconciled with his homeland.


3) The impact of the passage above (“Europe, out of gear since the beginning . . .”) is heightened because of the way Fowles has patiently developed its themes. He introduces the four elements above in the novel’s opening chapter, “The Harvest.” There, the year is 1942, and Europe is plunged in its most grievous historical error of the 20th century. Daniel is an English lad of 15—“inscrutable innocent, already in exile”—whose tranquility during a Devon-county August harvest scene is shattered by the appearance of a German combat plane flying overhead, seemingly poised to destroy him.

Fowles’s artistry establishes a kinship between these three moments, though they’re separated by hundreds of pages (in the novel) and by more than three decades (in the novel’s chronology). At age 15 Dan viscerally senses the problem of Europe’s being “out of gear,” but has to wait many years before he can fully grasp and articulate it. In short, Fowles’s critique of the West in Daniel Martin begins at the gut level, and expands to include the mind and heart.


BEYOND CRITIQUE

If Fowles was only aiming for critique, Daniel Martin would be a lesser book than it is. Through his artistry and his intellectual fairness he shows us myriad ways in which Europe is not "out of gear." He brings the positive side of Europe’s culture and legacy to life in a variety of ways—by engaging Jenny’s Anglo-Scottish roots and Andrew’s Anglo-Saxon roots; by celebrating the ancient Etruscan and Minoan cultures; by using physical settings in England, Italy, and Spain; and by selecting characters and cultural touchstones that vividly dramatize Europe’s heritage. Such characters include the Mallorys’ French au pair Gisèle; Andrea, with her Polish background; and the English, French, German, and East European passengers on the Nile cruise.

As for cultural touchstones, Fowles brings in scores of English references, as well as a truly cosmopolitan array of elements drawn from elsewhere in Europe. These include George Seferis’s modern Greek heritage, Georg Lukács’s Hungarian heritage, Rembrandt and Vermeer (Holland), Joyce and Beckett (Ireland), Mozart and Freud (Austria), Bergman (Sweden), Breughel and Van Dyck (Flanders), Carl Dreyer (Denmark), Francisco de Goya and Luis Buñuel (Spain), Homer, Plato, Thucycides, and Socrates (ancient Greece), Carl Jung (Switzerland), John Knox (Scotland), Bach and Thomas Mann (Germany), and Andrea Mantegna (Italy). (For a more complete listing, including non-European references, see my postings above.)

It’s worth reiterating that in Daniel Martin the element of critique is not limited to Europe, but is arguably global in its reach, and goes further than that. Dan describes the ruins at Palmyra as belonging to a reality beyond geopolitical markers: “. . . so apt, so stripping of the outer world, so crying the truth of the human condition.” In the climactic scene there, the phrase connected with the sound the puppies make, “an unhappiness from the very beginning of existence,” cues us to see things no longer in terms of critique but of a tragic aspect of existence itself--a mysterious unrest at the heart of matter, from before recorded time. The symbolism works here because it is supported so carefully, and in such detail, by the other layers of time and civilization in the novel. Moreover, the “unhappiness” is finally not tragic but generative and beautiful, because we see it transformed into something else. It is powerful enough to reach past everything that is halted inside of Jane—and by extension, everything that is halted inside of contemporary women and men. In the ruins at Palmyra, Fowles isolates and distills the force that drives existence forward.

--Kelly

[drkellyindc]

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DEFINITIVE TREATMENT AS AN ASPECT OF WHOLE SIGHT

Why are some of the descriptions in Daniel Martin so elaborate? For instance, why does Fowles refer to “stopped lines of impotent quadrirotal man” (64) when he could just say traffic jam? Why does he say “that eternal nocturnal re-entry into the womb” (609) when he could just say the hero went to sleep?

Some early reviewers (e.g., Newsweek, National Review, New Statesman, and The New Yorker) pointed to such descriptions as evidence that the novel was long-winded or top-heavy. However, I see them as serving a special purpose in Fowles’s “whole sight” project. The project spurred him to find not only a new kind of fictional container but a new way of illuminating its contents.

Definitive descriptions.
The examples above show Fowles taking ordinary activities and imaginatively transforming them. His words convey more than mere descriptive texture; they aim for a definitive approach to the subject at hand. The coined term “quadritotal” (four-wheeled) is unusual enough to lodge in memory—or at least my memory. Even today when I’m waiting in traffic, Fowles’s description sometimes comes back to me, and puts me in mind of the odd relationship between humans and four-wheel vehicles. His words bring a smile of recognition, and make the experience a shade less unpleasant.

The other passage mentioned above, from the chapter “Flights,” also merits attention:

In darkness, bed, that eternal nocturnal re-entry into the womb, he lay for a minute or two staring at the ceiling . . . (609)

At the physical level, this passage shows Daniel getting into bed, and hesitating before falling asleep. However, seen in connection with what precedes it, the phrase “re-entry into the womb” adds a number of other levels:

at the intellectual level, Daniel temporarily retreats from the knot of complexities listed in the previous paragraph (rejection, consolation, absurdity, desire, and so on);

at the psychological level, Daniel takes a step back from various living females--Jane, Jenny, and Caro--and finds refuge in the prenatal link with the original female in his life, his mother, who died before he reached his fourth birthday;

at the archetypal or mythic level, the passage offers a new perspective on what sleep represents not just for Dan but for all other humans.

This same sentence goes on to still further levels before it’s complete; what I want to emphasize here is that the description supports a definitive awareness of going to sleep.

It’s no coincidence that Fowles also provides a definitive account of waking up. This appears in the first paragraph of the chapter “The Bitch”:

Dan was deeply asleep when the knocks came on the door. He called, or groaned, from where he lay. . . For a few moments, still half asleep, he had completely forgotten where he was; he lay trying to conform the room to his bedroom at Thorncombe, in a familiar maze between sequence-despising dream and coherent reality . . . (644)

This passage gives us a crystal-clear account of Daniel waking up at a specific place and time (Palmyra, on the last full day of his travels to the Middle East); but it also imparts an awareness of the very nature and essence of waking up—i.e., what waking up is like for all humans, regardless of the time and place.

* * *

Definitive characters.
Other candidates for this “definitive” approach include characters in the novel. Anthony Mallory is both a sharply drawn, specific individual, and also a definitive portrait of the Oxford don and intellectual Catholic; similarly, Barney Dillon is a tangible individual (married father of three, involved with Caro, etc.), and also a “type” (egotistical media man); the narrator explains in one passage that Barney is a “minor emblem” of Dan’s Oxford generation (105). Other examples of individuals and types:

- Miles Fenwick (Tory Member of Parliament) (329-338)
- Miles Fenwick’s wife (privileged socialite) (329)
- Andrew Randall (the Anglo-Saxon heritage in England) (232)
- Anthony and Jane (north Oxford marriage) (215)
- Dan and Nancy in “Phillida” (summertime teenage romance) (370-404)

It’s worth adding: there’s considerable artistic risk involved in creating characters that work simultaneously as individuals and types. Imbalances can happen in either direction. For instance, Don and Betty Draper on the TV series Mad Men are clearly marked as a quintessential early-1960s U.S. couple, but many viewers find that they’re not sharply enough drawn as individuals; it’s as if they exist more as archetypes than as flesh-and-blood people. On the other hand, in movies like the Oceans Eleven series, the characters have no real archetypal roots, but exist only as the actors who happen to be playing them. Their presences are mostly a compendium of what you remember from their previous roles, or what you happen to project onto them.

Because Daniel Martin is also the self-conscious account of a novel being written, the narrator periodically takes us aside to discuss his craft, as in this "definitive" account of how minor characters function:

Minor characters in scripts are rather like knights in chess: limited in movement, but handy in their capacity for quick turns, for fixing situations. (255)

* * *

What’s the cumulative effect of this definitive tendency in Daniel Martin? Once the separate elements coalesce in a reader's mind, they become more than the sum of various fictional parts; contemporary civilization itself is what one begins to see in an illuminated and definitive way.

--Kelly

[drkellyindc]

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Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

What does “all the rest” mean here? All the rest of what?

The words themselves--“all,” “the,” “rest”—what could be simpler? But the more I look at them in this context, the more complex they become. There are reasonable things to say about them, but I think they draw less upon reason than upon other traits, such as intuition, sensitivity to language, and what might be called tolerance for enigma.

In my view, Daniel Martin’s opening sentence is less a logical proposition than a metaphysical puzzle. I believe it remained a puzzle for Fowles himself, which is why it served his purposes so well. In The Aristos he writes, “Mystery, or unknowing, is energy” (ch. 1, note 73). He describes “the ultimate tension” as being “between what we know and what we know we will never know . . . The more knowledge we have the more intense this mystery becomes” (ch. 6, notes 66-7).

In line with this, my aim in this discussion thread is not to “clear up” the novel’s opening sentence but to deepen and intensify its mystery.

*

“ALL THE REST”: ECHOES AND CONNECTIONS

The phrase “all the rest” recurs in two later passages, both of which offer clues about the opening sentence:

At the end of “Beyond the Door,” as Daniel falls asleep, his subconscious seems to take over as the narrator, and gives voice to this line:

I create, I am: all the rest is dream, though concrete and executed. (221)



In “Tsankawi,” Daniel the narrator speaks in daringly idealized terms about the region’s beauty. For him, the region is not just ineffably beautiful but redemptive:

[Tsankawi] validated, that was it; it was enough to explain all the rest, the blindness of evolution, its appalling wastage, indifference, cruelty, futility . . . Tsankawi defeated time, all deaths. Its deserted silence was like a sustained high note, unconquerable. (346)

In these passages Fowles sets up a tension between a favored term and “all the rest”:

between whole sight and all the rest;

between creative being and all the rest;

between Tsankawi and all the rest.

“Whole sight,” “creative being,” and “Tsankawi” are three ways of describing what is sacred, or what is the ultimate good, in this novel. Other such terms include “the sacred combe,” “the orchard of the blessed,” “right feeling,” and “the river between.” Together they are among the novel’s uppermost virtues or pantheon.

*

If these terms represent the ultimate good, then what becomes of all the rest? Is everything else downgraded to second class? Banished to the children’s table? Treated as leftovers?

Considering the remote and rarefied nature of “whole sight,” we might imagine “all the rest” as constituting 99.9% of creation. If this vast entity were allowed to speak with a single voice, perhaps it would say “What am I, chopped liver?”

Fowles was alert to the risks involved in assigning ultimate value to any one concept or phrase. Such risks include:

• everything else gets demoted to secondary or peripheral importance;
• the favored term becomes doctrinaire, rigidly hierarchical, calcifies into dogma or cliché;
• the favored term becomes an albatross—burdensome, solemn, holier than thou, remote from everyday concerns;
• the favored term supports new forms of elitism and grandiosity on the part of those who are deemed “in the know.”

Fowles not only recognized these tendencies but took steps to counteract them. He found creative ways of laughing at, or otherwise defusing, his favored terms. Examples:

• about “Tsankawi”: he also includes Abe’s wisecracks about the place (346-7);
• about “creative being”: he also ponders whether all art is mere escapism and “superstitious tomb-making” (550-1);
• about “whole sight”: he also talks about the “sheer silliness” of taking “theorists of total consciousness very seriously” (551), and he declares whole sight “impossible” in the novel’s final sentence (673).

The very fact that he pluralized his god-terms shows that he wanted to decentralize them, and to prevent any one of them from becoming monolithic or oppressive.

In a related effort, Fowles made sure to let no form of elitism in the novel go unexamined. Several passages explore the elitist side of Anthony and Jane, with their “priggishness,” “censorious insularity” (286), their habit of looking down their nose at Daniel’s lifestyle and career. Fowles posits the Oxford Movement’s theory of reserve as one of the original causes behind this trait (see 173, 289, 319-20, 419). In a kind of summation passage about the limitations of elitism, Daniel considers what’s missing from Jane’s way of seeing:

It had no lateral or horizontal scope, it was all verticality, obsessive narrow penetration to supposed inner cores and mysteries—souls and absolutes, not skins and common sense; as if such qualities could not be a part of the whole, of truth, because they were so frequent, universal and necessary . . . and had to be demoted to the mere misleading epiphenomena, like moments of animal closeness in the night, of a more elite reality. (649)

(The phrase “demoted to the mere misleading epiphenomena . . . of a more elite reality” is a more sophisticated way of saying “reduced to chopped liver.”)

This passage is about more than the narrator (Daniel) analyzing one of his central characters (Jane); it is also, by extension, about an artist (Fowles) doing a kind of spiritual cost-accountancy with respect to his own creative tools and artistic authority. In this and other such passages, Fowles intervenes against the formation of a new cartel composed of Daniel Martin's preferred terms and values. He does this by examining the terms, situating them, and alerting us to their shortcomings.

In a novel that affirms whole sight in a great many ways, Fowles nonetheless discourages readers from forming a Cult of Whole Sight.

Part of Fowles’s mastery, it seems to me, lies in his knowing when and how much to promote his favored terms, and when and how much to doubt or demote them.

--Kelly

[drkellyindc]

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BOTANICAL WHOLE SIGHT

Is there a more biodiverse book than Daniel Martin?

Earlier I listed the animal names found in the novel; here I’ve assembled a great many of its botanical terms and plant references—its green file, if you will.

Fowles said in interview that novels serve as a “nature reserve for language.” It seems clear that he also envisioned Daniel Martin as a “nature reserve for nature terms.” Perusing this list, I catch a glimpse of the “valley of abundance” Fowles explores in the “Sacred Combe” chapter. Some analogue of God naming the creatures obtains here.

Nature terms in this novel don't merely add color and texture; they help order the characters' lives and pursuits. Fowles often employs plants symbolically. For instance, in the chapter “Phillida,” Daniel and Nancy explore new erotic thresholds in a secret place entirely bounded by Thorncombe greenery. One could say the adult Daniel’s interest in Thorncombe and also Kitchener’s Island arises out of his continued longing to be enclosed and rejuvenated in a womb-like green space. A few other examples of the novel's symbolic or illuminating use of plants:

• Orchids and orchid-hunting are pivotal in connecting Daniel and Anthony as friends, and also in revealing what divides them.
  
• Apples and how they’re grown help to explain divisions between England and the U.S.
  
• A good deal is revealed about Ben and Phoebe through their connection to plants and vegetables, respectively.
  
• The term “reed” serves as a link between Nancy Reed and the woman discovered in the reeds by Daniel and Jane at Oxford; one scholar has observed that Nancy and Jane are both women that Daniel is unable to save.

However, though he incorporates a wealth of plant species in his novel, Fowles also cautions us against relying too much on botanical terms and knowhow. He points up Daniel’s teenage habit of overvaluing what he knows: “He clings to his knowledges; signs of birds, locations of plants, fragments of Latin and folklore, since he lacks so much else” (10). We also see how as an adult, Daniel’s knowing “all the names and the frightfully scientific words” at a site such as Tsankawi emerges as a barrier between him and Jenny (350).

Curiously, Jane is characterized as having “never been much of a country-woman” (323), and yet Daniel likens her in one passage to “nature itself” (441). The resemblance lies in the fact that nature is “catalytic, inherently and unconsciously dissolvent of time and all the naturalist tries to put between himself and his total reality” (441). Where Daniel’s knowledge serves to distance him from Jenny, what he perceives in Jane makes him aware of how his knowledge sells him short.

More about Fowles and biodiversity is found in these books:
John Fowles and Nature, edited by James R. Aubrey
The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles, by Thomas M. Wilson


PLANT LIFE IN DANIEL MARTIN

Flowers
9, 37, 71, 82, 180, 204, 246, 322, 365-6, 380-3, 461, 572, 593, bird of paradise 36, carnation 82, 515, heart’s-ease (wild pansy) 2, 363, lilac 86, poinsettia 11, 506, primrose 86, 434, 445-6, Quaker’s Bonnet primrose 135, primula 82, rose 3, 35, 351, rosebud 34, 93, vine-trellis rose 115, violet 434

Orchids
9-10, 69, 70-2, 112, 181, 191, 197, 312, 361, aestivalis 181, dactylorchis 361, Fly 71, insectifera 191, Monkey 71, purple 181, Spiranthes spiralis 10, 181, Summer Lady’s Tress 181

Trees
73, 276, 292, 298, 325, 345, 350, 353, 375, 379, 383, 397, 428, 434, 568, 572, 593, 645, 667-8, 672, ash 4-6, 8-9, 376, aspen 344, beech 10, 69, 91, 112, 385-6, 392, 420, 456, beechwood 71, 137, 433, cedar 420, cottonwood 343, date-palm 647, 668, elm 88, fruit-trees 83, medlar 78, oak 32, olive 48, 358, palm 11, 517, pine/piñón 225, 290-2, 343-4, 347, 348, sunt 564, sycamore 378, whitebeam 71, yew 88

Apples
4, 372, 383, 391, 420, Beauty of Bath 375, Blenheim 449, Catriona 449, Codling 83,
Cox 375, Fir-apple 449, King Edwards 448, Pippin 83, Russet 83

Pears
Glou Morceau 83, Good Christian 83, honey-pear 290, Jargonelle 83, Musk Bergamot 83, prickly pear 345, Warden 83



Individual species

Acacia 506
Aspidistra 608
Banana 609
Barsim (winter clover) 543
Bean 448, 535
Beet/beetroot 232
Bougainvillea 225, 572
Bracken 378-9, 382, 387-8, 392, 394-6, 433
Brambles 378
Broccoli 448
Bulrush 22
Bush 329, 332, 473, 623, rosebush 363, thornbush 378
Buttercup 29
Cabbage 434, cabbage palms 568
Caraway 382
Castor-oil plant 11
Celandine 434
Celery/celeriac 448
Centaury (a.k.a. earthgalls) 379-80, 393
Cinnamon 568
Clematis armandii (flowering vine) 82
Corn 7, 384
Cumin 635
Dropwort 22
Eyebright 379
Fern 387, 394
Frankincense 102
Frond 387
Geranium 587
Gerbera 587
Germander 381, 405
Grass 23, 86, 91, 379-81, 669, 671, grass-haulm 90, grass-stalk 91, grass-tussock 181
Hay 374, 397
Hemlock 189
Herb 635, medicine herbs 345
Hyssop 24
Ivy 385
Leek 448
Lettuce 250
Lichen 136
Mimosa 506
Mistletoe 403
Moschatel 9
Moss 307
Mushroom 570
Myrrh 102
Myrtle 135
Nettles 372, 374
Opium 595
Orange 635
Osmanthus (flowering shrub) 82, 135
Oxlip 135
Parsley cow-parsley 90, parsley stalk 90
Patchouli 575
Pistachio 499
Pot (marijuana) 474
Potato 448
Rabbit-brush 347
Raspberry 9, 58
Reed 25, chapter-title: “The Woman in the Reeds,” 327, 668
Rush 574
Shallot 448
Shrub 73, 82, shrubbery 371
Speedwell 381, 405
Straw 326, 372-3
Strawberry 382
Sugar-cane 535
Thistle 374, 652, thistledown 3, 334, 395
Thyme 102, 381-2
Thornplant (the origin of the place-name “Thorncombe”) 404
Tibouchina (Brazilian shrub) 224, 246, 461
Trichodendron (flowering plant) 82, 135
Tomato 250
Tunnel-arbor 670
Turnip 362
Violet 434
Water lily 22
Weed 71, dyeing weed 345, tumbleweed 504
Wheat 1-7, 10, 75, 232, 378
Willow 19, 21, 29, 23, 26
Yucca 345

- - -

Related botanical terms

Blossom 428
Botanical specimens 253
Bough 376, 382, 572
Bower 60, 329
Branch 48, 204, 358, 372, 376, 382
Combe 1, 9, 88, chapter-title: “The Sacred Combe,” 290, 378, 433
Copse 292
Countryside 71
Crop 349, 543
Exotic Foliage 599
Farm 346
Field 278, 339, 362-3, 374-5, 378, 384, 404, 408-9, 433, 535
Forest 225, 291, 293
Fruit 250, 317
Garden 82, 135, 148, 207, 225, 233, 237, 278, 290, 336, 345, 347, 363-5, 370-1, 379, 404, 414, 427, 455, 580, 599, 610, 637, botanical garden 572, gardening 82-3

Gorse 387
Greensward 379
Greenwood 288, 292
Grove 425, 517
Haulm 395
Heath 667, 670
Hedge 372, 378, 434
Houseplant 322
Irishman’s heels and seedlings 82
Labellum 72
Lawn 123, 656
Leaf 378, 382, 386, 594
Ley (pasture) 374
Log 420
Manna 569
Meadow 392, 433, 455, 542
Orchard 4, chapter-title: “The Orchard of the Blessed,” 372-3, 375, 425, 427-8, 448
Park 124, 325, “Parke” 329
Pasture 329
Plant 10, 82, 86, 181, 188, 304, 322, 345, 365-6, 543
Root 72, 379
Seed 63, 86, 126, 348, 352, 448, 450, 572
Slough 402
Spice 489
Stem 22, 24, 374, 387, 428
Stump 386
Succulent 322
Tendril 29
Thorncombe Woods 7
Trunk 572
Undergrowth 379, 384
Vegetable 82, 229, 250, 365-6, vegetation 572
Verdure 610
Valley 289-90, 326, 347, 349, 379, 402, 527, 656
Wicker 667, 671
Wilderness 293, 402-4, 627
Wood/woods 244, 292, 347, 369, 382, 386-7, 402, 420, 671
Yard 399, 404, courtyard 620


Named plants

Fruit trees at Thorncombe: “Aunt Millie’s Tree” 83, “the Yellow Devil” 83, “the Green Spice” 83

--Kelly

[drkellyindc]

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MUSIC AND DANIEL MARTIN

What is musical about Daniel Martin?

Recently it occurred to me that it’s like a triple concerto, with its tonalities and atonalities, phrasings, tempos, syncopations, cross-harmonics, and melodic recurrences. Below is a quotation that likens Daniel Martin to a symphony orchestra.

Questions from a different angle: how does Daniel Martin incorporate music? What does it have to say about music? I put together the material below with such questions in mind.


Musical instruments:

Bell 86, 90-1, 394
Concertina 394
Drum 553, 561, 650
Flute 91, 650
Gong 400
Harp 580
Lute 142
Oboe 62
Piano 207, grand piano 206, 599
Posthorn 123
Rebec 553
Tambourine 553
Trumpet 507
Violin 225, 247


Composers and performers in history:

Ashkenazy, Vladimir 461
Bach, Johann Sebastian 600-1, 631
Chopin, Frederick 599-600, mazurka 599
Delius, Frederick 62
Goldberg, Johann 600-1, 631
Handel, George Frideric, composer of the oratorio The Messiah 91
Jennen, Charles, librettist for Handel’s The Messiah 91
Leoncavallo, Ruggiero, composer of the opera Pagliacci 130
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 450, Symphony in G minor, 450, sonata 600
Richter, Sviatoslav 600


Miscellaneous musical references:

Andante 631
Ballad 85
Band with scarlet uniforms and silver instruments 123
Bass 5
Boating-chant 584
Cabaret 266, 552, cabaret-cum-music-hall act 494
Camelot, 1967 film version of Lerner and Loewe musical 14
Chorus 488
Composing 19, great composers 590
Concert 256, 461, 599, concert-hall 462
Conductor 85
Croon 256
ETC revue (at Oxford) 19
Evensong 316
Folk-song 369, folk-sound 618, a makeshift folk-band 553
Harmony 346
Hum 381
Hymns 34, 85, 86
Jukebox 524
Music 450, 590, 599-602, musics 346, musical 225, baroque music 600
Music-hall 266, music-hall characters 266
Musical key 358, 361, changing to a remote key, modulation 594, same key 600
Musical resolution 654
Muted 340
Orchestra 553
Pianist 599
Pop music: pop tune 434, American music 618
Psalm 86
Quartet 48
Radio 227, 618, radio music 216
Record 450
Round-dance 115
Singing 19, 34, 91, 266, 384, 584, famous singer 618
Sonata form, da capo 389
Sustained high note 346
Symphony 450
Tenor 90
Tune: in tune 266, out-of-tune 580
Unplayed instruments 600


Moments where music serves as a distraction, or prevents communication:

• On Jane’s son Paul and his generation:

  For all his current interest, Paul was a town boy, and with all the new town-dominated media conforming his and his generation’s mind . . . even the ploughmen carried transistors in their tractor cabins now. There was a village joke about one who got so drowned in some pop tune that he forgot to lower his shares after a headland turn and was seen driving all the way down the return furrow with his tail cocked up ‘like an ol’ pheasant.’ (434)

  
  
• The jukebox on the Nile ship serves as a distraction for the “Barge-borne Queen”’s young companion, and as a noise barrier to Jane: “I can’t really hear with that thing pounding away.” (524)
  
  
• The amplified folk-band music on the Nile-cruise cabaret night turns away Daniel and Jane, as well as the Herr Professor. Daniel tells the Herr Professor, “The noise is too much for us.” (553)

Other noteworthy musical elements:

• Daniel’s impression of the Pueblo site in New Mexico known as Tsankawi: “. . . Tsankawi defeated time, all deaths. Its deserted silence was like a sustained high note, unconquerable.” (346)
  
  
• Daniel has an epiphany while listening to Mozart’s Symphony in G minor:

  The music behind him: he felt an abrupt wave of happiness, richness, fecundity, as if he was in advance of the actual season outside and transported two months on into full spring . . . Just as the green-gold music had, beneath the balance, the effortless development and onwardness, its shadows, so also was there a component of sadness in Dan’s happiness: he was happy because he was a solitary at heart, and that must always cripple him as a human being. (450)

  
  
• As Labib drives Daniel and Jane to Palmyra, there’s a small conflict over what music will play in the car:

  He switched on the radio and the car was filled with folk-sound. He fiddled for ‘American music,’ but they made him return to the original wavelength: a woman’s voice, sinuous, alternately sobbing and languorous, against a plangent rhythm. (618)

  
  
  
• Daniel, brooding about his artistic career: “He saw himself as being like someone with a deep feeling for an art, but no creative talent for it; what one felt occasionally before great composers and executants in music . . .” (590)
  
  
• The night before their flight from Aswan, Egypt, back to Cairo, Daniel and Jane overhear an impromptu piano concert at the Old Cataract Hotel. From their seats on an outside terrace, they overhear a Russian pianist play J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations:

  They sat in the endless sound, the precise baroque complexity, so calculated, so European; in the African darkness. Dan’s mind drifted away after a while, into the night, the stars: saw the pair sitting down there, before a table, three feet apart, in what seemed to possess the lifelessness of sculpture, of waxworks, of unplayed instruments. And gradually there stole on him, both with the music and from outside it, a sense of release, a liberation from lies, including the one he had told himself before dinner. It was less that the music particularly moved him, he had never really enjoyed Bach, but it did carry a deep intimation of other languages, meaning-systems, besides that of words; and fused his belief that it was words, linguistic modes, that mainly stood between Jane and himself. Behind what they said lay on both sides an identity, a syncretism, a same key, a thousand things beyond verbalization. (600)

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Here, again, is a quotation from Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia:

Intricacy, density, design--I'm not sure what to call it, but when I read Mary Lee Settle's Blood Tie, Anne Tyler's Celestial Navigation, or John Fowles's Daniel Martin, I hear a symphony orchestra.

--Kelly

[drkellyindc]

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“COSMIC” WHOLE SIGHT

In an earlier posting I explored how Fowles expands the scope of Daniel Martin from England and Englishness to include other nationalities, cultures, and geographies. Although the references are not as frequent, Fowles does also position his earth-bound cast and locations in relation to the rest of the cosmos.

Here’s a rundown of many of the novel’s astronomical and cosmological references (noted in boldface):

Thistledown floats southward across the field, in a light air from the north, mounting, a thermal, new stars for the Empyrean. (3)

The sun in the extreme west, as he likes it best. (9)

The [church] beside the Vicarage had a massive fluted and streamlined tower soaring . . . like a space rocket within its cone-capsule. (88)

I had passed several light-years beyond her comprehension by then . . . but not her forgiveness. That outreached all time and space. (89)

I saw the two girls wade in, then both turn and call to us. They stood hand in hand, like a pair of sea-nymphs, in the starlight. (115)

Like Lucifer: I will exalt my throne above the stars of God . . . and set it among the stars of Hollywood. (174)

[The early stages of an artistic project:] I might complain, but I also knew it was in many ways the most enjoyable time, and precisely because of this necessary aspect of retreat, of secrecy . . . as one might feel to be the first man ever to set foot on a desert island, a new planet. (289)

“You don’t realize primroses seem like another planet.” (445)

“Are you sure you aren’t on the moon?” (446)

The sky was clearing to the south and west, and the setting winter sun had got through for the first time since his return. (455)

You would like her, Dan, even though she’s a Californian-style poor little rich girl, ten planets away from Europe and its shabbiness and poverty and making-do. (460)

She had caught a little color during the day, from the sun. (496)

Here and there a dim-glowing point, as of an oil-lamp; the stars, the quiet rush of the water. (519)

The night, the stars, the onwardness, were somehow depressing now; monotonous, meaningless. (524)

And then there came what was almost an envy of the simplicities of life in this green and liquid, eternally fertile and blue-skied world; just as some denizen of an icier, grimmer planet, might look on, and envy, Earth. (527)

He said, “You’ve caught the sun today. . . Gives you a nice gipsy air.”
. . . She had caught the sun, and in fact looked much younger. (553)

Limitless sands, broken by harsh black basaltic outcrops, scorched by millennia of unrelenting sun, stood and waited, or so it seemed, for the great river to run dry. (568)

The flight south, over the moonscape and amoeba-shaped islands of Lake Nasser, the limitless rippling dunes of the Nubian desert, was spectacular enough; and at first sight, the resurrected temples also. (592)

The night, the faint smell of the river, stars, the filtered lamps from inside reflected in the exotic foliage below the balustraded terrace; Jane appeared, a dark figure, and walked down toward him, in and out of the latticed light. (599)

“That music. It made me feel the absurdity of this distance between us. When there’s all that frozen distance up there. I’m sorry, this is very trite, but . . .” (602)

There seemed no children, no hope; a world the rest of the world had forgotten, as far from the glitter of Beirut as the landscapes of the moon. (619)

“No man or woman ever fully understand what they’ve each become. If that condition has to be fulfilled, the two sexes ought to be living on different planets. (629)

--Kelly

[drkellyindc]

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DANIEL MARTIN AND MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES

Intelligence is a hallmark of Daniel Martin, as it is in other Fowles writings. It’s worth asking, though, what kinds of intelligence are engaged? What does Fowles impart about the strengths and limitations of various intelligences?

This passage from The French Lieutenant’s Woman, chap. 9, suggests that Fowles was savvy about multiple intelligence long before the phrase became widely used:

Sarah was intelligent, but her real intelligence belonged to a rare kind; one that would certainly pass undetected in any of our modern tests of the faculty.

In 1983, developmental psychologist Howard Gardner divided intelligence into eight basic types: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. This eight-part system suggests still another way of perceiving “whole sight” as manifest in Daniel Martin. In what follows I look at the interplay between Gardner’s framework and Fowles’s novel.


1. Linguistic intelligence.

It’s clear throughout the novel that Daniel is highly gifted at putting words together. The explicit references to Daniel’s writing abilities often appear in incidental or indirect ways:

• In the Oxford hospital scene, Anthony says that Daniel’s being there speaks louder than any words--“even from someone of your skill with them” (180).
• At one point in the after-dinner political discussion at Compton, Conservative M.P. Miles Fenwick wonders aloud to Daniel, “Why should you be paid the same fees as a writer ten times your inferior?” (335).
• During a fraught discussion with Jane at Palmyra’s Hotel Zenobia, Daniel says he has betrayed “the only two things for which I ever had any talent. Handling words, and loving one single other human being wholly” (631).

Daniel’s skill with words can also reveal his civilizing kindness, as seen in his behavior with the Cockney twins Miriam and Marjory:

They would often have talked all night, if I hadn’t stopped them. They had been starved all their lives of confession—had never met a professional word-man before, someone who could coax, listen, correct them without hurting them. (266)

However, if Daniel Martin affirms the positive uses of language, it also recognizes that language has limitations, and can work in negative ways. Sometimes language drives a wedge between people:

• over an Italian dinner in Oxford, Jane gives Daniel just enough conversational rope to hang himself (198)
  
• at Compton, Jane’s son Paul snobbishly insists that Ping-Pong be referred to as table tennis instead (316)
  
• at Tsankawi, sensing Daniel’s dislike for period slang, Jenny half-apologizes about using the term “uptight” (350)
• on the Nile cruise, Jane recoils against the pretenses of her French fellow-passengers, for whom “Even insects don’t truly exist until their presence has been announced in the only real language” (510)

As a professional secretary and the daughter of a professional word-man, Caro is defensive with her dad about her lack of university education, and her “dreadful English” (121). She feels “inarticulate” with him (225), and says “I don’t use words very accurately” (240). Daniel attempts to reassure her: “You mustn’t think everything can be said in language” (240).

Other examples of language and its limitations:

• at an early age, Daniel pays a social price for using language as he does (“He is shy and ashamed of his own educated dialect of the tongue” [4]); and a personal price for having a father who preaches as he does (78-9) and who uses words like “encomium” in ordinary conversation (375). Despite Daniel’s education, he can still be baffled by Nancy Reed’s use of language (specifically French and Latin) (381).
  
• Marjory openly mocks Daniel for being too bookish, explaining to Miriam why he’s never been to the dog-races: “It’s ’is books. ’E loves ’is books” (269).
• In a joke told by the Herr Professor, excessive refinement with language becomes fatal for an Englishman in French Africa: he’s eaten by a crocodile because he is seemingly incapable of hearing anything but over-refined British syntax (558-9).
• In a soulful moment during the terrace scene, while listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Daniel senses “a deep intimation of other languages, meaning-systems, besides that of words . . . a thousand things beyond verbalization” (600).

See also:

• Daniel and Jane listen to Mitch and Marcia Hooper in conversation “as a professional pianist listens to an untalented amateur” (521).
• Difference in language use between England and the U.S. (74-5)

2. Musical intelligence.

Although Daniel has “no practical knowledge of music” (599), and indeed “had never really enjoyed Bach” (600), he still senses that the composer’s “Goldberg Variations,” as played one evening at the Old Cataract Hotel, carries “a deep intimation of other languages, meaning-systems, besides that of words” (600). Daniel’s narration includes an array of musical references (see my July 15, 2010, posting on the thread “What is ‘whole sight’?”), and tributes to the classical composers Delius (62), Chopin (599-600), Handel (91), Leoncavallo (130), and Mozart (450, 600).

Popular music doesn’t fare as well in the novel:

• At Thorncombe, the cautionary tale of a village ploughman “drowned in some pop tune” (434) reads like an advance critique of the Ipod generation.
• The amplified folk-band at the Nile-cruise gala cabaret creates a “pounding din” that sends Dan and Jane (and the Herr Professor) rushing to the nearest exit (553).
• On the road to Palmyra, Westerners Dan and Jane insist on hearing plangent Middle Eastern music over Easterner Labib’s preference for “American music” (618).

A deeper register of musical intelligence in the novel lies in its melodic undercurrents, motifs, cross-harmonics—the “symphony orchestra” that Katherine Paterson says she hears when she reads it.



3. Logical-mathematical intelligence.

• This form of intelligence is embodied in Anthony, who remains at Oxford after graduation and becomes a philosophy teacher and don. Anthony and Jane’s first meeting at Oxford involves his explaining the French philosopher and mathematician Descartes to her (72). Years later, when he becomes a don, he avoids talking about philosophy to the lay world (71). His books find their way alongside the other “serried and silent regiments of philosophy and would-be human wisdom” on his bookshelves (208); Daniel admits he lacks the patience and the mental equipment to read them (71). Although Daniel is slow to recognize the defect of Anthony’s “singlemindedness” (72), Jane soon wises up about one of his blind spots: “He assumes things about people he’d never assume about a theory of logic or a syllogism” (57-8). It takes many years for Anthony himself to catch on to this blind spot, as he belatedly tells Daniel: “Mind has dominated our marriage . . . And all its toys” (185) . . . “When I think of the vain thousands of words I’ve wasted . . . on abstract propositions and philosophical angel-counting” (191).
  
• Nevertheless, the opposite tendency also has its downside. If the “too much” in this department is manifest in Anthony, Nell represents the “too little” aspect, at least in Daniel’s estimation. As his marriage to her declines, he recoils against the trait of “illogicality” she seems to embody (149).
  
• Late in the novel, Daniel reaches the limits of his own logical-mathematical intelligence. After his talk with Jane on the Old Cataract Hotel terrace, Daniel likens his conflict of feelings to “some equation too involved for his knowledge of emotional mathematics to solve” (608-9).

4. Spatial intelligence.

• During his taxi-ride to the L.A. airport, Daniel likens himself to “an I in the hands of fate, Isherwood’s camera” (63). Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was an English-born writer who emigrated to the U.S. in 1939 and settled in Hollywood, CA. In Goodbye to Berlin he wrote,

  I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

  The camera’s-eye-view recurs in Daniel Martin as a way of signaling either physical or metaphorical forms of orientation:
  • During their tour of Cairo, Assad occasionally makes “a director’s frame-finder with his hands, to be sure Dan saw the visual possibilities” (495)
  • On the Nile cruise, Daniel criticizes the excessive use of photography among the tourists, and Jane mocks him for being a “traitor” to his medium (528)
  • During the Kobbet el Hawa cliff excursion, Daniel experiences a profoundly disturbing sense of spatial and temporal dislocation, “as if he were a camera, merely recording, at a remove from present reality” (570-1; see also 579)
• Daniel describes Abe Nathan as “not a foot-oriented American.” At Tsankawi, Abe’s sense of spatial anxiety or agoraphobia manifests in a stream of defensive jokes about the place (346-7)
• In “Westward,” Jane’s son Paul makes somewhat comic attempts to orient himself with maps while exploring an ancient field system (358, 360)

5. Bodily (kinesthetic) intelligence.

• On Daniel’s experience of the Thorncombe harvest:

  The insides of his forearms are sore already, his fingers not being strong enough to carry the sheaves far by grasp. . . . But he likes the pain--harvest pain, a part of the ritual; like the stiff muscles the next morning, like sleep that night, so drowning, deep and swift to come. (3)

• On Daniel’s response to Anthony’s invitation to come to Oxford:

  The decision is on him, almost before he knows it is there, and he feels—the image is from seeing, not experience—like a surfer, suddenly caught on the crest, and hurled forward. (47)

• On “body language” and not talking during sex:

  Limbs are nouns and action verbs, and there is nothing more profoundly destroying of all but skin pleasure than the need to assess and analyze what is really a perfectly sufficient language in itself; and like music, to be enjoyed best in silence. (169)

• The French au pair Gisèle’s perception of how two middle-class English people respond to a death in the family: “Anglo-Saxon sangfroid . . . these English with their phlegm, their stone-cold blood.” (209-11)
• Paul’s accusing body language on the drive to Compton: “He sat . . . strangely thrust back, like someone who doesn’t trust the driver.” (313)
• On the link between physical movement and self-knowledge, during Daniel’s late-night walk in his Thorncombe orchard: “Even as Dan walked, he knew himself, partly in the very act of walking and knowing . . .” (428)
• On rediscovering the joys of sexual connection:

  He had an acute and poignant memory, re-experience, of what it had been like, once, before so many other undressings and goings to bed had numbed it, to drop like this out of the intellectual, the public, into the physical and private . . . the strange simplicity of it, the delicious shock, the wonder that human beings bothered with any other kind of knowledge or relationship. (639)

• In a bleak moment at Palmyra, Daniel privately nurses his judgment that Jane represents “souls and absolutes, not skins and common sense.” (649)

See also: Daniel likened to a bird that can’t stop migrating (293, 504, 630)



6. Interpersonal (social) intelligence.

This aspect is epitomized by scholar Robert Alter in the essay “Daniel Martin and the Mimetic Task” (1981):

. . . the long effort [Daniel] needs to make in order to see who Jane is resembles . . . what most reasonably reflective people have to undergo in trying honestly to know someone else.

In other words, this novel provides not just an example of such an interpersonal process, but a model for it.

Other touchstones for interpersonal intelligence:

• Daniel describes Jane as “Very . . . meticulous over personal relationships. Very scrupulous” (48). (Astute readers will note how much this also describes John Fowles as a novelist.)
• In returning to England at Anthony’s request, Daniel is reintegrated with his extended family—“this loose, warm web of clan” (235)--and becomes a “prodigal uncle returned to the fold” (409). Rejoining the clan does have it downsides, as Daniel reflects after a day spent fully immersed in family goings-on. He says he felt “unreal” to himself, “too full of polite lies, unnatural smiles and urbanities, conventional middle-class behaviors” (244).
• Daniel’s main objective as an Oxford student is “to mix, to prink and prance” among people drawn together “by a common love of the exhibitionistic” (70). However, in middle age he describes himself as not a “people person” (352). Given this, it takes him a long time and effort to realize and act on his capacity for “loving one single other person wholly” (631).
• While Daniel Martin examines the historical transition into the age of self, it also alerts us to how “the selfish present is somehow selling us all short” (167). The conflict between selfishness and selflessness is played out as a tension between the pleasure-seeking Daniel and the pleasure-withholding Jane. One evening during their Nile cruise they argue about problems of the age of self; Jane’s conclusion, as related by Daniel, is that “worship of self channeled all feeling inward, and that was suicidal in an age where the world clearly needed outwardness” (530).
• Daniel’s declining marriage to Nell is marked by what he calls “agapicide” (140); however, in middle age, in his interaction with Jane, he discovers, “for the first time in his life, the true difference between Eros and Agape” (600).
• After her encounter with the ruins and the puppies at Palmyra, Jane shows a healthy ability to stop brooding about her problems, and a new capacity for reaching outside herself instead. Responding to Daniel’s invitation to go into still more analysis of her behavior, she says, “Talk about anything, Dan. But not about me” (655).

7. Intrapersonal (psychological) intelligence.

Psychological studies have characterized Daniel’s growth in the novel as a model for the process of individuation (Carol Barnum, 1988), and as a model for the self successfully overcoming narcissism (Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, 1993). The scholar Robert Arlett details Daniel’s progression from being a “mirror obsessed narcissist at Oxford” to his achieving “a humanistic maturity where will is tempered or coupled with compassion” (Epic Voices, “In Penelope’s Arms,” 1996). A few other examples of the novel’s intrapersonal or psychological intelligence:

• Anthony’s view of his own shortcoming: “I have looked at myself. All my adult life. But as I am. Not as I might have been, or ought to have been.” (191)
• After a day of being re-connected with his extended family in Oxford and London, Daniel encounters “the reality of solitude” in the street outside Caro’s apartment. He perceives a tramp rummaging through castoff items as “his lost real self . . . a thing living on the edge of existence in a night street of his psyche.” (244)
• At Tsankawi, Jenny says she’s a “people person,” and Daniel notes how little this applies to him:

  “. . . I was fundamentally an observer and storer of correspondences—like some iceberg, with nine tenths of what really pleased and moved me sunk well below the understanding of the people I moved among, and however intimately.” (352)

• The chapter “In the Orchard of the Blessed” is an extended meditation emanating from deep within Daniel’s psyche. To account for his life’s focus being inward rather than outward, he borrows a term from chemistry: “. . . his ens, in the old alchemists’ sense of the word, ‘the most efficacious part of any mixed body,’ triumphed over his outward biography.” (430)
• Listening to Mozart’s G minor symphony prompts Daniel to recognize “he was happy because he was a solitary at heart, and that must always cripple him as a human being.” (450)
• Preferring to do his inward work in solitude, Daniel objects to “all this psychoanalysis at breakfast” in his discussion with Caro. (283)
• Some of the benefits Jane and Daniel note about traveling to the Nile “later in life” have to do with age and subjectivity: “one knew more, saw more, felt more.” (510)
• One recurring theme of the novel is the trait of hiding, and what it both conceals and reveals about Daniel, and about the English psyche (10, 71, 140, 231, 288, 353). At one point Daniel states outright, “I have always needed secrets” (68). He also sees this trait writ large among his fellow countrymen; on a train to Oxford Daniel takes note of a general trait among his travel companions: “fear of exposure, this onanistic fondling of privacy” (140).
• Late in the novel, there’s a caution about the dangers of moving too far into an inwardly defined world: while visiting rock tombs at the Kobbet el Hawa cliff near Kitchener’s Island, Daniel has a few moments of profound disorientation, and experiences premonitions of “something pathological, a madness, a declared schizophrenia.” Jane doesn’t say or do anything noteworthy during this episode, but Fowles still provides clues about how much her presence restores Daniel’s mental equilibrium. (At this moment, it’s as if she plays Orpheus leading Dan’s Eurydice out of the underworld.) The episode concludes with Daniel following Jane down a steep slope near the tombs; when the ground levels out he comes beside her, “damning death and introspection.” (572)

8. Naturalist intelligence.

• Daniel’s boyhood connection to nature is not just a hobby or pastime but an answer to his deepest psychological needs:

  My solitary boyhood had forced me to take refuge in nature as a poem, a myth, a catalysis, the only theater I was allowed to know; it was nine parts emotion and sublimation, but it acquired an aura, a mystery, a magic in the anthropological sense. (71)

• His intense connection to nature manifests in certain early traits. As a small boy he rushes into breakfast shouting the Greek and Latin names of the family plants as if they were beloved pets (82). In adolescence he “clings to his knowledges” about birds and plants (10), and thinks of himself as “clever-clever” for knowing their names (91). His attraction to Nancy Reed, his first teenage love, owes a good deal to what he senses about her family: both their earthiness and their spirituality feel more authentic to him than what he finds back home at the Vicarage (78-80, 368-70). No wonder he ends up purchasing the property the Reeds used to live on!
• Nature for Daniel is a “buried continent” (69), and continues being so into middle age. As an adult he writes,

  It still takes very little, a weed in flower at the foot of a concrete wall, the flight of a bird across a city window, to re-immerse me; and when I am released from deprivation, I can’t stop that old self from emerging. (71)

• At Oxford as a young adult, Daniel solidifies his friendship with Anthony during their botanizing expeditions. Anthony is a “crack field botanist” (71), for whom nature is like a “crossword puzzle, a relief in concrete objects from abstract ideas” (72). Anthony unwittingly resurrects Daniel’s complicated boyhood relation to nature—an internalized reality suffused with poetry and mystery, and permanently marked by repression, trauma, and loss (70-2).
• Daniel makes no claim to being a “serious naturalist” (71)—indeed, he confesses that he's someone who “walked wet fields once a year, between cities; and loved it only because he so largely escaped it” (434). However, his specialized knowledge about nature still gets him into trouble with Jenny. In terms of Gardner’s multiple-intelligence system, his naturalist side conflicts with her preference for the interpersonal. During their visit to Tsankawi, Jenny says, “. . . I don’t want to know all the names and the frightfully scientific words . . . I’m a people person” (350). When Daniel says she “shouldn’t justify contempt from ignorance,” she says that’s what he’s doing with respect to her feelings (350).
• A paradox: on one hand, Daniel says that Jane “had never been much of a country-woman” (323); on the other, he likens her to “nature itself . . . inherently and unconsciously dissolvent of time and all the naturalist tries to put between himself and his total reality” (441).
• The last part of this quotation leads to another paradox: although nature is for Daniel a “buried continent,” he’s also aware of what’s missing from the strictly scientific naturalist’s outlook. The novel provides several ways of grasping this paradox. For instance, the scholar K. A. Chittick (“The Laboratory of Narrative and John Fowles’s Daniel Martin,” 1985) has pointed out that “The River Between” chapter begins with Daniel’s pedantic observations--classifying birds according to type, sounding like an amateur bird-lover (542-3)--and moves into the Herr Professor’s more fully knowledgeable and engaged viewpoint, speaking about bird symbolism, about his own hardest life decisions, and about his enigmatic awareness of an entity he calls “the river between” (560-1). In broad terms, the chapter moves from Daniel’s limited rationalism into the Herr Professor’s expansive perception beyond rationalism. That Daniel the novelist presents the chapter this way suggests that he has absorbed the Herr Professor’s lesson. This is a link between Daniel Martin and other Fowles heros, Nicholas Urfe, Maurice Conchis (The Magus) and Charles Smithson (The French Lieutenant’s Woman): all of them are intelligent and sensitive men who need to be provoked out of their complacent overreliance on scientific rationalism.

On naturalist intelligence see also:

• at Thorncombe, gardener Ben’s relation to plants (366)
• the character Andrew Randall: as the inheritor of a baronetcy and of Compton estate, he pretends as if the “earth, trees his grandsires planted, meant nothing to him” (325); and yet this attitude is belied by his expertise in handling physical aspects of the estate and its livestock (326, 335)
• the scholarly books John Fowles and Nature (edited by James R. Aubrey) and Thomas M. Wilson’s The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles.

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There’s no scientific consensus about the validity of Howard Gardner’s model, but I still find it useful. Gardner also entertained questions about artistic intelligence and the imagination; about moral and existential intelligence; and about aspects such as intensity, complexity, drive, and advanced development. (See Wikipedia entries for “Howard Gardner” and “multiple intelligences.”)

--Kelly