Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)

Tibor Tóth: Fiction as the 'River Between': Daniel Martin

58 TIBOR TÓT! I bility or impossibility of getting home will become one of the central theoretical concerns of the novel as well. The question is whether Daniel Martin can 'get home' to his country and regain his right to dream about love, friendship, countryside and an adequate form of art which can formulate his yearning for a form of life which is freed of the tyranny of money and success. The form of art he dreamed of as a young man was drama. The availability of this form of literature to fiction was convincingly demonstrated earlier in The Magus where the 'art world' efficiently supported the idea that fiction is an extremely flexible form of literature, which can absorb a number of possible artistic formulae, offered up by other arts. Daniel Martin will express his intentions to write a novel entitled Daniel Martin

, which is the novel we are about to finish when the intention is formulated As we have already mentioned reading the novel we find out that Daniel Martin the scriptwriter working for Hollywood productions discovers that financial wealth, fame and success with women cannot compensate for the loss of his dreams to write drama. Consequently he starts writing a novel which is, actually, John Fowles's novel, entitled Daniel Martin. The first section of the novel is a mixture of film and fiction and its effect is negative in the extreme. This negative aesthetics is created through the dialogic sections of the novel, which are dense with technical solutions characteristic of film-scripts. They are intended to suggest at the level of discourse and style the alien character of the world chosen earlier by the title character. Stage directions and technical directions interrupt the fictional material and they very often disturb, technically deconstruct the tone, if not the flow of the main narrative. For example, the dialogue between the title character and his mistress ends with a short cut and thus aggressively contradicts our expectations and of course the authorial intention is to 'stain the water clear.'

6 The above irregularities stress one of the themes behind the novel, namely the author's meditation on the difference between film and novel and the status of the artists who together contribute to the creation of a film and the solitary novelist. 6 Reference goes to William Balke's formula employed in "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence.