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

68 TIBOR TÓT! I Dan will compensate for the lost time and possibilities as his relationship with Jane assumes the optimistic tone of the happiness he could not sense some twenty years earlier. This more 'optimistic' ending is accompanied by the change of the narrative technique of the novel. In the moment Daniel Martin manages to abandon interpreting his life as if it were a film and return to a more comprehensive tradition which is fiction he becomes able to restore some of the essential dimensions of one's perception of reality, of the existential. Katherine Tarbox explains John Fowles's attitude aixl the nature of the above narrative strategy. Fowles believes that linear time is an artificial measuring device imposed upon experience, the real time is nebulous and that all time lies parallel.

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3 Dan returns with Jane to Thorncombe and they feel that they get home to precious experiences of their youth. He does it also by rejecting film-writing and committing himself to writing, with Jane's encouragement, an autobiographical novel whose hero is named Simon Wolfe. As Katherine Tarbox notes Daniel Martin has to escape the tyranny of the cinema. Dan's art lapses into present-tense narration mimic, the present tense tyranny of the camera.

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4 He manages to escape this tyranny and the novel reproduces the tonal recovery of the-characters at the level of its texture. One of the most curious features of this novel is that it changes abruptly two thirds of the way through. It changes, of course at the section that deals with Dan and Jane going up the Nile. The crazy-quilt structure gives way to a very traditional, linear, sequential narration.

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5 We may say that Daniel Martin is a novel, which is quite difficult to read because it contains technical solutions and methods, which belong to another sort of art, which is film. John Fowles has repeatedly men1

3 Tarbox, Katherine. 1988. The Art of John Fowles. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 7. 1

4 Tarbox 1988, 89. 1

5 Tarbox 1988, 100.