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
FICTION AS THE 'RIVER BETWEEN': DANIEL MARTIN 71 ute to the unnatural character of the book which can be explained as the representation of the artist, life and art seen as "character(s) who must be seen in flight, like a bird that has forgotten how to stop migrating." (D. M. 295) This 'migration' from one art to another, from one dimension in time to another, from artificial to natural life is supported by Daniel Martin's anxiety which stems from his understanding that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, reminiscent of John Fowles's theory regarding the situation of the novel in the twentieth century, when he states that if the novel is to survive it has to narrow its field to what other systems of recording cannot record. I say 'one day' because the reading public still isn't very aware of what I call misch an elling [..-]. 1 6 This individual and artistic anxiety is explained at the level of social and moral development as well at the beginning of the novel when he states that his contemporaries were brought up in the spirit of the nineteenth century because the twentieth century only started after 1945. The statement is interesting with regards to the development of fiction, the genre Daniel Martin is trying to return to because the disputes about insistence on the material world as opposed to the representation of the artist's and its protagonists' interior world started much earlier. The criticism is then addressed to those who let themselves, their perception and presentation be reduced to the material world, its artifice in search of "something discontinuous and disconnected from present being." (.D . M. 95) Of course, Daniel Martin's personal failure is described in terms of the more private dimension of man woman relationship when he shows himself as someone who wants to define his identity by using the surface-reflection of him formulated by women. He was arguably not even looking for women in all this, but collecting mirrors still; surfaces before which he could make himself naked —or at any rate more naked than he could before other men —and see himself reflected. A psychoanalyst might say he was something for the lost two-in-one identity 1 6 Fowles, John. 1964. "I Write Therefore I Am." In Wormhotes, 5-12. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999, 7.
