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
72 TIBOR TÓT! I of his first months of life; some solution for his double separation trauma, the universal one of infancy and the private experience of literally losing his mother. (D. M. 255-56) Daniel Martin understands that the traditional definition of harmony, unity, order traps people into self-discipline, and restraint and this is ultimately the strategy that made of him a kind of authority in a world which is as artificial as the Victorian world dominated by the image of God. Daniel Martin discovers that homecoming in both terms of art and life is to know the difference between conventions and individual freedom, financial prosperity and spiritual redemption. She was also some kind of emblem of a redemption from life devoted to heterogamy and adultery, the modern errant ploughman's final reward; and Dan saw ... for the first time in his life, the true difference between Eros and Agape. (D. M. 596) [Or Eros and civilisation, we might add.] As we have already stated most notably, the novel explains the importance of absorbing the possibilities offered by contemporary rival arts. Daniel Martin understands that "dialogue is the only tool of the scriptwriter, but it is only a part of the novelist's art." The novel's insistence on two narrative points is abandoned in the last part and thus the T and the 'he' is telling about the union of showing and telling and of the rebirth of past in present, much in the fashion described by Fowles. I have heard writers claim that this first-person technique is a last bastion of the novel against the cinema, a form where the camera dictates an inevitable third-person point of view of what happens, however much we may identify with one character. But the matter of whether a contemporary novelist uses 'he' or 'I' is largely irrelevant. The great majority of modern third person narration is T narration very thinly disguised. The real T of the Victorian writers —the writer himself or herself —is as rigorously repressed there [...] as it 1 7 Ibid., 93.
