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 73 is, for obvious semantic and grammatical reasons, when the narration is in literal first-person. 1

8 John Fowles's "I Write Therefore I Am" seems to offer relevant help when trying to formulate conclusions to our discussion of Daniel Martin. Why have I got it in for the novel? Because it has been shifted away from life, whatever, as Wittgenstein put it, is the case, these last fifty years. Circumstances have imposed this shift. It is not the novelists' fault. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel was at one remove from life. But since the advent of film and television and sound recording it is at two removes. The novel is now generallv about things and events, which other forms of art describe rather better. [...] All of us under forty write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, 'shoot' scenes, and write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a lot of novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an unmade and never-to-be-made film into words.

1

9 Bibliography Barthes, Roland. 1987. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press. Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Paris: Editions de Seuil. Cassagrande, Peter J. 1987. Hardy's Influence on the Modem Novel. London: Macmillan Press. Derrida, Jaques. 1966. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." In Modem Literary Theory

, ed. Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia, 149-166. London: Edward Arnold. Fowles, John. 1998. "Hardy and the Hag." In Wormholes, 136-152. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. Fowles, John. 1996. "I Write Therefore I Am." In Wormholes, 3-13. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. 1

8 Fowles, |ohn. 1969. "Notes on an Unfinished Novel." In Wormholes, 13-26. ]ohn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999, 18. 1

9 Fowles, John. 1964. "I Write Therefore I Am." In Wormholes, 5—12. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999, 7.