The Collector

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Oh yes … I’m sure. Whether the actual contemporary English novel is doing it I don’t know, but I’m sure it has the power to do it, yes. I mean Solzhenitsyn has obviously done it recently with Russia, I should have thought Bellow has done it or did it in Herzog, in America. Joe Heller has done it I think for America. I don’t think it’s beyond the capacity of the novel. It may be beyond the capacity of the contemporary English novelist. Have you thought, I mean, do you think of the novel in comparison with poetry and plays? Do you think it can do things that other art, that the other arts cannot do? On October 23, 1977, John Fowles was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for the BBC Television show “The Lively Arts.” The following is a transcript. Well, the academic…you see, the academic worlds have not helped one bit by over-praising what to my mind is pseudo-intellectual, it’s not truly intellectual. It has a surface gloss of avant gardism, experimentalism, intellectualism, what you want…and I think that this is a treachery of the clerks. It’s also to my mind profoundly unsocialist. The great unknown literary critic in my view of the last fifty years is George Lucaks, the Hungarian. He had faults that we all know, but his message has just not got across, I think, in the west. His message is not fundamentally to my mind a Marxist one. It’s much more a humanist one.

The Collector premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 3, 1965, where both Stamp and Eggar won awards for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively. [20] This marked the first time in the festival's history that two performers from the same film won both awards. [20] The film had its North American premiere in New York City on June 17, 1965. [1] It premiered in London on October 13, 1965.

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John Robert Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town in Essex. He recalled the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles said "I have tried to escape ever since."

It’s not what humanism is about. No, I tell you what I find terrible is the association between avant garde art and a certain branch of the New Left. You know, that iconoclastic experimental art must automatically be left wing. This is for me one of the great illusions of the age. I don’t see how it can be, you know, because it is, however anti-establishment it may be, it is fundamentally highly élitist. It’s hermetic, and it’s just like all those late nineteenth century movements, symbolism and the rest. But you put a lot of…I have the impression that you put a lot of your own personal philosophical views into your novels. Booker, Keith M. (2011). Historical Dictionary of American Cinema. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-810-87459-6. That I do not know. I do not know, but I made a kind of resolution many years ago that I would not put too many of my personal political views into my novels. If they are put in they are filtered in and …

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Why do you think that a great deal of modern writing has lost interest and lost energy for narration…for narrative? We’re always talking about a division in modern writing which is bridged by very few people, and you may well be one of them, between, what is thought by a small group of literati in New York and London to be very good, which is not at all widely known, and what is widely known which is thought by this small group to be not at all good. The good and the well-known, the good and the popular…there is a sort of a chasm between the two, isn’t there? What makes Ferdinand a dangerous character with a stubborn personality is the fact that he believes he is always right. He believes that he is doing the best thing for both Miranda and himself. He is even proud of the way he manages to kidnap the girl without leaving any trace. Before winning the pools, he saw the world through the eyes of a man who was bullied and rejected by society. Now that he is rich, he can build his own world, a world seen through the eyes of a collector. He even divides people into specimens that are or aren’t worth collecting. Clegg's photo-taking turns aggressive when chloroforms Miranda, takes off her clothes, and photographs her in her underwear. Near the end of the novel, he wants to photograph her naked as insurance in case she tries to tell anyone that he kidnapped her. For Clegg, photographs are a safe way to view Miranda and "collect" her without having to deal with messiness of emotions, or with the dilemma of having an angry prisoner in his basement. To him, photographs are renderings in which none of life's beauty is lost, only its ugly confusion. To Miranda, it is precisely this confusion - anything "nasty," as she says - that makes people alive and that has been the impetus for all great art. Prison Where does the ‘ought’ come in? You’ve said that the writer was somewhere between a preacher and a teacher. That statement does sound rather…

I was brought up at Leigh on Sea, which is a suburban town, part of Southend on Sea. I led the normal life of a suburban middle-class child, but the snag was that standing in the way of a smooth progression to a normal suburban middle-class adulthood was a love of nature. I can remember even as a small child that I always adored green things, I adored going out in the country. I was fortunate. I had an uncle who was a natural historian, and a cousin who was also a natural historian and those were the highlights of my first ten years, going out to look for butterflies or birdwatching, country walks. Then Hitler helped me greatly because we were evacuated to Devon and I had five years in a remote Devon village. That was a formative experience for me. I was a lonely child, but my friend was always nature, rather than being the company of other boys. Some literary truths are about the nature of fiction. The ones I’ve just mentioned in The French Lieutenant’s Woman are in my view truths about the artificial nature of fiction, but that has nothing to do with other kinds of truths in the book, which really are about feeling, and which of course do express opinions about life. I would consider myself a socialist, but I don’t think the novel’s really the right place for explicit socialist propaganda. The right place for that is the essay or the non-fiction book, or obviously the actual involvement in politics.Scholar Katarina Držajić considers The Collector "one of the most prominent novels of the 20th century, [which] may be viewed from many interesting perspectives – as a psychological thriller, a Jungian study, a modern or postmodern piece of literature. John Fowles is well established as a master of language, using a variety of tools to convey different meanings and bring his characters closer to his reader." [13] Reception [ edit ]