The Collector

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Alan Pryce-Jones of The New York Times wrote of the novel: "John Fowles is a very brave man. He has written a novel which depends for its effect on total acceptance by the reader. There is no room in it for the least hesitation, the smallest false note, for not only is it written in the first person singular, but its protagonist is a very special case indeed. Mr. Fowles's main skill is in his use of language. There is not a false note in his delineation of Fred." [14] Hayden Carruth of the Press & Sun-Bulletin praised the novel as "brisk" and "professional," adding that Fowles "knows how to evoke the oblique horror of innocence as well as the direct horror of knowledge." [2] Christopher Wilder, a spree/serial killer of young girls, had The Collector in his possession when he was killed by police in 1984. [24] Robert Berdella [ edit ] Why are you so keen to promote the idea that there should be a cultivation of the notion of mystery?

You said you didn’t particularly or you didn’t at all like the literary life in London. Do you not like any part of the literary life at all? Or does it worry you, being a literary figure? Squires, John (18 October 2021). " 'The Collector': John Fowles' Novel Gets a Stunning Limited Edition Release from Suntup Editions". Bloody Disgusting . Retrieved 19 October 2021. Yes, yes, but that’s no reason for the novel to say, all right then I’m freed from that task, I can now turn in and look after my own elite. I am as it so happens often tempted to write more complicatedly and to use for the sake of a better word a more avant garde style than I actually use, but I mean this is…I regard a little bit of a socialist’s duty in the writer, if you do adhere to the principles of socialism, you should in fact not try and cut yourself off from a wide audience. If you can attract it, if you can write for it, then you ought to. 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.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. Why do you want then to play so many games on your reader by telling him something and then saying. ‘No, that isn’t true.’ In The Magus, Conchis is constantly saying … Have you ever thought of moving abroad, then, feeling so much in exile from Englishness? Have you ever considered going and writing in …?

John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says “I have tried to escape ever since.” Držajić, Katarina P. (2014). "Human feelings mirrored in metaphors: The Collector by John Fowles" (PDF). Journal of Language and Cultural Education. 2 (3): 197–207. ISSN 1339-4045. Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 July 2019.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? I joined the system. Then again the war helped me because I went straight into the Royal Marines. From having been a little gauleiter in school, I was right at the bottom in the Royal Marines and I loathed that comprehensively. The Marines helped me discover what I was, which was a profound hater of all authority, all externally imposed discipline. I really think I shook off the whole public school thing in those two years. One doesn’t shake off those things immediately, but fairly soon afterwards, certainly by the time I’d finished at Oxford, I felt I was a different person. You’ve talked about narrative. Do you find that being a storyteller, to put it at its most modest, is something that came naturally to you or is it something that you work at and try to make the narrative …? No, not at all. I’ve never needed other human beings really, I suppose, which doesn’t mean to say I don’t enjoy meeting them sometimes, but I need other people less than most. It’s much more to do with mysterious things like climate, the sort of precocity of the West of England, that’s something I’ve always loved. The fact that spring starts here a little bit earlier than it does up country, and I adore the sea. I don’t think I could live now out of sound of the sea. I’m one of those mysterious people who loves coasts, beaches, shores, and if I had to define a perfect place to live my one constituent would always be that you go to sleep with the sound of the sea somewhere.

Shakespeare's play The Tempest is frequently alluded to in Fowles's novel, and the comparisons and contrasts between the two stories reveal Clegg's and Miranda's mindsets in The Collector. Clegg tells Miranda that his name is Ferdinand; in The Tempest, the character Ferdinand is a cultured and kind prince with whom Miranda falls in love. It is clear that this is the side of his character that Clegg wants the captive Miranda to see. Yet Miranda calls Clegg Caliban. In The Tempest, Caliban is a monstrous man who tries to rape Miranda. Yet Prospero, the powerful magician who serves as Shakespeare's protagonist, reduces Caliban to slavery. Caliban is violent, uncivilized, and undesirable. This is how Miranda views Clegg throughout much of The Collector. By analyzing The Collector in light of its similarities to The Tempest, one can unearth revealing aspects of the characters. Art Absolutely, what a nice way of saying it. This is what I hate about modern Oxford, you know. I mean the pressure on you to achieve destroys the great value of the Oxford and Cambridge system…the drifting, the not knowing where you were going. Booker, Keith M. (2011). Historical Dictionary of American Cinema. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-810-87459-6. When you left your job and became a full-time writer…is the easiest way, did you find it a strain or did you find you accommodated to it quite easily and happily?At first, Miranda thinks that Clegg has sexual motives for abducting her; but, as his true character begins to be revealed, she realises that this is not true. She begins to pity her captor, comparing him to Caliban in Shakespeare's play The Tempest because of his hopeless obsession with her. Clegg tells Miranda that his first name is Ferdinand (eventual winner of Miranda's affections in The Tempest). 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. McClelland, Doug (1972). The Unkindest Cuts: The Scissors and the Cinema. London: A. S. Barnes. ISBN 978-0-498-07825-5. Well I think that whatever his political views, the writer should not be too swayed by intellectual fashion. There is a certain kind of contract which we were talking about just now, between the novelist and a reasonably wide audience. If the novelist uses an experimentalist style, experimental techniques, all right he’s at perfect liberty to do that, but I think he ought to ask himself the question of what good am I doing? In general he’s preaching to the converted, to the rest of avant garde, but there are all those other people out there who cannot appreciate that kind of writing. He’s missing out on them totally and that for me is not what socialism is about. 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?

The novel was adapted as a feature film by the same name in 1965. The screenplay was by Stanley Mann and John Kohn, and it was directed by William Wyler, who turned down The Sound of Music to direct it. It starred Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. The 1980 Tamil language film Moodu Pani, according to its director Balu Mahendra, is partly based on The Collector. The novel was also loosely adapted by Filipino director Mike de Leon into a film titled Bilanggo sa Dilim ( Prisoner in the Dark) in 1986. The 1997 Finnish drama film Neitoperho was loosely inspired by the novel, according to the film's director. [16] I detect traces of it elsewhere in the English class system, but I think it’s specifically a middle-class thing. For me this is one thing which distinguishes us clearly from America. Every Englishman who goes to America has problems with irony. There are all kinds of ironic things which you can say to another Englishman, which the American, even the intelligent American, won’t get. You have to say what you mean there to communicate. The Collector was John Fowles’ first novel. It was made into a film in which Terence Stamp played the young man whose obsession for collecting butterflies was accompanied by an obsession to collect and make a captive of a young girl from Hampstead. Hampstead is the place John Fowles was living in at the time.

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Lee, Seungjae (2005). Otherness, Recognition and Power: The Hegelian Themes in John Fowles's The Collector (PDF) (Thesis). Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia. Archived (PDF) from the original on 20 July 2019. After winning the lottery, Ferdinand Clegg, a lonely entomologist, buys a big house in the countryside and kidnaps Miranda Grey, a beautiful twenty-one years old art student with whom he has been obsessed for some time. After a long period of preparations and observations, he forcefully brings Miranda to his own cellar, especially modified to house her for a long time. He treats her nicely, buying all she desires in terms of food, clothes, books, music, and art. He fulfills her every need except her want to be free. He holds her captive, without any connection to the outside world, in the hope that she will eventually grow to know and love him. 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 mean there is a very general boring sort of run, isn’t there, that the novel is dead because of television, the cinema and so on …?