The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles, 1969

Oral exam

Intro

Through my presentation, I will deal with the I of the writer and the writer's eye and I will show you how in what extent are these texts are related to post-modernism. To do so, I will talk about 3 documents. The first one is an extract from a play called The Dumb Waiter written by Harold Pinter in 1960. The second document is the 13th Chapter of a novel called The French Lieutenant's Woman, written by English novelist John Fowles in 1969. As for my personal document, I've chosen Waiting for Godot written in 1948 by Samuel Beckett.

Body

First of all, I am going to evoke how the novelist uses the absurd which are one of the characteristics of post-modernism. For instance, The French Lieutenant's Woman related the story of Sarah Woodruff, a woman who lives in the coastal town of Lyme Regis as a disgraced woman who supposedly has been abandoned by a French ship's officer who had returned to France and married. Before the excerpt under study, she has been seen walking by an orphaned gentleman named Charles Smithson who becomes curious about her. The previous chapter ended with two questions: “Who is Sarah?” and “Out of what shadows does she come?” and the beginning of this chapter provides a short and shocking answer “I do not know” and the following sentences are even more shocking, as the narrator admits that the «story I am telling is all imagination” and the characters “never existed outside of my own mind”. This is highly unconventional because as readers we are supposed to suspend our disbelief and believe that what we read is true as much as it's believable, but here the illusion is shattered even if Fowles says that he has not “disgracefully broken the illusion” of reality because, he argues, the characters of novel “still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one (he) (has) just broken”. Fowles expresses in this excerpt his point of view on the condition of the reader and his connection with the novelist. In fact, he wants to prove with this intrusion of the narrator that everything is only an illusion in a fiction. Then, we also notice that in The Dumb Waiter, the reader is confused because of a lack of actions between the two characters named Gus and Ben but also between the playwright and the reader that makes it sounds absurd.  Indeed, Gus and Ben are two professionals killers and they found an envelop which slipped under the door of the basement room they are in and contained matches. They received their orders from a dumb waiter and the last order will be to kill the first man who comes into the room which will be Gus. There are a lot of repetitions: “Pick it up”, “Open it” and they seem not to speak the same language. Indeed, the dumb waiter is a symbol of a lack of communication here; we can say they don't speak with each other but just to each other because they seem not to understand one another. We can note the use of the theater of the absurd; in this excerpt there is the idea that life is random or meaningless and shows humans struggling to find a purpose and control it. The two men have to kill a man, also this characterizes the theater of the absurd: a touch of comedy in a negative or even tragic context.

Then, I am going to go through the multiplicity of meanings or the quest for meanings in these extracts. For instance, in the extract understudy of Waiting For Godot which is part of the first act, the setting is in the evening on a country road with a single tree present. Estragon is trying to pull off his boot, but without success. Vladimir enters and greets Estragon, who informs him that he has spent the night in a ditch where he was beaten. In the beginning of the extract understudy, a boy comes to tell them Godot won't come this day but surely the next day. Then, the two guys seem to be hesitating on staying or not while remembering memories. We can see that their discussion makes no sense: Indeed, Estragon seems to be disappointed and demoralized because he does not know if they have to wait for what is called Godot or leave also is joking on his death: “Pity we don't have a bit of rope.” and his friend calmly responds “Come on. It's cold.” as if he didn't understand what he said. At the end, Estragon asks himself they wouldn’t have been better off alone, each one for himself because they probably weren't made for the same road but the reader doesn't know what he is talking about because at first they were simply waiting for a character named Godot we don't know anything about. In fact, this dialogue emphasizes the absurdity of life, reduced to an endless routine, as well as that of language, which serves only to fill the silence when for instance Estragon is talking about when Vladimir threw him into the Rhone even if there is no point in talking about it because they don't want to remember it, to escape the anxiety of emptiness. In The Dumb Waiter, we find the same scheme of the speech that is devoid of meaning. Indeed, the dialogue between the two characters is absurd: they speak to each other only to cover silence, it doesn't really have a proper aim and we can see it when the one repeat what the other said even if he heard it before: “Matches.”, “Matches?” and the debate around “light the kettle”  illustrates the same idea because they debate around an idiom, that has them talk a lot, but in the end is “dumb” in both senses. Not to forget that at the beginning they are supposed to kill someone, but this off-stage violent act can be felt at stage by the way they are yelling at each other also we can talk about displacement of meaning.

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