The Tree by John Fowles

Author:John Fowles [Fowles, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-202941-6
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

In some mysterious way

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me, just as, if I watch a film, I stay physically in one place and it is the images in the projector gate that shift; as do the words on the page and the scenes they evoke, when read. This inner or mental reversal of the actual movement, common to all traveling, comes very close to what I like most in all narrative art from the novel to the cinema: that is, the motion from a seen present to a hidden future. The reason that woods provide this experience so naturally and intensely lies, of course, in the purely physical character of any large congregation of trees; in the degree to which they hide what exists, at any given point, beyond the immediately visible surroundings. In this they are like series of rooms and galleries, house-like, doored and screened, continuous yet separate; or paged and chaptered, like a fiction. Just as with fiction, there are in this sense good and bad tree congregations—some that tempt the visitor to turn the page, to explore further, others that do not. But even the most ‘unreadable’ woods and forests are in fact subtler than any conceivable fiction, which can never represent the actual multiplicity of choice of paths in a wood, but only one particular path through it. Yet that multiplicity of choice, though it cannot be conveyed in the frozen medium of the printed text, is very characteristic of the actual writing; of the constant dilemma—pain or pleasure, according to circumstances—its actual practice represents, from the formation of the basic sentence to the larger matters of narrative line, character development, ending. Behind every path and every form of expression one does finally choose, lie the ghosts of all those that one did not.

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry. I am quite sure this is not some kind of rationalization, or irrationalization, after the fact; that having discovered I write fiction in a disgracefully haphazard sort of way, I now hit on the passage through an unknown wood as an analogy. It is the peculiar nature of my adolescent explorings of the Devon countryside (peculiar because I had not been brought up in a rural atmosphere, could not take the countryside for granted, indeed it came to me with something of the unreality, the not-quite-thereness of a fiction) that made me what I am—and in many other ways besides writing.

I see now that what I liked best about the green density, the unpeopled secrecy of the Devon countryside that the chances of history gave me was its explorability. At the time I thought I was learning to shoot and fish (also to trespass and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.