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John Robert Fowles war ein britischer Romanautor.

John Fowles studierte Sprachen an der Universität Oxford und arbeitete als Lehrer, bevor er sich seit 1964 ausschließlich dem Schreiben von Romanen widmete. Seine erfolgreichsten Bücher – „Die Geliebte des französischen Leutnants“ und „Daniel Martin“ – kommen auf den ersten Blick als historische Erzählungen daher, bergen aber eine Vielzahl von historischen und gesellschaftskritischen Einsichten und lassen sich auch als Beschreibungen der condition humaine im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert lesen. Gleiches gilt für die oberflächlich als Kriminalgeschichten angelegten Romane „Die Grille“ und „Der Sammler“, in denen die Anomie-Problematik und die prinzipielle Abgründigkeit menschlichen Handelns thematisiert werden. In „Mantissa“ stellt Fowles in dem Dialog mit einer der Musen der griechischen Mythologie seine Poetik dar.

„Der Magus“ – lange als sein Hauptwerk betrachtet – stellt die Themen Freiheit und Willensfreiheit in den Mittelpunkt und fragt nach der Möglichkeit von Erkenntnis an sich. Alle Romane von Fowles sind gekennzeichnet durch den Zweifel an der wahrgenommenen Realität, wie er auch im philosophischen Konstruktivismus gepflegt wird.

John Fowles lebte in Lyme Regis in Dorset. Er starb an Krebs.

✵ 31. März 1926 – 5. November 2005  •  Andere Namen جان فاولز
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John Fowles: Zitate auf Englisch

“I do not defend Conchis’ decision at the execution, but I defend the reality of the dilemma. God and freedom are totally anti-pathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. I am old enough to realise now that they do sometimes with good reason. True freedom lies between each two, never in one alone, and therefore is never absolute freedom.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

“That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yang.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

But the smile.
Quelle: The Magus (1965), Ch. 21

“I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilisation, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history to know then. I now know it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan, - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the ‘Aegean blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

“I played him the Goldberg Variations. If one wishes to reduce a sensitive German to tears there is no surer lachrymatory.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“One kind of person is engaged in society without realizing it; another kind engages in society by controlling it. The one is a gear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, ergo sum.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“There was a bright wind, it was a Dufy day, all bustle, movement, animated colour..”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“The dinner that evening was dreadful, the epitome of English vacuity…they were all the same, each mind set in the same weird armour, like an archosaur’s ruff, like a fringe of icicles. All I heard the whole evening was the tinkle of broken ice-needles as people tried timidly and vainly to reach through the stale fence of words, tinkle, tinkle, and then withdraw. Nobody behaved with breadth, with warmth, with naturalness, and finally it became pathetic. We were all the same; I hardly said anything, but that made me no more innocent – or less conditioned. The solemn figures of the Old Country, the Queen, the Public School, Oxbridge, the Right Accent, People Like Us, stood around the table like secret police, ready to crush down in an instant on any attempt at an intelligent European humanity.* We…were held by those cloud-grey shapes on the world’s blue rim. Death machines holding thousands of gum-chewing, contraceptive-carrying men; for some reason more 30 years away than 30 miles; as if we were looking into the future, not the south; into a world where there were no more Prosperos, no private domains, no Poetries, fantasies, tender sexual promises…I felt acutely the fragility of time itself…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

“Pois eisai? She wanted to know. Pou pas? The old Homeric questions of the Greek peasant. Who art thou? Where goest thou?”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“There are people who have an instinctive yet perfect moral judgment, who can perform the most complex ethical calculations like an Indian peasant can sometimes perform astounding mathematical feats in a matter of seconds. Lily was such a person. I craved her approval.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.”

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John Fowles buch The Aristos

The Aristos (1964)

“To my horror I began to cry…a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. One day she had said “when you love me (and she had not meant ‘make love to me’) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am”; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and give me a sense of responsibility towards her…My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all – male selfishness…Something far worse than lèse majesté. Lèse-humanité.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors…the eyes of a machine. An educated machine… I realised he was drinking less than we were…And that he was playing with me. That he was a realist… Also that Anton was careless with his tongue…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Her voice was completely English. For some reason I had expected a foreign accent; but I could place this exactly. It was my own; product of boarding school, university, the accent of what a sociologist once called the Dominant Hundred Thousand.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“He liked to be popular and in place of charm had to dispense alcohol…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma - human or divine - can deminish or demean. Indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.”

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John Fowles buch The Ebony Tower

The Ebony Tower (1974)

“I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockneyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself, to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked very likely to be high.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Quelle: The Magus (1965), Ch. 52

“She seemed older to me, over-experienced by travel; needing to be learnt again, and I hadn’t the energy.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“There’s a card in the Tarot pack called The Magus. The magician, conjuror. Two of his traditional symbols are the lily and the rose.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

“I was not a poet. I felt no consolation in this knowledge, but only a red anger that evolution could allow such sensitivity and such inadequacy to coexist in the same mind. In one ego, my ego, screaming like a hare caught in a gin.”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Well, then there was the bit in the local paper about the scholarship she’d won and how clever she was, and her name as beautiful as herself, Miranda. So I knew she was up in London studying art. It really made a difference, that newspaper article. It seemed like we became more intimate, although of course we still did not know each other in the ordinary way.
I can’t say what it was, the very first time I saw her, I knew she was the only one. Of course I am not mad, I knew it was just a dream and it always would have been if it hadn’t been for the money. I used to have daydreams about her, I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her and all that. Nothing nasty, that was never until what I’ll explain later.”

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John Fowles buch The Collector

The Collector (1963)

“I felt both a state of envy and contempt. The yacht itself was not vulgar, but I smelt something vulgar about owning it…A few moments later I set off back to my dull daily penal colony of an existence on the far side of the dream, as Adam left the Garden of Eden perhaps…except I knew there were no Gods, and nothing was going to bar my return…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“Perhaps the clue lay in indispensibility. I was being taught some obscure metaphysical lesson about the place of man in existence, about the limitations of the egocentric view…”

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John Fowles buch Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“If there was some central theme beneath the (more Irish than Greek) stew of intuitions about the nature of human existence – and of fiction – it is perhaps in the alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: The Godgame. I did intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific, that is, a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me still an eminently humanist aim; and I wish there were some super-Conchis who could put the Arabs and the Israelis, or the Ulster Catholics and Protestants, through the same heuristic mill as Nicholas.”

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

““The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed."
"I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self."
"You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.””

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John Fowles buch The Magus

Quelle: Magus (Mág)

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