The Collector
I am so angry. (I’m actually writing this a day after my first entry—but I did something wrong yesterday and it didn’t publish correctly.) I’m angry because of a novel I just finished, John Fowles’ The Collector. He paints his two characters so well that I found myself loving one and loathing—having murderous feelings toward—the other. Without giving too much away...The Collector is the story of a Londoner named Frederick who has no interiority. He’s hollow and artless and narcissistic. (Even Bartleby had more substance.) His only interest is butterfly collecting. He’s just going about his mundane life as a clerk (an unmarried, asexual, still-living-at-home-with-his-aunt clerk, to be exact) when he notices a beautiful young coed named Miranda who lives near his office. He begins to stalk her. Then he comes into some money after winning the lottery, and this emboldens him. He decides he wants to “take” Miranda for himself, so he kidnaps her and keeps her locked in a room in his cellar. (His aunt’s on holiday in Australia, so he’s living alone by this time.) For the first half of the book, we see events through Frederick’s eyes. While I did sympathize a bit with his dreary existence, I mostly despised him for being weak and spiritually vacant. “I could *so* kick his ass,” I thought to myself. His indifference and ineffectuality and utter selfishness are more despicable to me than stupidity or ignorance or hostility. At least there is a spark of something in the misguided and bitter. Frederick, on the other hand, is nothing but ash.
Then there’s Miranda, whom we hear from in the second half of the book. She’s keeping a diary. She’s everything that Frederick is not. She’s smart and perceptive, with a voracious appetite for life. An art student, she appreciates all forms of creativity and says she most hates “those who don’t make anything.” She also figures Frederick out very quickly; she knows she’s nothing more to him than a butterfly in a killing glass. She calls the other specimens in his collection her “fellow abductees.” Frederick can’t love anyone or anything, so he imprisons Miranda in order to indulge his admiration for her outer beauty. He knows nothing about her person. Fortunately, Fowles does allow the reader that pleasure. I fell in love with Miranda. I wish she were a real person. She’d be a close friend—or a sister. Here are my favorite lines from their conversations and her diary:
· “Ugly ornaments don’t deserve to exist…He is ugliness. But you can’t smash human ugliness.”
· “I’m thinking of all the butterflies that would have come from these if you’d let them live. I’m thinking of all the living beauty you’ve ended…You’re like a miser, you hoard up all the beauty in these drawers.”
· “Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?…Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?”
· “The essences. Not the things themselves.”
· “Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”
· “It’s feeling that matters. Can’t you see?”
· [Thinking about a man named George, whom she loves...] “The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.”
· “Uncreative men plus opportunity-to-create equals evil men.”
What makes me so angry is the way Frederick—and people like him—snuff out life by trying to “capture” it. You can’t possess another living thing. Not its essence, anyway. Why do we have to get our hands on life? Grab, grab, grab. Greed, greed, greed. Like the Japanese tourists you see at the Grand Canyon who never really look at the landscape; they’re too busy capturing a still shot for their scrap book. I wrote author Thomas Moore a few weeks ago. I titled the subject of my email, “Eros and other difficulties.” (I was struggling with some of my own "longing" issues.) When he wrote back he’d changed the title to “Winged desire.” I like that. To look at a thing—even desire itself—without touching it. “To have,” writes poet Louise Gluck, “honored hunger.” Is there a way to honor hunger while neither feeding nor supressing it?
Then there’s Miranda, whom we hear from in the second half of the book. She’s keeping a diary. She’s everything that Frederick is not. She’s smart and perceptive, with a voracious appetite for life. An art student, she appreciates all forms of creativity and says she most hates “those who don’t make anything.” She also figures Frederick out very quickly; she knows she’s nothing more to him than a butterfly in a killing glass. She calls the other specimens in his collection her “fellow abductees.” Frederick can’t love anyone or anything, so he imprisons Miranda in order to indulge his admiration for her outer beauty. He knows nothing about her person. Fortunately, Fowles does allow the reader that pleasure. I fell in love with Miranda. I wish she were a real person. She’d be a close friend—or a sister. Here are my favorite lines from their conversations and her diary:
· “Ugly ornaments don’t deserve to exist…He is ugliness. But you can’t smash human ugliness.”
· “I’m thinking of all the butterflies that would have come from these if you’d let them live. I’m thinking of all the living beauty you’ve ended…You’re like a miser, you hoard up all the beauty in these drawers.”
· “Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?…Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?”
· “The essences. Not the things themselves.”
· “Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”
· “It’s feeling that matters. Can’t you see?”
· [Thinking about a man named George, whom she loves...] “The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.”
· “Uncreative men plus opportunity-to-create equals evil men.”
What makes me so angry is the way Frederick—and people like him—snuff out life by trying to “capture” it. You can’t possess another living thing. Not its essence, anyway. Why do we have to get our hands on life? Grab, grab, grab. Greed, greed, greed. Like the Japanese tourists you see at the Grand Canyon who never really look at the landscape; they’re too busy capturing a still shot for their scrap book. I wrote author Thomas Moore a few weeks ago. I titled the subject of my email, “Eros and other difficulties.” (I was struggling with some of my own "longing" issues.) When he wrote back he’d changed the title to “Winged desire.” I like that. To look at a thing—even desire itself—without touching it. “To have,” writes poet Louise Gluck, “honored hunger.” Is there a way to honor hunger while neither feeding nor supressing it?
posted by Susan Adams Kauffman at 10:07 AM
1 Comments:
Do you not think Fowles makes some criticism of Miranda too? As much as she expresses certain truths, and is obviously more, shall we say, 'developed' than Frederick (that line about the "silver sadness, like a Christ face," is the most beautiful thing in the book), she's also fairly preening, self-consciouly 'arty' - perhaps TOO self-conscious of her own worth as spiritually-developed being, in comparison to F. The fact that there two approaches to life are so incomparable, are on a collision course from the get-go, is part of the tragedy that the book portrays so well. What I like about it is that we get to see both sides of the story - F's and M's - with no obvious authorial advocation of either (though Fowles' sympathies clearly lie more with Miranda). I don't think F is utterly to be despised, M to be praised - both are to be pitied, both are imperfect human beings. M's artistic sensibility comes into contact with a force that cannot understand this realm of human experience she occupies - but I'm not sure she can understand the other realm that F occupies. What I'm trying to say is that she's a flawed being as well.
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