Durrell's Justine and Fowles's The Collector as Late Modernist Novels

Abstract: Durrell's Justine and Fowles's The Collector
as Late Modernist Novels: Why the Postmodern?
by
Julius Rowan Raper

Aside from their obvious affection for French culture, Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles shared a number of interests, the most important of which may have been the profound desire to transform fiction in English as that fiction existed in the 1950s. The fifties, as we look back on them, clearl provided the second highwater mark for the modernist novel. If the twenties gave the world Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, The Sun Also Rises, To the Lighthouse, and The Sound and the Fury, the extended decade from 1947 to 1963 saw the creation of a number of impressive works, including especially Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951), Nabokov's Lolita (1955), Bellow's Seize the Day (1956), Durrell's Justine (1957), Updike's Rabbit Run (1960), and Fowles's The Collector (1963). No matter how the latter group differ in setting and cast of characters, what they all have in common is their high level of expertise in the aesthetic the early modernists--Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, Faulkner--embodied in their major works, including the early modernists' preoccupation with the psychological ocnflicts of which Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and associates had by the twenties made novelists acutely conscious.

Deus Loci 7 (1999-2000): 93-100.

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