Freeing Fossils: The Novel as Organism in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Abstract

The novel as organism is about modeling the exchanges that govern organisms (both scientific and physical, conscious and social), that should govern explorations, and that ultimately govern authentic reading. In Fowles’s novel and in my reading of it, the term “organism” functions not merely as a scientific term that describes the cooperative processes within a living thing, but also as a metaphor for the interactive processes that make up our webs of textual interactions. I use the concept of the novel as organism to explore the interactions within the text and between the text and the reader in Fowles's novel.