translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

of fiction that faithfully renders reality into a ‘mirror’ which reflects its own
process of writing. Postmodernists made extensive use of this metafictional
‘mirroring’ technique in order to create a text which offers a kaleidoscopic
vision and not a realistic portrayal of life. (See Dallenbach, 1977: 45-46)
“Greece is like a mirror” for Nicholas the protagonist of the novel,
because he can see himself as he really is in the complex system of ‘mirrors’
that Conchis creates for him. But the mirror may also stand for the selfreflexive
nature of the novel itself: the entire process of writing is brought
under discussion and reflected by the events that happened on the island of
Phraxos in Greece. “Greece is like a mirror” may be read as a statement of
Fowles’s literary credo. It is as if he were saying: ‘The events taking place
on the Island of Phraxos are nothing but a metaphor for the act of writing
itself. This is how I understand to write a novel; I think it should be
experimental, challenging and above everything else, mysterious.’
In the second part of the novel, when Conchis ‘remembers’ and
narrates his experiences during the war, the story becomes a long, complex
account of history. This part of the novel may be seen as a piece of
historiographic metafiction. Linda Hutcheon considers that the historical
novel revived under the form of that “un-innocent paradoxical
historiographic metafiction” (1988: 124) may be defined as fiction “which
keeps distinct its formal auto-representation and its historical context, and
in so doing problematises the very possibility of historical knowledge,
because there is no reconciliation, no dialectic here – just unresolved
contradiction…” (1988: 106)
This “unresolved contradiction” seems to be the result of the
juxtaposition of past ‘facts’ or historical events alongside fictional narrative.
What we witness with Conchis is the revisiting of the past and its rewriting.
He tells the story of the battle of Neuve Chapelle the way it happened but
he also presents his own interpretation of this terrible war episode. That
history can be revisited and rewritten is an idea that Fowles foregrounds in
the alternative story presented by the 19 year old (back then) Conchis to his
parents on his return home:
Until that moment of confrontation I had determined that I would tell
the truth. […] But there are some truths too cruel, before the faces one
has to announce them to, to be told. So I said that I had been lucky in a
draw for leave […and not that he deserted from the front], and that
now Montague was dead I was to rejoin my original battalion. […] I
invented a new battle of Neuve Chapelle, as if the original had not been
bad enough. I even told them I had been recommended for a
commission. (148)
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