Stela's Reviews > A Maggot

The make-believe history is a well-known trick of the postmodernist literature. Here we have a celebrated criminal in Margaret Atwood’s “Alias Grace”, a famous gangster in Mircea Mihaes’ “Woman in Red”, a brought to life portrait in Tracy Chevalier’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”, and in all these novels and others reality and fiction are blended beyond recognition, to create literature’s second reality. A sort of non-fiction novels, to borrow Truman Capote’s very deceptive term.

However, whether the above-mentioned works concentrate upon the historical figure itself, John Fowles imagines only its background, his novel illustrating, apparently, what made Anne Lee become the founder of the Shakers.

I said apparently because this could be an interpretation of sorts, but of course things are never as simple as they appear in a postmodernist book. History is only a source like any other, but the credibility factor doesn’t function in the same way. The truth of art has nothing to do with the historical truth, even when it copies its methods of investigation.

And the methods ARE similar to those used by a historian or a detective in quest for the truth. The disappearance of an important personage is investigated thoroughly, which gives the narrator the perfect pretext to exercise different styles: juridical, administrative, journalistic, epistolary, dramaturgic, scientific, he tries them all with the same dexterity and all are maggots, possibilities. Just as the many layers of the narrative: historical (the cuts from Historical Chronicle 1736, the information about economy, population, garments in 18th century England, etc.); science-fictional (the maggot-like machine and the time travel), religious (the Quakers, the Protestants, etc.), detective (Ayscough’s investigation) all novels in nuce, hence – maggots.

Last but not least, both in Prologue and Epilogue, the narrator reveals his sources (the obsession with an image, a picture of a woman and Anne Lee’s origins) insisting upon the same idea that the book is only a maggot. Because a work of art never leaves the artist’s hands fully developed, consequently needing the public to maturate? Or because everything has to grow, beings and ideas?

On the other hand, the main character of the book also mentions the maggot twice: first, as a symbol of decay, punishment and death, second as an instrument of salvation. And the last words of the novel refer to it, too:

I mourn not the outward form, but the lost spirit, courage and imagination of Mother Ann Lee's word, her Logos; its almost divine maggot.

A divine maggot – that is, the Logos born under the writer’s quill but growing in significance under the readers’ eyes.