The Prisoners of Gender

By Paul Gray

MANTISSA by John Fowles; Little, Brown; 196 pages; $13.95

A man awakens in a padded room. He cannot remember how he got there or much of anything else. Two women are watching him, and from them he learns his name: Miles Green. He begins to dislike the observer who calls herself his wife and feels relieved when she goes away. The attractive doctor with the strangely Mediterranean cast to her features stays and summons an equally appealing West Indian nurse. Before long, Miles realizes that his condition is going to be treated in an unusual fashion. Ordering him to fondle her breasts, the doctor says: "I have a perfectly ordinary female body. Shut your eyes and use it." Miles protests. He may not know who he is, but he is certainly not the kind of man who would submit to such shameless immorality, and in a hospital to boot. Naked now, the doctor and nurse intensify their ministrations. "Our sole function," explains his physician, "is to provide you with a source of erotic arousal. . ."

This standard-issue male sex fantasy is rudely interrupted. A female punk rocker materializes, shouting obscenities and menacing Miles with her electric guitar. She is outraged by the doctor-nurse scene, convinced that Miles has written it to degrade women: "Ever since I got into serious liberation, you been takin' the mickey. I got your number, mate. You're the original pig. Numero Uno." Despite the leather gear, dyed hair and garish makeup, Miles recognizes this apparition as an old, inspiring friend. She is Erato, the classical Muse of lyric poetry and, by historical default, of fiction as well.

Or is she? In his fifth novel, Author John Fowles again performs the sort of narrative legerdemain that made both The Magus (1966) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) such popular puzzlers. He raises tantalizing and entertaining questions. Why, for openers, does he call this novel Mantissa and then provide a self-deprecatory definition of the word, "An addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse"? Does that mean readers seeking substantial fare should look elsewhere? Other queries quickly arise. Is this Erato who breaks into Miles' story real or a figment of his imagination? Wait a minute. She has always been a myth (has she not?), and what could possibly be called real in a made-up story that takes place entirely in a gray area suspiciously resembling a brain?

Literalists who try to track down such matters will find that Fowles, presumably the only one with the answers, has disappeared, leaving the slim trace of a smile between the lines. Mantissa is a jeu d 'esprit with a vengeance, its principal characters, like so many of Fowles' earlier creations, held in thrall by forces they cannot quite explain. Erato and Miles are prisoners of gender. When they squabble, as they do throughout the rest of the novel, they helplessly re-enact timeless wars between the sexes.

She accuses him of using her for only one thing and claims that she is totally his invention, deprived of a will of her own. She compares him unfavorably to the creatures she once frolicked with in ancient Greece: "I'll tell you what a modern satyr is. He's someone who invents a woman on paper so that he can force her to say and do things no real woman in her right mind ever would." He counters ironically by offering to reshape her in a manner more to her own liking: "You could tell me the specific ways in which you'd like to be totally unattractive to men."

They bicker over the details of their previous meetings. She says that he has learned nothing from her inspirations: "The world's full of highly pertinent male-female situations whose fictional exploration does subtend a viable sociological function--and yet this is the best you can come up with. Muses . . . I mean, Christ.

It's so embarrassing." He says that his output as a writer began to suffer the moment she appeared to him: "You've ruined my work from the start, with your utterly banal, pifflingly novelettish ideas."

Byplay becomes foreplay. They fall into each other's arms and then violently push away. She taunts him with gossip about her former conquests: Shakespeare, Aristophanes, T.S. Eliot, everyone, in fact, whom Miles might hopelessly wish to emulate. He wonders aloud why she will not transform herself more frequently into the shape of that delightful West Indian nurse, simply for the sake of varied stimulation, if she is so confident of her own seductive powers.

Sex and art stare each other down, and the contest is a standoff. As he has done so often in the past, Fowles makes sure that the tie goes to the author. During one of his short-lived triumphs, Miles pedantically explains his art to Erato: "Serious modern fiction has only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction." The joke is on everyone except Fowles. Mantissa is clearly an example of serious modern fiction, with itself as its subject, and not a trace of difficulty is visible anywhere in its construction. A susceptible soul might be led to believe that the Muses are amusing. Perhaps Erato lives.

--By Paul Gray

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