SFR welcomes author Lee Miller in his first column, which examines current events through a literary lens. This week, a 1963 novel lends eerie insight into contemporary sexual violence.
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The recent sexual assault indictment of former IMF Managing Director and French presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn raises several interesting physiological questions about “power” and “point of view,” many of which John Fowles vividly explores in his 1963 debut novel, The Collector. Strauss-Kahn allegedly attacked a 32-year-old Ghanaian chambermaid while she attempted to clean his Sofitel Hotel room in Manhattan, locking her inside the suite for approximately 30 minutes. The case evidence, along with a “consensual encounter” defense, point toward Strauss-Kahn’s guilt. Why would he ever do something like this? What was he thinking?
British author John Fowles (The French Lieutenant's Woman, The
Magus) explores these questions of human folly. The Collector has a simple plot: A friendless clerk and amateur
butterfly collector, Frederick Clegg, becomes infatuated with a 20-year-old art
student, Miranda Grey, who attends school near his office. When Frederick wins
a large football pool (akin to a million-dollar lottery hit today), he quits
his job, buys a house in the country, redesigns the wine cellar into an
inescapable prison and proceeds to "collect" Miranda. Frederick considers the
kidnapping of Miranda as a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, "like catching the
Mazarine Blue or a Queen of Spain Fritillary."
Power transforms Frederick’s fantasy into action. He
believes the words of his former officemate Crutchly: “You have to push
nowadays to get anywhere.” The blossoming British bourgeois society around him
supports the axiom “money is power.” Frederick Clegg, like Strauss-Kahn, becomes overwhelmed by
his social status and deciphers what is “good” or “bad” through a prism of personal
power rather than common morality. As a rich loner, he creates his own rules
for Right and wrong. Unfortunately (or fortunately), Miranda does not behave as
Frederick fantasizes, and she does not fall in love with him. Like the Sofitel
chambermaid, Miranda refuses to succumb to power, focusing all of her strength
and smarts toward escape. She refuses to bow to her captor’s intents and
perceptions.
The Collector
provides fabulous insight into the subtle destructiveness of bourgeois values,
where the principal concern is making money, finding a comfortable niche and
then sitting and watching, rather than living beyond money and “being to the
full.” During her long captivity,
Miranda declares, “I hate people who collect things and give them names and then
forget all about them.” In a materialist society, art is collected and
classified more than it is experienced, and herein lies its devaluation. Fowles
uses art as a metaphor throughout the book to explore social psychology.
The true artistic excellence in The Collector is Fowles' masterful point of view play. The first
120 pages are written from Frederick's point of view, using his voice. The next
160 pages are Miranda's diary, recorded during her captivity in the cellar. A
twenty page dénouement, returning to Frederick's point of view, ends the story
with a nearly even split between the captor's perception and the "butterfly"
view. This literary technique creates a counterpoint to every assumption,
exploring the ideas of power, bourgeois morality, art, and even Shakespeare's The Tempest. At one point in the story,
Miranda draws a series of fruit bowl sketches and asks Frederick to pick out
the best. He chooses the one she considers her worst. Their opinions and
tastes, their different points of view, expound the "why?" The theory that "perception
is reality" colors Miranda's kidnapping, her fruit sketches and the handling of
her severe illness, which ends the story.
The Collector has
become an inspirational read for serial abductors such as Leonard Lake, Charles
Ng and Christopher Wilder. Like The
Catcher in the Rye, there is a moving psychological power to the writing
that can be interpreted in a multitude of meaningful or destructive ways. Maybe
Dominique Strauss-Khan also read this story? Or perhaps he will discover it in
prison.
Lee Miller is the
author of the Bengali novel Kali Sunset
(www.clovercreekpress.com).
Santa Fe Reporter