Lacanian Non-Rapport in the Novels of John FowlesEdition 1

Failed sexual relationship is a recurrent theme in the fiction of the British postmodern author John Fowles. But why do sexual relationships fail? The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Fowles’s contemporary who faithfully “returned” to and reinterpreted Sigmund Freud, offered a detailed clinical answer to this question through a theorization of “sexual non-rapport.” Fowles, deeply interested in Freudian theories, used psychoanalytic techniques to interpret femininity, masculinity, and failures in man-woman relationships both in his personal life and fictional world. This book engages in a dialogue that is only too evidently necessary but totally under-researched and engages in a clinically informed study of failed relationships in Fowles’s six novels and one short story collection in conjunction with Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories including but not limited to the notion of sexual non-rapport. Radically differing from the existing psychological and feminist readings of Fowles, this book, through a Lacanian perspective, offers the key to Fowles’s enigmatic and indeterminate fictional universe. By way of an analysis of how the psychical content of the characters triggers the formal indeterminacy of the narrative, it makes an important contribution to the existing theories of postmodernism. By demonstrating the clinical value of the literary and vice versa, the book helps the reader to connect the dots between life and art on the question of subjectivity, sexuality, and relationships.