Parody as a Reflecting Surface

2.1.1.1 Parody as a Reflecting Surface

Before passing on to the reported incidents of physical reflection, mirrors and reflecting surfaces in both writers’ novels, it must be noted that Fowles and Pamuk use parody itself as a mirror in foregrounding the form rather than content while trying to stress the Self-reflexive state of their novels. This sort of self-reflexivity is only one sub - part of the whole worlds of both writers’ novels, which are made up of embedded worlds reflecting each other endlessly. For instance, John Fowles in FLW parodies the Victorian norms and literature and attempts to shatter the reader’s conventional moral and aesthetic expectations. He challenges moral assumptions by setting the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries against each other and destroys aesthetic assumptions with the three endings he offers for his novel. By using parody as an overt self-reflexive device, Fowles writes both with a realistic motivation and with an aesthetic motivation. In questioning the realist conventions, he does not dispense with them entirely. In the background there is the Victorian world. By unmasking the dead conventions and laying bare the literary devices in postmodern fiction, Fowles in FLW achieves a new and more inclusive whole and through this new synthetic whole, he teaches his readers that “reality” is illusory and can be altered because what he/she reads is fiction. It is true that language is representational, what it represents is a fictional “other” world. So the reader’s task is not so easy. First he should realize that the text he reads is Self-reflexive, but at the same time centered on outward reality. However, this does not mean that the world of “reality” reflected in the fiction is the exact copy of the real world. They are similar but not identical. Therefore what is seen in the novel is not the reflection of the reality but of a “reality.” Just like the characters, who misidentify their true selves Before passing on to the reported incidents of physical reflection, mirrors and reflecting surfaces in both writers’ novels, it must be noted that Fowles and Pamuk use parody itself as a mirror in foregrounding the form rather than content while trying to stress the Self-reflexive state of their novels. This sort of self-reflexivity is only one sub - part of the whole worlds of both writers’ novels, which are made up of embedded worlds reflecting each other endlessly. For instance, John Fowles in FLW parodies the Victorian norms and literature and attempts to shatter the reader’s conventional moral and aesthetic expectations. He challenges moral assumptions by setting the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries against each other and destroys aesthetic assumptions with the three endings he offers for his novel. By using parody as an overt self-reflexive device, Fowles writes both with a realistic motivation and with an aesthetic motivation. In questioning the realist conventions, he does not dispense with them entirely. In the background there is the Victorian world. By unmasking the dead conventions and laying bare the literary devices in postmodern fiction, Fowles in FLW achieves a new and more inclusive whole and through this new synthetic whole, he teaches his readers that “reality” is illusory and can be altered because what he/she reads is fiction. It is true that language is representational, what it represents is a fictional “other” world. So the reader’s task is not so easy. First he should realize that the text he reads is Self-reflexive, but at the same time centered on outward reality. However, this does not mean that the world of “reality” reflected in the fiction is the exact copy of the real world. They are similar but not identical. Therefore what is seen in the novel is not the reflection of the reality but of a “reality.” Just like the characters, who misidentify their true selves

Fowles questions Victorian morality and its literary conventions with the presentation of an alternative world - the world of the 20 th century and alternative

endings. By doing so, he tries to tell his readers about the need for freedom and emancipation. Charles Smithson, the protagonist of FLW, is led to recognition of what freedom demands by Sarah Woodruff, the social outcast of the title. Sarah’s role in the novel is important in the sense that she is the character who demonstrates Fowles’s ideas on freedom and fiction and, in a way she functions as a model for the readers to follow. With the fictional version of her life that she constructs, Sarah manages to alienate herself from the society she lives in. Being seen as a fallen woman - largely because of her own fiction - enables her to stand outside conventional Victorian society. She is a social outcast. This is parallel to what Fowles himself achieves through his fiction: exploiting the conventions of Victorian realism, Fowles stands outside the conventional Victorian world, which is the fictional world he constructs. Therefore, the reader should notice the ontological divide between the world of fiction and the world Fowles and he/she inhabits. Although these worlds overlap to some extent, they are not identical.

In Magus (M) Fowles places an art-world at the center of the fictional world

he creates. As in the case of the Victorian realism in FLW, Bourani in M serves as the alternative universe to lay bare the postmodern view that the “reality” of fiction is primarily verbal. What Nicholas has to learn and learns at the end is the fact that there is a thin line between fact and fiction. In the godgame that Conchis plays, Conchis is the manipulator acting like some controlling deity. In M, the novel itself does not incorporate the level of a watching author or reader, although one of the messages of the novel - the “godgame” message, makes the reader aware that Nicholas is not only “watched” but also is created by another entity which, at the book level, must be the author “John Fowles.” Therefore, Fowles’s lesson for the reader is that like Nicholas, he/she, too should perceive “the fictional basis of he creates. As in the case of the Victorian realism in FLW, Bourani in M serves as the alternative universe to lay bare the postmodern view that the “reality” of fiction is primarily verbal. What Nicholas has to learn and learns at the end is the fact that there is a thin line between fact and fiction. In the godgame that Conchis plays, Conchis is the manipulator acting like some controlling deity. In M, the novel itself does not incorporate the level of a watching author or reader, although one of the messages of the novel - the “godgame” message, makes the reader aware that Nicholas is not only “watched” but also is created by another entity which, at the book level, must be the author “John Fowles.” Therefore, Fowles’s lesson for the reader is that like Nicholas, he/she, too should perceive “the fictional basis of

Not in BB or NL, but in MNR, Pamuk, like Fowles, uses parody as an overt self-reflexive frame. Pamuk provides a representation of the Eastern culture and

archaic Turkish arts and language of the 20 th century. He uses the art of miniature as

a mirror for the art of writing and uses it also as a backgrounded norm to emphasize the problems of writing, attempting to underline the discrepancy between the reality (or the original object) and the world of fiction (or its reflection). That is why there are mirrors everywhere in the novel. Sometimes they are presented to harem women as gifts by Sultans (MNR, 438/384), sometimes the backs of mirrors are decorated just like “a plate,” “a chest, or at times, the ceiling of a mansion or of a Bosphorus manor, or even, a wooden spoon” (MNR, 10/3). There is also the mirror used “to check the composition as well as mirror-making business” (MNR, 56/44). Miniaturists “sit for weeks in the darkness amid mirrors, in the dim light of an oil lamp” in order to “learn how to perceive the world like a blind man despite not truly being blind” (MNR, 97/81).