Lacanian Non-Rapport in the Novels of John Fowles

Impossible Relationships

Mahitosh Mandal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781032227825
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040727317
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Lacanian Non-Rapport in the Novels of John Fowles offers the first systematic Lacanian study of the fiction of John Fowles. Although Fowles repeatedly acknowledged his engagement with psychoanalysis, his novels have rarely been examined in relation to Jacques Lacan's theorisation of sexual non-rapport. This book argues that the persistent misrecognitions of love and the recurrent failures of relationships in his fiction are structured by the Lacanian insight that "there is no sexual relationship." Through detailed readings of Fowles's six novels, the study demonstrates how Fowles's characters confront the structural impossibility of sexual rapport and attempt to negotiate it through fantasy, desire, and symptom. It further suggests that Fowles's fiction can be read as unwittingly Lacanian in its dramatization of sexual non-rapport. The book also shows how the enigmatic and inconclusive narrative forms often associated with Fowles's postmodernism are underwritten by this psychoanalytic logic. By bringing Lacanian theory into dialogue with Fowles's novels, the study offers a new interpretation of one of the most distinctive voices of twentieth-century British fiction.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Fowles but Were Afraid to Ask Lacan
• 1 Lacan on Sexual Non-Rapport: Key Propositions
• 2 “I will still have my woman-me he can never touch”: Perversion and Sexual Non-Rapport in The Collector
• 3 “And you wouldn’t marry me because I’m a whore and a colonial”: Anxiety and Sexual Non-Rapport in The Magus
• 4 “Eyes a man could drown in”: Phallic Myth and Femininity in The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• 5 “He has a mistress. Her name is Loss.”: “Abortive Romances” and the Question of Traversing the Fantasy of Sexual Rapport in Daniel Martin
• 6 “if this wasn’t an unwritable non-text”: Phallic Failure, Invasion of Jouissance, and Uninscribability of Sexual Rapport in Mantissa
• 7 “So great it may hardly be said in words”: Phallic Impotency and Other Jouissance in A Maggot
• Conclusion
• Index