The Collector

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It’s not what humanism is about. No, I tell you what I find terrible is the association between avant garde art and a certain branch of the New Left. You know, that iconoclastic experimental art must automatically be left wing. This is for me one of the great illusions of the age. I don’t see how it can be, you know, because it is, however anti-establishment it may be, it is fundamentally highly élitist. It’s hermetic, and it’s just like all those late nineteenth century movements, symbolism and the rest. I taught for a year in an adult education college in Hertfordshire, Ashridge. Again, that was interesting because they were doing courses then where management and trade union officials met. This was the first time I’d really met socialists and listened to the socialist line being properly put. Captor and victim take turns detailing their points of view and we're first given an insight into the mind of a man whose transformation to kidnapper seemed inevitable from the very beginning. Fred is especially terrifying because he seems oblivious to his own perversion and to the harm he inflicts on others. In many ways, he's the perfect psychopath. He believes he's Miranda's host and not her captor. He watches her, but he's not a stalker. She's his guest and not his victim. She has everything she needs in her room except a key, so why is she so unyielding, so ungrateful?

Scott, Vernon (May 31, 1964). "Wyler Only 'Prima Donna' At Columbia". The San Bernardino County Sun. San Bernardino, California. p.51 – via Newspapers.com. Alan Pryce-Jones of The New York Times wrote of the novel: "John Fowles is a very brave man. He has written a novel which depends for its effect on total acceptance by the reader. There is no room in it for the least hesitation, the smallest false note, for not only is it written in the first person singular, but its protagonist is a very special case indeed. Mr. Fowles's main skill is in his use of language. There is not a false note in his delineation of Fred." [14] Hayden Carruth of the Press & Sun-Bulletin praised the novel as "brisk" and "professional," adding that Fowles "knows how to evoke the oblique horror of innocence as well as the direct horror of knowledge." [2]He does not make love to her. What he asks is mutual "respect." Miranda's astonishment gets the upper hand of her sense of outrage. At times she wants to help him. At one painful moment she makes the ultimate challenge: The screenplay was written by Stanley Mann and John Kohn, based on the novel by John Fowles. However, Terry Southern contributed an uncredited script revision for Wyler after the producers became unhappy with the book's original darker ending; they wanted Miranda to escape. Southern's "happier" ending was rejected by Wyler. Miranda and Clegg have very different views regarding photographs, as becomes clear at several different points throughout the novel. Miranda thinks that photographs are dead, mere facsimiles of moments, and that such records fail to capture living, breathing reality. "When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies," she says. To Clegg, however, photographs are a safe way of viewing the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the photographs he takes of Miranda. Clegg's photographs start off fairly innocuously: he simply asks Miranda if he can take pictures of her, and she consents. She thinks his photographs show no artistic talent, but she does not object. Fowles explores the psychological ramifications of these control tactics by examining both Clegg and Miranda. At times, control makes Clegg drunk with power, unable to handle his own urges; for instance, he undresses Miranda after chloroforming her the second time and photographs her in his underwear. Later, he will use force to make her pose for him naked. Clegg's control of Miranda is psychologically damaging to her, and every day she tries out a different strategy in an attempt to unseat his control, and also to figure out how best to win his sympathies. His control over her makes her determined to fight for new privileges and emerge as a better person. In the end, of course, Clegg's controlling ways claim her life.

Have you thought, I mean, do you think of the novel in comparison with poetry and plays? Do you think it can do things that other art, that the other arts cannot do?

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Why are you so keen to promote the idea that there should be a cultivation of the notion of mystery?

In 1985, Leonard Lake and Charles Chi-Tat Ng abducted 18-year-old Kathy Allen and later 19-year-old Brenda O'Connor. Lake is said to have been obsessed with The Collector. Lake described his plan for using the women for sex and housekeeping in a "philosophy" videotape. The two are believed to have murdered at least 25 people, including two entire families. Although Lake had committed several crimes in the Ukiah, California, area, his "Operation Miranda" did not begin until after he moved to remote Wilseyville, California. The videotapes of his murders and a diary written by Lake were found buried near the bunker in Wilseyville. They revealed that Lake had named his plot Operation Miranda after the character in Fowles' book. [25] Christopher Wilder [ edit ]That I do not know. I do not know, but I made a kind of resolution many years ago that I would not put too many of my personal political views into my novels. If they are put in they are filtered in and … Well, I’m not at the moment because in these conditions it’s rather difficult. I’m talking about more relaxed sort of private situations. Because one is a writer you construct better truth out of print which you can constantly revise and revise and revise, than you can from the one time only of any conversation. I mistrust spoken dialogue totally in the ordinary…not in an artistic sense, but in the ordinary context of a conversation. I don’t think I could ever express myself fully in ordinary conversation. That’s partly because constructing novels is as you know a rich complex experience and it’s impossible I think really in any space shorter than the novel itself to fully convey it. Power and control are central aspects of Fowles's novel. From the beginning, Clegg uses chloroform to subdue Miranda; the pad of chloroform will reappear later in the novel during one of Miranda's escape attempts. Clegg also gags Miranda and binds her hands whenever he takes her upstairs. The basement where she lives is impenetrable and soundproof, and even if it were not, nobody lives nearby enough to hear her scream. Miranda may be better-educated than Clegg, but Clegg's uncanny ability to exercise control and predict how she might try to escape means that he is well-prepared for any rebellion. I think the intellectual literary creams of both London and New York have really lost touch with what the function of literature should be.