The Abduction from the Imbroglio: Fowles's A Maggot and some aspects of the story-discourse distinction

Abstract

In April 1736, a young man walks into a cave somewhere on the Devonshire moors with two companions. Only the companions come out. Whatever it was that happened in the cave, it has terrified one of these companions into suicide, and effected something like a religious conversion in the other. A classic locked-room mystery. Indeed, John Fowles's 1985 novel A Maggot most obviously sets itself up as a mystery story. As in Todorov's description of the mystery genre, it has a twin narrative, one concerning the events which have taken place and the other concerning the reconstruction of those events: the young man's father is a peer of the realm who hires a London lawyer to trace what has happened to his son, and characteristically this double motion shuttles backwards and forwards throughout the narrative to approach, with ever-decreasing oscillations, the central and unwitnessed mystery.