Lacanian Non-Rapport in the Novels of John Fowles : Impossible Relationships

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.

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.