SOURCE: "Fowles's Allegory of Literary Invention: Mantissa and Contemporary Theory," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 61-72.

In the following essay, Wilson interprets Fowles's novel Mantissa as an allegorical attack on poststructuralist theory.

[Interviewer]: (with reference to post-structuralists): "You seem to make fun of them in Mantissa."

[Fowles]: "Well, I did in Mantissa because I think they've been granted altogether too powerful a position on the intellectual side." [John Fowles with Carol M. Barnum, "An Interview with John Fowles," in Modern Fiction Studies (Spring 1985)]

An allegory of the creative process structures John Fowles's Mantissa, an allegory that proceeds by means of, and within, a parody of contemporary theoretical ideas on that same creative process. Within his parody, Fowles takes hold of the post-structuralist sexual metaphor of texts and transforms it into a unique image of the creative process—the remerging of the public/logical self with...