John Fowles and Marie de France

Abstract

In 1974, John Fowles creates a prose retelling of Marie de France’s medieval lai of Eliduc and includes it in his collection The Ebony Tower. The translation is prefaced with ‘A Personal Note,’ where Fowles reminisces about his student days in Oxford, where he was studying Old French, medieval literature and the lais of Marie de France. The article is concerned with identifying the reason for Fowles to choose this particular text for translation. To this end, the authors conduct a comparative analysis of the original and the translation. The alterations of the lai show that Fowles selected this text for his collection due to plot similarities with his own books. The article proceeds to explore the significance of bigamy, the core plot of the lai, for Fowles’ works. The scholars suggest that, via his translation, Fowles starts a simultaneous conversation with medieval literature and his own earlier output. The naivety and simplicity of Eliduc, rendered by Fowles with kind but undisguised irony, stand in stark contrast to overwrought and confusing postmodernist writings, and as such draw attention to the complexity and uncertainty of human life.