The Multi-Layered Meanings of "A Maggot"

It must have been sometime in the mid-1990's when I gifted myself The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.  Since then, I have cracked it maybe three or four times.  

It may be the shorter Oxford dictionary, but it is by no means short.  It comes in two heavy tomes, each of almost 2000 pages, and the print is fine.

On page 1661 of the first volume one may find the definition(s) of the word "maggot," both the contemporary -- "Any soft-bodied limbless larva, esp. of a housefly, blowfly, or other dipteran fly ...," and that derived from the old Middle English -- "A whimsical or perverse fancy."

"A Maggot" is the title of the last-published (1985) novel of the celebrated English writer John Fowles.  Fowles makes it plain at the very beginning of the book that in reading it our eyes should be more focused on the second and older meaning, suggesting that someone's "whimsical and perverse fancy" will be a driving force in the novel, and also that for him to write it arose from a whimsical fancy.  And yet, the more unsettling, one might say disgusting associations that the word "maggot" brings to mind hang over the novel that follows like a sinister white cloud.  (And what of Fowles' choice of the indefinite article in the title?  Does it reinforce the old historical meaning? (This, after all, from the author of "The French Lieutenant's Woman," not "A French Lieutenant's ...))

In any event, so it is that a perverse fancy, albeit a shifting one, is at the center of the novel.  The story is set in 1736.  A young English lord has had a falling out with his father, an eminent but unnamed duke, over the former's unwillingness to marry according to the wishes of His Grace.  His Lordship departs London for Devonshire in the company of four others, but in the guise of a wealthy merchant, one "Mr. Bartholomew."  The others are: a middling actor who pretends to be his uncle, "Mr. Lacy," a still lesser actor in the role of a retired soldier, "Sergeant Farthing," there to provide protection with his blunderbuss, "Dick," who alone carries his own real name and is the manservant of Bartholomew, though he be deaf, dumb and otherwise mentally feeble, and "Louise," who in fact has been hired out to His Lordship for the duration of the trip by Miss Claiborne, the keeper of the most notorious "bagnio" or brothel in all of London.  "Louise," sometimes also "Fanny," and in reality "Rebecca," plays the role of maid to a fine lady of whom His Lordship is deeply enamored and who, we are first told, is the object of his journey, for the purpose of elopement.

But as the novel unfolds, we are asked repeatedly to abandon our understanding of what sort of perverse fancy drives His Lordship, only to replace it with a more outlandish one.  Is he tormented by his own impotence, and does he hope to cure it both by witnessing Fanny and Dick in wild copulation and by "taking the waters" in a certain place in Devonshire that specializes in a cure for this particular ailment?  Is he on a quasi-scientific pilgrimage of some kind, to Stonehenge and beyond, with a Rosicrucian or other occult orientation to it?  Beyond that still, but in the same direction if you will, is he a practitioner of Black Arts whose intention is to win favor with Satan himself by offering up Fanny, in helpless sacrifice, to be ravaged by the Devil?  Or is he a high priest, in practical station if not in name, in a benevolent and powerful religion the likes of which we have never before seen, and is his purpose in such capacity to shake Fanny to her spiritual foundations so that she can break free of her sinful past and reconcile in piety with her Quaker parents?

We never discover the answer to this riddle.  His Lordship never returns from his journey, and his fate and his whereabouts remain unknown.  The fate of his servant, on the other hand, is to have been found hanging from a tree, dead by his own hand as far as we can tell.  For a denouement we don't have an unravelling of the riddle but rather finally, at novel's end, we see Fanny, now Rebecca, in late winter of 1736-7, married to an impoverished blacksmith and giving birth to a daughter, not by her husband but by Dick.  The daughter, we are told, is Ann Lee, who many years later will be buried in Watervliet, New York, near Albany, having risen to prominence as the second, female incarnation of the Christ, or at least said to be such divinity in the Shaker movement that she led!

Much of what we learn about the competing fancies of His Lordship we learn not in conventional description of the Devonshire pilgrimage but rather in long depositions of key characters, depositions taken by the lawyer Henry Ayscough, who has been engaged by the duke and charged with solving the central mystery and, more to the point, finding his son.  These depositions are posted to His Grace, as enclosures to obsequious letters in which Ayscough candidly explains his estimation of each witness and his tentative theory of the case.

The most noteworthy and, to me, impressive stylistic feature of the book is its immersion in the language of the time and place in which it is set.  In truth, I should say that I am as ignorant as the next person about what, in fact, the patois of that time and place sounded like, and so I can only say that Fowles' language has the ring of linguistic truth!

Here is a representative sample from Ayscough's deposition of David Jones, who played the role during the trek of Sergeant Farthing:

Q.  I would have you tell me what you made of Mr. Bartholomew's servant Dick.

A.  I made nothing of him, sir.  That 'twas beyond an Irishman's belief, a gentleman thinking to employ him for what he was.  He was strong enough, well set, for a good lackey, but naught else, see you.

Q.  Not a gentleman's servant, you would say?

A.  He did what he was bid, sir, well enough.  And I'll allow his master's secrets was safe enough with him.  And his belongings.  He would not even let me touch the little chest we had upon the packhorse, that weighed so heavy.  Our first day out I would help him carry it up, he pushed me off, and so for the rest.  He was more jealous cur than serving-man in that.

Q.  Marked you nothing else peculiar in him?

A.  That he would not laugh, nor even smile, not even when the company was as merry as cup and can.  There was a maid at Basingstoke one morning at the well, where Dick and I and others was standing by, and would dowse the stableboy for some impertinence, and ran after him with the bucket but fell, and dowsed herself, which a dead man would have laughed to see how droll it was.  But not he.  He stood always at the coffin's side, as the saying goes.  Ever found sixpence, and lost a shilling.

Fowles employs a clever conceit to buttress this our immersion in the language.  He reproduces and intersperses with the narrative facsimiles of actual publications that were popular at the time his tale takes place.  They are rather difficult to read, but worthy of the effort.  Here, from "The Gentleman's Magazine," the news of Tuesday, 19 Oct 1736 includes this entry:

Dublin.  A Woman big with Child going into the Country to lie in, was taken with her Labour on the Road, no body being near but a blind Man and a Boy, she begg'd the latter to go for Help, he refus'd unless paid beforehand, she pull'd out her Purse, in which was some Silver and a small Piece of Gold, which the Boy seeing told the Blind Man of, he immediately knock'd out her Brains with a Staff, took the Purse and went off : A Gentleman coming by, and seeing the Woman murder'd, rode up to the Boy, and threatening to kill him, he confess'd the Fact, and both were sent to Kilmanham Gaol.

Fowles' narrator qua narrator does not purport to be speaking from a perch in 1736, but rather in Fowles' own time.  For example, at one point he contrasts two characters as emblematic of left- and right- "brainedness."  Nevertheless, the narrator's own voice carries a modest level of formality that we may associate with times past, as here, where he inserts an aside after telling us that Rebecca has just hastened to use her chamber pot, "quickly raising her skirts":

She did not have to remove any other garment for the very simple reason that no Englishwoman, of any class, had ever worn anything beneath her petticoats up to this date, nor was to do so for at least another sixty years.  One might write an essay on this incomprehensible and little-known fact about their under-clothing, or lack of it.  French and Italian women had long remedied the deficiency, and English men also, but not English women.  All those graciously elegant and imposing upper-class ladies in their fashionable or court dresses, whose image has been so variously left us by the eighteenth-century painters, are -- to put it brutally -- knickerless.  And what is more, when the breach was finally made -- or rather, covered -- and the first female drawers, and soon after pantalettes, appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were considered grossly immodest, an unwarranted provocation upon man, which is no doubt why they so swiftly became de rigeur.

If it weren't clear before now, I have great admiration for "A Maggot" and the audacious imagination that spawned it, and this without having explained its most audacious turn of all, one that places it, for some, in the category of science fiction instead of, or in addition to, the category of historical fiction. What was that turn? The last of the motivations of His Lordship, the benign one related by Rebecca to Ayscough in her deposition, remarkably has her enter a mysterious cavern with the nobleman, there to witness an oblong white craft that she calls a maggot!  A door drops down, she enters the craft, and then she is transported to the skies above a new and glorious world that she characterizes as the "Eternal June."  This and other visions from the cavern and its environs she incorporates into her still evolving religious perspective, which we might call "proto-Shakerism."

To me it is striking and mysterious that Fowles, an unwavering atheist, would in a historical novel paint for us a picture nearly 40 years ago that bears such close relationship to the "tic tac" phenomena that our US Navy pilots described before Congress, under oath, just last year.  But for their hard shells, they might well have been called maggots rather than lozenges.  Perhaps, then, it all bubbles up from our still-opaque and Jungian "collective unconscious."