Kidnapping The Real: John Fowles' The Collector

By David Leon Higdon

John Fowles’ 1963 novel, The Collector, evolve from three sources, two of which are well known: his attendance at a performance of Béla Bartók’s opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and his own teenage captivity fantasies. The mystery of the third source can now be resolved, and its identity is detailed in this essay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Leon Higdon
• Release date: Jun 5, 2014

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Copyright 2014 David Leon Higdon

Published By David Leon Higdon at Smashwords

Kidnapping the Real: John Fowles’ The Collector

Authorities place the number of kidnappings each year in the world at 15,000 to 30,000 and classify them in four groups: kidnappings for money, kidnappings for politics, kidnappings for money and politics, and kidnappings for neither money nor politics. In 1999, there were 1789 kidnappings for money (ransom) in the United Kingdom alone. In the Third World, children are often abducted and then sold into either labor or sexual slavery. The 1970s and 1980s saw an explosion of political kidnappings in which a person or a number of persons were hold hostage to try to force some political action such as release of incarcerated individuals, reversal of a policy. Often a political kidnapping is engineered to extort money for a cause. FARC and ELN in Columbia have quite successfully used this tactic, as has the Abu Sayaf separatist group in the Philippines. Most authorities see the no money, no politics category as involving non-custodial parental kidnapping of their children—some 354,000 children in the United States in 1988—but this category includes that small percentage of kidnappings in which reasons or motivation is very ambiguous. Italy’s Red Brigade kidnapped, tried, and killed Aldo Moro, a former premier, to disarticulate the workings of the bourgeois state without ever requesting a ransom or a change in public action. Unfortunately, the list of kidnapped individuals could be extended considerably, to Elizabeth Smart (held June 5, 2002 to March 12, 2003) or to Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight who were held captive for ten years by a retired school bus driver. Currently, we are transfixed with the kidnapping of some two to three hundred girls by extreme Islamists in Nigeria.

Take two infamous examples of kidnapping from the last quarter of the twentieth century: Terry Anderson who was held hostage in Lebanon for ambiguous political ends from March 16, 1985 to December 4, 1991—2,454 days he reminds his readers in his account of his ordeal—and Colleen Stan who was held hostage in northern California from March 19, 1977 to August 9, 1984. Anderson, an Associated Press reporter stationed in Beirut and mistaken for a CIA agent, was taken hostage by 9mm pistol-waving unshaven young men (Anderson 6) as he returned from his weekly tennis game early one morning, and for the next six and a half years was trunnelled, taped, chained, blindfolded, wrapped mummy like, and hauled around Beirut and environs from one location to another as his captors attempted to trade his life for arms. He was not pleased to learn that the market price was set: One American citizen is worth 300 TOW antitank missiles, or 50 Hawks and 200 TOWs (162). Blindfolded most of the time and kept sedentary for hours each day, Anderson fought the blankness by drawing on his memories, by reading every scrap of print he could get, and by writing in his secret diary. But to no avail. As he notes, the days were simply Hours, days, nights, weeks. Blank nights. Gray dawn after gray dawn (67). He repeatedly became depressed, as hope after hope was squashed. "The depression is enormous,