Fiction:
The Magus Non-Fiction:
“The Lost Domain of Alain Fournier”
“Behind the Magus”
“Greece”
With the publication of The Magus in 1965, Fowles‟s literary powers scaled heights in the organization of narrative, creation of ambiance, more matured and intricate than his unveiling fiction, The Collector. In The Magus, a novel conceived and attempted before The Collector, but published later, Fowles does not formulate his leading character as ill-bred and ill-informed, but focusses on a public-school alumni, and an Oxford returned graduate. Written in the first person, The Magus is a story of Nicholas Urfe, a self-centred womanizer, who starts to live with Alison Kelly, a young Australian.
Despite knowing of his duplicity, she falls in love with him. Nicholas fails to see the nature of their liaison, and plans to get away from London, which was dreary to him. He takes up a job as a schoolteacher in the Greek island of Phraxos. It is here that the dislocated hero comes in contact with a weird elderly gentleman, Maurice Conchis, the magus of the title. The novel progresses with the enigmatic Conchis, drawing Nicholas more and more into and against a world of impossible odds, and made to explore his inner self to reach authenticity. Nicholas is confused, taunted, baited and made to distrust his own feelings and thoughts.
The Magus projects Nicholas and Maurice Conchis narrating as first person narrators.
Conchis‟s accounts are largely concerned with four stories. Like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, an omniscient narrator intervenes briefly in the last chapter of the novel to guide the baffled Nicholas and the flabbergasted reader out of the maze. There are various accounts by Lily, whom Nicholas encounters in Bourani, Conchis‟s estate, and who also duplicates as Julie, as a part of Conchis‟s godgame. The descriptions given by her sister Rose, the elucidations given by Conchis‟s wife Lily de-Seitas, the version given by
Mitford, the teacher in Phraxos, Jojo, the woman Nicholas meets on his return to London, are also parts of the narrative. There are descriptions in the text, which are not oral; they are the Foulkes pamphlet, the account given by Anton on the atrocities in Phraxos, the two pamphlets of Conchis of the 1920‟s and the faked letters and newspaper cuttings which are a part of the godgame on Nicholas.
The structure of The Magus can be compared with the allegory of the Tarot. An ancient system of knowledge of unknown origin, the Tarot derives its base from ancient Egyptians, and to some, from Atlantis. Yet it is also said to have originated in Islam. A basis of modern playing cards, the seventy-eight chapters of The Magus coincide with the exact number of cards in the Tarot. The quest for knowledge of re-discovering the self, undertaken by Nicholas, is comparable to the mission which the Fool undertakes in the Tarot myth. In the myth: “The Fool is the principal figure in the tarot, for he is the persona who must travel the circuit of cards through a calibrated progression out of ignorance and frivolity into enlightenment”(McDaniel 249-50). Nicholas‟s expedition replicates this “calculated progression in achieving whole sight” (Salami 82). The cards in the Tarot in which the Fool overcomes is a separate “riddle for him to solve before he can progress to the succeeding card and its own particular lesson” (Ibid 250). In some cases, the Tarot is evil, since it tries to undermine God. Each character in the Tarot, represents a symbol of something deeper and more profound than the pictographs. Each correspond to something within the psyche, whether mundane or profound.
Three literary influences have made The Magus, to be among the hundred best sellers in America. Henry James‟s The Turn of the Screw, Charles‟s Dickens‟s Great
Expectations, and Alain Fournier‟s The Lost Domain. The Magus is characterized by self-consciousness, intricacy, weirdness and illusory games. As Salami concedes: “The most striking feature of the novel‟s complexity is the sheer proliferation of texts: there are numerous stories that the reader is invited to scrutinize through the act of reading”
(Salami 73).
As in The Collector, the opening of The Magus brings to our focus the central character, Nicholas Urfe, the second Fowlesean protagonist, in the incipit itself:
I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf, Queen Victoria. I was sent to a public school, I wasted two years doing my national service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.
(TM 3)
This is an unearthing situation, which is a personal development of the self. The narrative also highlights the bitterness and pent-up feelings, “middle-class, English, grotesquely-elongated, monstrous”(TM 3). The words wane in a accusing tone, though the narration does not project a regretful note. The novel unfurls in this paradoxical situation in the self. Nicholas “is a typical inauthentic man of the 1945-50 period”
(Campbell 466). He is not as inhuman as his predecessor Frederick Clegg, but is a callous collector of damsels. Not chloroforming them, he tricks them with his “solitary heart”(TM 9), trying to carve out concepts of his own self. He rejects religious and
principles is excused as, “The truth was that I was not a cynic by nature; only in revolt (Ibid 5). But he hurriedly concedes that, “I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford‟s greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty”(Ibid 5). His father, a brigadier, embodied the blind authoritarian regulations: “In lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility”(Ibid 3). Hazard, the Fowlesean condition of “suffering freedom”
(The Aristos 9) liberates Nicholas from his parents, when they are killed in a plane collision near Karachi in Pakistan. During his second year at Oxford, Nicholas begins his life, secluded and lonely, but is at peace, “After the first shock I felt an almost immediate sense of relief, of freedom” (TM 4).
Nicholas had spent his undergraduate years in Oxford, not only to perfect his acquaintance with existentialism, but also as a pastime, seducing women. A member of Les Hommes Revolts, a student club engrossed in the search of existentialism, made him devour the dissimilarity between genuine and inauthentic behaviour. After seducing women, he loses interest in them, and puts the “solitary heart”(TM 9) away, showing the “Chesterfieldian mask instead” (Ibid 22). In a retrospective mood, Nicholas could see how his previous understanding of existential theories were flawed: “We tried to imitate them, mistaking metaphorical descriptions of complex modes of feeling for straight prescriptions of behaviour” (Ibid 5). This perversion satisfied his own ends, giving him a peculiar sense of freedom. Donning this inauthentic mask, concealing his own identity, he explores his self.
The picture of Nicholas is hardly auspicious. His behaviour is the fulcrum of the analysis in this chapter. Analyzing his sexual conquests, it was like playing a game of his own design of “the solitary heart”(TM 9). He comments:
I didn‟t collect conquests, but by the time I left Oxford I was a dozen girls away from virginity. I found sexual success and the apparently ephemeral nature of love equally pleasing…I mistook the feeling of relief that dropping a girl always brought for a love for freedom. (Ibid 9)
On meeting Alison in due course, Nicholas becomes distressed at her growing attachment towards him. He finds their relationship to be uncanny, terming her as a kind of “human oxymoron”(TM 24), a “whore and a colonial”(Ibid 35). After toying with her affability, he deserts her, and leaves for Phraxos. The equation of sexuality with power is shown when Alison Kelly is described by Nicholas in a manner, bringing all his pretentiousness to the fore. To him, her voice is only very slightly Australian, yet not English “veered between harshness, faint nasal rancidity, and a strange salty directness”(Ibid 24). British imperialism is echoed here, as Australia being a Commonwealth country, is illustrated to be socially inferior to England. Alison‟s “waif- like”(Ibid 23), and “characteristic bruised look”(Ibid 23), made Nicholas hurt her continually. As their affair draw towards an end, he tells his associates ungallantly in London, that she was “cheaper than central heating”(Ibid 36). But he is aware that Alison did not reciprocate to his solitary heart, and had a “nose for emotional blackmail”(Ibid 350. It is a sign of inauthenticity in Nicholas‟s self, that he fails to see the unadulterated traits in Alison.
Nicholas is confused as Paul Morel had been, between Miriam Leviers and Clara Dawes in D. H. Lawrence‟s Sons And Lovers. He tries to locate his befuddled brain in something new, and gets employed in Phraxos, by the British Council. Thrilled in his new mission, Nicholas exhilarates: “But I was filled with excitement…I didn‟t know where I was going… I needed a new land, a new race, a new language…I needed a new mystery”(Ibid 7). Nicholas abandons Alison, escaping to Greece with all his affairs unquestioned. A deliberate and a well rehearsed letter, with a considerable amount of money, are handed over to her, indicating that she was no more than a prostitute. It is ironical to perceive that the same Nicholas, who hummed all the way to the Victoria Station, to celebrate his “emotional triumph” (TM 35), falls in love with Alison in Parnassus. The self in Nicholas tries to create a dividing line between an ideal and sexual love, and finding himself unable to come out of Alison‟s clutches, he deserts her.
In Poitiers, no magus appeared to help the confused John Fowles find his true alleyway, after his graduation in Oxford. The experiences and characters of Fowles‟s stay in Poitiers are embedded in the narrative layers of The Magus. Poitiers is one of the principal biographical inspirations of the novel:
The John Fowles of Spetsai, Greece, was a more mature, more secure young man…the John Fowles of Poitiers, France, sounds like Nicholas Urfe and shares with him the searing sense of isolation and the pain of exile, by geography, by language, and by temperament that makes Nicholas so vulnerable to Conchis‟s experiment. (Warburton 76)
On reaching the magical island of Phraxos in Greece, Nicholas tries to view himself as an existential poet. Writing profusely, he realizes that his poetry is nothing but banality:
“The truth rushed down on me like a burying avalanche. I was not a poet” (Ibid 44). In The Aristos, Fowles had elaborated on the concept of the nemo, “The nemo is man‟s own sense of futility”(The Aristos 35 ). This is what Nicholas feels that he belongs to
“nobody-nobodiness”(Ibid 35). Taking a gun with him, he goes up the hills to kill himself, only to be called back by a romantic music: “From the hills, came the solitary voice of a girl…It sounded disembodied, of place, not person…it seemed intensely mysterious, welling out of a solitude and suffering that made mine trivial and absurd”(TM 47-48).
The reincarnation in Nicholas, is the outcome of this music, a desire to live again.
Fowles here is interested in the manner the mystery of Greece dismantles idealism, as a metaphor. The haunting music exposes Nicholas‟s attempted suicide as foolish. As Clegg had preferred a death like Romeo, Nicholas poses himself as Mercutio: “…more and more it crept through my mind…that I was trying to commit not a moral action, but a fundamental aesthetic one…It was a Mercutio death I was looking for, not a real one”(TM 48). The Magus permits its protagonist to be shaken from his reverie of over- romantic stagnation. Nicholas‟s desire to die a Mercutio death, made him realize that his life was being watched by a beneficial God: “All this time I was being watched, that I was not alone, that I was putting on an act for the benefit of someone”(Ibid 48). His own atheistic concepts are dismantled here by destiny. He now considers himself
“intensely false; in existential terms”(Ibid 48). This is a stepping stone in discovering
intruded by someone. Noticing smoke coming out from a villa, he undergoes an uncanny experience. Discerning evidences of his suspicions, he finds two footfins; a towel, a poetry book with passages from Eliot, Auden, and Ezra Pound. A passage of T.S. Eliot‟s Little Gidding is marked for his edification:
We shall not cease from exploration And at the end of all our exploration Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (TM 55)
Maurice Conchis, the mysterious magus thus crosses the threshold, entering the life of Nicholas and Fowles‟s novel. Nicholas‟s encounter with Conchis guides him to be enveloped in a series of godgames, which mature the narcissistic self in him to an asserting individual. To Conradi:
The self imposed romantic incarceration prefixes the opposing liberating/
imprisoning magical enclosure of Bourani, where Urfe will discover a world that educationally resists the self, yet enhances its sense of its uniqueness. (Conradi 45)
Conchis possesses those attributes, which make him a sound instructor and a brilliant storyteller. Having a way with drama and music, he applies them as a self-negating way. The reader categorically finds his character to be unintegrated as, “no theory about him coheres”(Conradi 48). He is but a revelation of Nicholas‟s other self. Conchis‟s philosophy is, “The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself”(TM 136). The tantalizing way in which Nicholas is led by him to the
villa in a collection of signs, shows “his present absence as to his absent presence ” (Neary 132). So far Conchis seems to “suggest Godot” (Ibid 133). He tells the story of his life to Nicholas, which is “full of metaphysical innuendo reminiscent, of the mystagogy of The Aristos” (Conradi 46). He possesses a painting of “Modglianni” (TM 77), two of “Bonnards”(Ibid 82), an original “Playel harpsichord”(Ibid 79), and a fifteenth century painting of Fra-Angelico‟s painting of The Ammuniciation. His library consists of biographies and autobiographies. Nicholas takes to week-ending at Bourani from his school, listening with rapt attention to Conchis‟s life story, an amalgamation of adventurous wars and personal extremes, which he relates to the Jungian credentials of Europe. Myth and history also enter Conchis‟s narrative. Lily the woman in Conchis‟s life, is included in the narration, but as dead. A situation is created when Nicholas sees Conchis‟s dead fiancée, which is afterwards comprehended that it was another woman duplicating as Lily.
The Magus so far, is filled with long monologues, in which Conchis tells stories about his life. Trapped in befriending him, Nicholas is compelled to listen to Conchis‟s narratives, which are his main guides for self-identity. Conchis‟s first story is about his desertion from the army during the First World War, which to him, was not cowardice, but a triumph of personal integrity: “This is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will”(TM 106), and to remain fighting in it would have been to betray his “real self”(Ibid 106). His childhood fiancée Lily had tried to persuade him to return to the front, but her conventional notions on bravery, duty and honour did not dissuade Conchis from ultimately deserting the army.
Conchis‟s maneouvers are also psychical tests for Nicholas to appreciate human relationships in addition to his attitude towards women. Nicholas is made to acknowledge, that people should be known as they are in themselves, and not as outward projections. A kind of logical positivism! The masques in The Magus enable him to see this view of human understanding, “First and last, the godgame builds upon relationships in a specially Jungian fashion”(Raper 68). The masque presented before Nicholas, represents an ancient ritual. It irritated him like an “obscure poem”(TM 173).
The actors in it are disguised as mythic creatures: “ From beyond the cottage, there was a beam of light; not very strong, as a hand-held torch might give…He was tall, well-cast to be Apollo…a running girl appeared…it was Lily…Apollo blew his horn…” (Ibid 163-4). But suddenly, it turns into a current experiment, when the participants remove their odd costumes and become normal persons, “All, these dislocations serve to obliterate Nicholas‟s faith in any substantive ground or center”(Neary 134).
Conchis‟s second story concerns a wealthy nobleman named de-Deukans. He was to Conchis, “…the most abnormal man I had ever met”(TM 161), and who had taken a keen interest in Conchis as a young man, and had a commendable role as his mentor. At this point, Nicholas is made to concede cautiously, that the role Conchis assumes is at times the role of a God. To Conchis the event in human lives are not controlled by Divine Providence, but by hazards. A question is put out to Nicholas: “Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?”(Ibid 169). This distinguishing factor is about water, which has been present in the earth since its inception, and the individual wave, formed by the wind. The layered question is to give Nicholas a hint why he is fascinated by Alison, and then Lily. Are their attractions to him on account of being nubile women, or
just objects of lust? This is Conchis‟s way of testing the most crucial aspect of Nicholas‟s self.
Conchis‟s narrative continues with the third story of Henrik Nygaard, a hermit he had encountered while doing his research on birds in the high Arctic. A strict Janesist, believing in “divine cruelty”(TM 265), Nygaard was trying to achieve a union with God. Hearing Nygaard‟s heart wrenching cry in the wilderness of Norway, made Conchis realize that the hermit had indeed been communicating with God for quite a long time: “He was not waiting to meet God. He was meeting God; and had been meeting Him probably for many years”(Ibid 271). Given to Conchis‟s lack of religious convictions, “…the Nygaard story is a statement not about seeking God, but about seeking oneself-a statement that is best understood in the Fowlesean interest in Jungian philosophy” (Acheson 24). Jung stresses that the endpoint of the process is alike to the discovery of God. He gives emphasis to the self in an individual as an “unknowable essence whose totality… since it transcends on powers of comprehension” (Jung 236).
The moral imperative aspect of the Nygaard story had a deep influence on Nicholas.
Jung elaborates on such exemplary religious experiences: “Yet not I , but Christ liveth in me.‟ The symbol „Christ‟ as „son of man‟ is an analogous psychic experience of a higher spiritual being who is invisibly born in the individual…”(Jung 52).
The longstanding inauthenticity of his self comes to the surface, when Nicholas realizes to value the individual more highly than the general. To view woman as sex objects is in itself an indication of inauthenticity. When Alison arrives in Greece for a brief period, he is faced with an unthinkable dilemma. His attraction to Lily, whose actual