The Magus (2)

Colchis's stories and anecdotes (sometimes true, sometimes not, who can tell?) are some of the most fascinating parts of The Magus, and within these parables are couched various aphorisms and gnomic utterances. Whether these pronouncements are entirely to be trusted or not is something we alone must decide. Fowles, I think, is playing around here with the idea of the novelist as god or guru. However, I can identify the truth in many of these:

Politeness always conceals a refusal to face other kinds of reality.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical . . .

. . . the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself.

But, as the Spanish say, a drowning man soon learns to swim.

The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.

Never take another human being literally.

An answer is always a form of death.

Any opinions on the above would be most welcome! I particularly like the last two, and to me they sound resoundingly true.

We humans talk in riddles and metaphors much of the time, whether we're conscious of it or not. What we say and how we say it reveal huge things about us spiritually and psychologically — again, whether we realise it or not. What we say is, disturbingly often, not what we mean; and we have to read 'between the lines', and interpret the silences between words, even more than the words themselves, to get at the real truth.

And all answers can certainly be seen as forms of death (though potential springboards for new questions too). In life and in the novel the search is often more interesting than the solution, the puzzle more seductive than the unveiling, the labyrinth more compelling than the unravelling, and the grail quest more exciting and full of life than the discovery of the grail itself.

Near the end of the novel Fowles makes a rare authorial appearance, speaking in his own voice:

The smallest hope, a bare continuing to exist, is enough for the anti-hero's future; leave him, says our age, leave him where mankind is in its history, at a crossroads, in a dilemma, with all to lose and only more of the same to win; let him survive, but give him no direction, no reward; because we too are waiting, in our solitary rooms where the telephone never rings, waiting for this girl, this truth, this crystal of humanity, this reality lost through imagination, to return; and to say she returns is a lie.

But the maze has no centre. An ending is no more than a point in sequence, a snip of the cutting shears. Benedick kissed Beatrice at last; but ten years later? And Elsinore, that following spring?

Fowles is speaking a great truth here, but he's teasing us too about the approaching end of his novel, and how all apparent endings are artificial, snips of the cutting shears, and the beginnings of something else.

In the end, the end of his book is open-ended, but the last words with which he ends are these: Cras amet qui numquam amavit / quique amavit cras amet, which, as Amanda translates in a comment on my first post on the Magus, mean: Let those love now who've never loved; let those who've loved, love yet again — which gives us all some hope for the future.

The Magus (1)

The Magus from the Tarot

In my late teens and early twenties I had a complete crush on the fiction of John Fowles, and frenziedly read my way through The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Ebony Tower and Daniel Martin. Fowles was very popular with the 1960s' generation: a generation on a hippie search for freedom, self-knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. The book which became its totem was The Magus — though Fowles himself considered it one of his least successful works. He called it a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent, by someone callow-green in the hope of becoming fertile-green. Alhough he then went on to state that the tyranny of the younger self rules the whole of one's creative life, and that The Magus was an acceptance and celebration of this. Recently I revisited The Magus, but not without some slight hesitancy and trepidation. Often the novels of one's youth — shining like beacons through a stormy and confused adolescence — can disappoint in later life. This one, however, I still loved, and found unputdownable once more.

The novel is a quest novel which concerns its narrator, Nicholas Urfe, and his journey of self-discovery. Nicholas is intellectual, well-read and intelligent, self-absorbed, unable to love satisfactorily or give himself totally, unable to accept others as they are. He sees the world through a lens of art and literature (he has illusions about becoming a poet), and is cynical about 'real life' and its hollow promises. Girls he sees as conquests, and he's proud of the fact he can let go of relationships with minimal emotional damage. He's a little aloof and priggish, a product of his bourgeois background. (In fact, there's an uncomfortable amount of myself in this portrait, at a certain period of my youth.) There's a girl in his life, Alison, who loves him, and they live together for while, until she leaves to become an air hostess and he takes up a teaching post on the Greek island of Phraxos.

On Phraxos, after a brief flirtation with suicide and the prostitutes of Athens, he embarks upon his proper 'education' — a rather different experience from his privileged Oxford career. He enters the mysterious domain of the villa Bourani, home to the charismatic and enigmatic millionaire, Maurice Colchis — the Magus. Colchis subjects Urfe to the 'godgame', a series of ever more elaborate deceptions, illusions, manipulations, theatrical re-enactments from history and myth, psychological mazes, labyrinthine masques — all of which obliquely serve to throw light on Urfe's own life and on life itself. Central to the plot are the twin sisters Julie and June, also known as Lily and Rose, who lead Urfe a merry, tantalising dance of seduction and betrayal. These figures may symbolise the complete woman, a marriage of idealism and reality, of innocence and carnality. A marriage already present in Alison, had he but realised it. But Urfe always strives for the impossible ideal, a striving bound to fail. He also tries to give a rational explanation to all the apparently irrational events happening to him — as we all would, no doubt. How much of our own selves can we see in Urfe: the egotist, the idealist, the rationalist, the pragmatist, the would-be poet, the pseudo-intellectual?

The novel is a vehicle for Fowles's take on existentialism — he was profoundly interested in Sartre and Camus — and it has all the trademarks of the knowing postmodernist writer. A meta-text, if you like. Colchis could represent the manipulative novelist himself. Or he could represent various aspects of God which we humans believe are aspects of God. Or he could represent a member of the privileged and powerful millionaire art-collecting, disciple-collecting class of people who quietly rule the world. Sometimes he appears sympathetic, humanitarian, supremely moral; at other times he seems cruel, distant, scheming. All these mysteries and paradoxes and shades of grey are intended by Fowles, of course. He's hinted that the 'meaning' of the book is whatever the reader thinks it means. A disingenuous remark by a quintessentially postmodernist author, naturally. Fowles is playing games with us, the readers, just as Maurice Colchis is playing games with Nicholas Urfe.

Ultimately the book has much to say about illusion and reality, sex and real love, chance and predestination, the choices we have to make in a godless universe, and the moral responsibilities behind these choices. It's an exposition of existentialist freedom, in fact. And Fowles is a master storyteller. He leads you on, through dark tunnels and down blind alleys, with a verbal style that's both readable and beautiful, both functional and poetic. The book races away, and the reader with it. I enjoyed so much reading this book again.