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.

South West Coast Path. Day 13: Seaton To Lyme Regis

Sea cliffs are unstable on the Devon/Dorset coastline and landslips are common. It's all to do with the geological deposition of harder rocks like chert and chalk over the softer Gault clay. Every now and then a chunk of land breaks off and slides into the sea. Normally these are small erosions, but occasionally there are much bigger slips — for which there's plenty of evidence all along this section of coast.

On Christmas Eve 1839, between Seaton and Lyme Regis, eight million tons of rock and soil slid seawards forming a completely separate block of land — later named 'Goat Island' — and a huge gully called 'The Chasm'. Acres of farmers' cultivated fields disappeared in an instant. Over the following years and decades wild nature took its inevitable course. This is the most impressive by far of all English coastal slips (though there are some good ones on the Isle of Wight), and the whole area is known as the Undercliff. There's a narrow path which runs all the way across it.  

However, walking the seven and a half miles through the Undercliff — particularly when the path is sticky with mud and slippery with leaves — is not for the faint-hearted. A single path winds up and down through a jungle of ash and maple, birch and sycamore, ivy-covered boulders and dense undergrowth. Toiling through it, I had the illusion I was walking on the spot and getting nowhere. Time hung suspended. This was a lost and secret world.

Long strands of brambles brushed and pricked at my face; shiny hart's-tongue ferns sprouted from rock crevices. It was not the time of year for wild flowers, and the only bright colours which stood out from the muted, background green were the reddish-orange seeds of the stinking iris and the red breasts of the robins. Ivy was pervasive, enveloping everything — the rocks, the tree trunks, the whole woodland floor itself.

There were birds — I could hear ravens and seagulls calling above the canopy — but most proved elusive, except for the blackbirds scuffling through the dead leaves and the mouse-like wrens with their cocked-up tails. I felt, as I so often feel in overgrown forest, that something wonderful and exciting, something unusual and momentous, was happening in a place just out of sight and out of reach. That beyond that tree root embedded in the path, beyond that mossy stump, beyond that creeping ivy and spreading rhododendron, a woodland Holy Grail was waiting to be discovered: a rare orchid perhaps, or a tawny owl sitting motionless on a branch, or a golden chalice from some Anglo-Saxon hoard gleaming in a sudden burst of sunlight. But everything remained obstinately hidden in some near-yet-far cleft in the rock, in some secluded glade or clearing — or in some dark recess of the mind.

I emerged from the Undercliff, and made my way down to the Cobb at Lyme Regis, the famous breakwater featured in The French Lieutenant's Woman, that classic novel by John Fowles. This book was, of course, later made into a film directed by Karel Reisz and starring Meryl Streep as the femme fatale, Sarah Woodruff, and Jeremy Irons as Charles Smithson, the fossil collector. I recalled that the last time I'd been in Lyme Regis, over a quarter of a century ago ago, I'd seen Fowles himself in the town's museum. He was the museum's curator, and remained so for ten years (from 1978 to 1988), and then became its archivist.

I walked to the end of the Cobb, to the spot where Meryl Streep had stood in the film, and the weather was equally wet and windy. Then, retracing my steps, I suddenly noticed thousands upon thousands of fossils imprinted in the stone slabs which paved the breakwater. 

Books Which Change Your Life

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a yogi to practice it. In fact, if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and leting it flow out of you unimpeded. It has to do with waking up and seeing things as they are. In fact, the word 'Buddha' simply means one who has awakened to his or her true nature. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

That's the last of my quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn. It's time to move on to other things. My recent readings of his books Coming To Our Senses and Wherever You Go, There You Are came at just the right time in my life and have affected me deeply. It's strange how sometimes exactly the right book is 'gifted' to us at exactly the right moment in our lives - a book which may quickly become a landmark book, influencing us, rescuing us, inspiring us in profound, often life-changing ways.

When I was in my late teens I read The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and these books fired a life-long interest in Zen Buddhism and were mind-blowing for me at the time. They affected absolutely the way I thought and the way I lived. Other books which have done this to me are Thoreau's Walden, the novels of Hermann Hesse and John Fowles, and (this may surprise you) the novels of Henry Miller. I read all of these writers in my twenties.

I wonder how many of you have totemic books you read at a critical time in your lives - books which altered your mindset? The power of the written word can be truly astonishing.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. THOREAU

Memory And Imagination

While the New Year is a time for anticipation and looking forward, Christmas is a time for reflection and looking back.

The future is by definition an imagined land. But what's often forgotten is that the past is also imaginary to a great extent. I've been looking back again through my old notebooks of quotations as I did before here and here. At the head of one of these notebooks I see that I've written this: to remember is also to imagine.

There was a time when I used to read a lot of John Fowles. I copied down these 2 quotations from his Victorian-pastiche novel The French Lieutenant's Woman:

His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad'.

It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic. I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is literally too much with us now.

These short passages still resonate strongly with me. And how relevant the 2nd one is in these days of instant, unrelenting communication by text and email, by mobile phone and Internet.

I also used to read a lot of Aldous Huxley. These extracts are taken from Texts And Pretexts:

All 'feelings and opinions' are temporary; they last for a while and are then succeeded by other 'feelings and opinions'... The 'all' feeling is brief and occasional; but this is not to say that a metaphysical system based upon it must necessarily be untrue... Our experience is divided up into island universes. We jump from one to the other - there are no bridges.

The mind purifies the experiences with which it is stored, composes and informs the chaos. Each man's memory is his private literature and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.

The magic of irrelevance is one of poetry's most powerful instruments. Why are poetical phrases poetical? In most cases, because they contain ideas which we normally regard as irrelevant one to another, but which the poet has contrived to make relevant... Every good metaphor is the mating of irrelevances to produce a new and more vivid explosion.

Dominic Rivron has been ruminating recently on metaphor in his blog - how about that for a brilliantly succinct description of metaphor, Dominic?

In case we nail all our colours with utter and complete abandon to the mast of Art, it's salutary to be reminded occasionally that Art and Beauty can sometimes lead to dangerous excess (as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray showed only too well):

The religion of imagination is a dangerous faith, liable to the most deplorable corruptions.

Finally in Texts And Pretexts Huxley states a great truth about nature that many cosy nature writers fail to recognise:

Very few 'nature poets' have the courage to admit that their goddess lives with an unknown mode of being, that she sometimes reveals herself unequivocally as the most terrifying and malignantly alien of deities.

I'm sure that Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers would agree with this!