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Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > The Magus
The Magus
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by
The Canon is What Our Friends Write
“The Magus” is a novel that achieves everything that most of the books pushed and promoted by white American male post-modernists fail to.
It’s genuinely innovative in form. Its form follows and complements its substance. Its narrative style reflects its metaphysical concerns. It doesn’t just name-drop post-modern philosophers or concepts, resembling a cut and paste from an undergraduate philosophy textbook. It genuinely explores the issues in a fictional way.
The metaphysical issues are explored in a metafictional manner as well. Issues that affect perception, understanding and meaning equally affect the structure of the novel, and the relationship between author and character, as well as author and reader.
The novel was enthusiastically supported by Fowles’ publisher, Jonathan Cape, which had previously published works by both James Joyce and Ian Fleming. It was both commercially and critically successful, at one point selling over four million copies.
As a result, its support has diminished in the US ever since, largely because it is Anglo-European (i.e., it is recognisably English, while set on a Greek island) and not the product of a member of the envious American post-modern academic fraternity who moonlight as God’s gift to the homegrown literary avantgarde. Inevitably, therefore, the novel has been buried in the US under the ignominious residue of its initial popularity. Superficially, it’s too accessible for the self-proclaimed post-modern elite.
Twopenny-Halfpenny Don Juan
The novel follows the exploits of a 25 year old Oxford-educated English teacher and budding poet/writer, Nicholas Urfe, who takes a two year assignment at a boarding school modelled on Eton on the fictional Greek island of Phraxos. Nicholas is a bit of a lad, and is trying to escape the clutches of his Australian girlfriend, Alison, who, he suspects, wants to marry him:
Love of Freedom
Alison responds to the news of his departure:
Nicholas describes his conduct as “calculating”, but argues that “it was caused less by a true coldness than by a narcissistic belief in the importance of the lifestyle. I mistook the feeling of relief that dropping a girl always brought for a love of freedom.”
The Right Anguishes
At Oxford, he belonged to a group called Les Hommes Revoltes, where “we argued about being and nothingness and called a certain kind of inconsequential behaviour ‘existentialist’. Less enlightened people would have called it capricious or just plain selfish; but we didn’t understand that the heroes, or anti-heroes of the French existentialist novels we read were not supposed to be realistic. We tried to imitate them, mistaking metaphorical descriptions of complex modes of feeling for straightforward prescriptions of behaviour. We duly felt the right anguishes…”
Nicholas doesn’t wholly escape the clutches of French existentialism after Oxford. His relationships are not just relationships, but explorations of the existentialist predicament. He must exit them, if he feels that his metaphysical freedom is compromised in any way.
Between Existence and Nothingness
Lonely on Phraxos, Nicholas hypothesises:
He feels “a metaphysical sense of being marooned” on Phraxos:
While the language of nothingness belongs to Sartre, the contemplation of suicide owes more to Camus:
The man is still being judged by the adolescent undergraduate. “But then the mysteries began.”
The Mysteries of Bourani
And the mysteries began when Nicholas ventured onto the land surrounding a private villa called Bourani that was owned by Maurice Conchis, who had briefly been the mayor during the German occupation of the island in WWII. He is a former student, but not a follower, of Jung.
What follows takes up most of the novel. From Nicholas’ point of view, it’s written in the style of detective fiction as he tries to learn more about his predicament. On the other hand, it seems that Nicholas has been chosen or elected to enter a kind of magical curtainless theatrical performance or masque or “meta-theatre” where “all here is artifice” (which reminded me of the magic theatre in Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”).
The Novel as Masque
This masque is symbolic of the experimental art form of the novel. Conchis jokes that “the novel is no longer an art form”, then asks “why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?” (to which Nicholas responds “For fun?”) This tongue in cheek exchange suggests that the choice is between education and entertainment.
For Nicholas personally, the masque represents a supernatural conflict between order and chaos, between the rational and the irrational, between the predetermined and the willed (or voluntary). He suspects that “something was trying to slip between me and reality”. He feels “as if the world had suddenly been re-invented, and for me alone...You’ve no idea how strange this experience has been. Beautifully strange. Only, you know, it’s one’s sense of reality. It’s like gravity. One can resist it only so long.” Conchis’ role is to be the “chance agent”, ably assisted by two attractive twin sisters from England (Julie/Lily and June/Rose, one of whom, at least, went to Cambridge). They’re playing a game with Nicholas that has two aspects - “one didactic, the other aesthetic.” It’s even hinted that the two girls are “nothing but a personification of your [Nicolas’] own selfishness.”
The Existence of Mysteries
As with any novel, there’s a difference between reality and unreality:
I’ll avoid revealing details of the game: “It would be like telling you the story of a mystery film just before you went to see it.” Suffice to say that the name of the novel was originally supposed to be “The Godgame”.
All is Hazard
Conchis consistently refers to “hazard” rather than “chance”. “There is no plan. All is hazard.” However, it is part of a broader ontology of being and becoming:
Conchis thinks of “the word ‘being’ [as] no longer passive and descriptive, but active...almost imperative...You are meant to do as you choose...I must warn you that this evening I give you not a narrative. But a character...We are all actors and actresses...on the stage of the world.”
Rearranging Reality
Later, Lily says to Nicholas, “You must have seen you’re in the hands of someone who’s very skilled at rearranging reality.”
Nicholas acknowledges that “I was experiencing...a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice...I had an idea that sooner or later I was going to be asked to perform as well, that this was some initiation to a much darker adventure that I was prepared for, a society, a cult...”
Soon Nicholas feels that he’s playing hide and seek with a group of schizophrenics:
Inevitably, Nicholas falls in love with Lily’s “coolness, mystery, elegance” (which overcome Alison’s “energy, candour, companionability” and “her normality, her reality, her predictability”):
Endless Interaction
Nicholas could justify his mistreatment of women, because he just hadn’t found the right one yet. He thinks of himself as “difficult, hazardous, poetic”, whereas Alison sees him for what he is: not complicated, but selfish.
Nicholas passes through “stages of knowledge” that are still ultimately philosophical, despite their resemblance to a “mystical experience”:
“An Answer is Always a Form of Death”
Towards the end of the novel, Nicholas is told:
Outside the godgame, we are all waiting for the meaning of life to be made (or to become) apparent to us. Only, to say that it becomes apparent for anybody is a lie. If anything, we must all continue waiting.
Freedom and Love
On the other hand, it’s possible that the meaning of freedom comes only from love:
The Folly of the Metaphysical Detective Story
Whatever attempts the reader makes to understand the novel must be qualified by both these words and the words Fowles has Nicholas say towards the end:
First published in 1966, “The Magus” seems to mirror some of Thomas Pynchon’s perspective in “The Crying of Lot 49” (published in the same year).
SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)
“The Magus” is a novel that achieves everything that most of the books pushed and promoted by white American male post-modernists fail to.
It’s genuinely innovative in form. Its form follows and complements its substance. Its narrative style reflects its metaphysical concerns. It doesn’t just name-drop post-modern philosophers or concepts, resembling a cut and paste from an undergraduate philosophy textbook. It genuinely explores the issues in a fictional way.
The metaphysical issues are explored in a metafictional manner as well. Issues that affect perception, understanding and meaning equally affect the structure of the novel, and the relationship between author and character, as well as author and reader.
The novel was enthusiastically supported by Fowles’ publisher, Jonathan Cape, which had previously published works by both James Joyce and Ian Fleming. It was both commercially and critically successful, at one point selling over four million copies.
As a result, its support has diminished in the US ever since, largely because it is Anglo-European (i.e., it is recognisably English, while set on a Greek island) and not the product of a member of the envious American post-modern academic fraternity who moonlight as God’s gift to the homegrown literary avantgarde. Inevitably, therefore, the novel has been buried in the US under the ignominious residue of its initial popularity. Superficially, it’s too accessible for the self-proclaimed post-modern elite.
Twopenny-Halfpenny Don Juan
The novel follows the exploits of a 25 year old Oxford-educated English teacher and budding poet/writer, Nicholas Urfe, who takes a two year assignment at a boarding school modelled on Eton on the fictional Greek island of Phraxos. Nicholas is a bit of a lad, and is trying to escape the clutches of his Australian girlfriend, Alison, who, he suspects, wants to marry him:
“I didn’t collect conquests, but by the time I left Oxford I was a dozen girls away from virginity...I was a snob, a prig, a twopenny-halfpenny Don Juan…You know what Australians are like. They’re terribly half-baked culturally. They don’t really know who they are, where they belong. Part of her was very gauche. Anti-British. She found me very English, very fascinating. Partly it was because I was ‘cultured’, a word she often used...Alison was always feminine; she never, like so many English girls, betrayed her gender. She wasn’t beautiful, she very often wasn’t even pretty. But she had a fashionably thin boyish figure, she had a contemporary dress sense, she had a conscious way of walking, and her sum was extraordinarily more than her parts...She stood there in her white dress, small, innocent-corrupt, coarse-fine, an expert novice...Out of bed I felt I was teaching her, anglicising her accent, polishing off her roughness, her provincialisms; in bed she did the teaching.”
Love of Freedom
Alison responds to the news of his departure:
“I’m going to be an air hostess, and you’re going to Greece. You’re free.”
Nicholas describes his conduct as “calculating”, but argues that “it was caused less by a true coldness than by a narcissistic belief in the importance of the lifestyle. I mistook the feeling of relief that dropping a girl always brought for a love of freedom.”
The Right Anguishes
At Oxford, he belonged to a group called Les Hommes Revoltes, where “we argued about being and nothingness and called a certain kind of inconsequential behaviour ‘existentialist’. Less enlightened people would have called it capricious or just plain selfish; but we didn’t understand that the heroes, or anti-heroes of the French existentialist novels we read were not supposed to be realistic. We tried to imitate them, mistaking metaphorical descriptions of complex modes of feeling for straightforward prescriptions of behaviour. We duly felt the right anguishes…”
Nicholas doesn’t wholly escape the clutches of French existentialism after Oxford. His relationships are not just relationships, but explorations of the existentialist predicament. He must exit them, if he feels that his metaphysical freedom is compromised in any way.
Between Existence and Nothingness
Lonely on Phraxos, Nicholas hypothesises:
“One kind of person is engaged in society without realising it; another engages in society by controlling it. The one is a fear, a cog, and the other an engineer, a driver. But a person who has opted out has only his ability to express his disengagement between his existence and nothingness. Not cogito, but scribo, pingo, ergo sum.”
He feels “a metaphysical sense of being marooned” on Phraxos:
“I was worse off than even Alison was; she hated life, I hated myself. I had created nothing. I belonged to nothingness, to the neant, and it seemed to me that my own death was the only thing left that I could create; and still, even then, I thought it might accuse everyone who had ever known me. It would validate all my cynicism, it would prove all my solitary selfishness; it would stand, and be remembered, as a final dark victory.”
While the language of nothingness belongs to Sartre, the contemplation of suicide owes more to Camus:
“My feelings, at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.”
The man is still being judged by the adolescent undergraduate. “But then the mysteries began.”
The Mysteries of Bourani
And the mysteries began when Nicholas ventured onto the land surrounding a private villa called Bourani that was owned by Maurice Conchis, who had briefly been the mayor during the German occupation of the island in WWII. He is a former student, but not a follower, of Jung.
What follows takes up most of the novel. From Nicholas’ point of view, it’s written in the style of detective fiction as he tries to learn more about his predicament. On the other hand, it seems that Nicholas has been chosen or elected to enter a kind of magical curtainless theatrical performance or masque or “meta-theatre” where “all here is artifice” (which reminded me of the magic theatre in Herman Hesse’s “Steppenwolf”).
The Novel as Masque
This masque is symbolic of the experimental art form of the novel. Conchis jokes that “the novel is no longer an art form”, then asks “why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?” (to which Nicholas responds “For fun?”) This tongue in cheek exchange suggests that the choice is between education and entertainment.
For Nicholas personally, the masque represents a supernatural conflict between order and chaos, between the rational and the irrational, between the predetermined and the willed (or voluntary). He suspects that “something was trying to slip between me and reality”. He feels “as if the world had suddenly been re-invented, and for me alone...You’ve no idea how strange this experience has been. Beautifully strange. Only, you know, it’s one’s sense of reality. It’s like gravity. One can resist it only so long.” Conchis’ role is to be the “chance agent”, ably assisted by two attractive twin sisters from England (Julie/Lily and June/Rose, one of whom, at least, went to Cambridge). They’re playing a game with Nicholas that has two aspects - “one didactic, the other aesthetic.” It’s even hinted that the two girls are “nothing but a personification of your [Nicolas’] own selfishness.”
The Existence of Mysteries
As with any novel, there’s a difference between reality and unreality:
“Verification is the only scientific criterion of reality. That does not mean that there may not be realities that are unverifiable…
“Man needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.”
I’ll avoid revealing details of the game: “It would be like telling you the story of a mystery film just before you went to see it.” Suffice to say that the name of the novel was originally supposed to be “The Godgame”.
All is Hazard
Conchis consistently refers to “hazard” rather than “chance”. “There is no plan. All is hazard.” However, it is part of a broader ontology of being and becoming:
“There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be. You are too young to know this. You are still becoming. Not being.”
Conchis thinks of “the word ‘being’ [as] no longer passive and descriptive, but active...almost imperative...You are meant to do as you choose...I must warn you that this evening I give you not a narrative. But a character...We are all actors and actresses...on the stage of the world.”
Rearranging Reality
Later, Lily says to Nicholas, “You must have seen you’re in the hands of someone who’s very skilled at rearranging reality.”
Nicholas acknowledges that “I was experiencing...a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice...I had an idea that sooner or later I was going to be asked to perform as well, that this was some initiation to a much darker adventure that I was prepared for, a society, a cult...”
Soon Nicholas feels that he’s playing hide and seek with a group of schizophrenics:
“I was beginning to lose my sense of total sureness that [Conchis] was inventing a new stage of the masque...He was assaying not my powers of belief, but my powers of unbelief.”
Inevitably, Nicholas falls in love with Lily’s “coolness, mystery, elegance” (which overcome Alison’s “energy, candour, companionability” and “her normality, her reality, her predictability”):
“I sensed, behind the outward daring, the duplicities of the past she had been playing, a delicious ghost of innocence, perhaps even of virginity; a ghost I felt particularly well equipped to exorcise, just as soon as time allowed...I knew already that all my past relationships with girls, my selfishness, caddishnesses, even that belittling dismissal of Alison to my past that I had just perpetrated, could now be justified. It was always to be this, and something in me had always known it...
“I imagined a Julie/Lily who had acquired all Alison’s experience and adeptness, her quick passions, her slow lubricities, but enhanced, enriched, diversified by superior taste, intelligence, poetry...”
Endless Interaction
Nicholas could justify his mistreatment of women, because he just hadn’t found the right one yet. He thinks of himself as “difficult, hazardous, poetic”, whereas Alison sees him for what he is: not complicated, but selfish.
Nicholas passes through “stages of knowledge” that are still ultimately philosophical, despite their resemblance to a “mystical experience”:
“I had the sense that this was the fundamental reality and that reality had a universal mouth to tell me so; no sense of divinity, of communion, of the brotherhood of man, of anything I had expected before I became suggestible. No pantheism, no humanism. But something much wider, cooler and more abstruse. That reality was endless inter-action. No good, no evil; no beauty, no ugliness. No sympathy, no antipathy. But simply interaction. The endless solitude of the one, its total enislement from all else, seemed the same thing as the total inter-relationship of the all. All opposites seemed one, because each was indispensable to each. The indifference and the indispensability of all seemed one. I suddenly knew, but in a hitherto unexperienced sense of knowing, that all else exists.
“Knowing, willing, being wise, being good, education, information, classification, knowledge of all kinds, sensibility, sexuality, these things seemed superficial. I had no desire to state or define or analyse this interaction, I simply wished to constitute it - not even ‘wished to’ - I constituted it. I was volitionless. There was no meaning. Only being...
“At the same time a parabola, a fall, an ejaculation; but the transience, the passage, had become an integral part of the knowledge of the experience. The becoming and the being were one.”
“An Answer is Always a Form of Death”
Towards the end of the novel, Nicholas is told:
“In the godgame we start from the premise that in reality all is fiction, yet no single fiction is necessary.”.
Outside the godgame, we are all waiting for the meaning of life to be made (or to become) apparent to us. Only, to say that it becomes apparent for anybody is a lie. If anything, we must all continue waiting.
Freedom and Love
On the other hand, it’s possible that the meaning of freedom comes only from love:
“When I loved you, it meant everything you said or did to me had meaning. Emotional meaning. It moved me, excited me. It depressed me…”
“Tomorrow, let them love, who have never loved;
They who have loved, let them love again, tomorrow.”
The Folly of the Metaphysical Detective Story
Whatever attempts the reader makes to understand the novel must be qualified by both these words and the words Fowles has Nicholas say towards the end:
“By searching so fanatically I was making a detective story out of the summer’s events, and to view life as a detective story, as something that could be deduced, hunted and arrested, was no more realistic (let alone poetic) than to view the detective story as the most important literary genre, instead of what it really was, one of the least.”
First published in 1966, “The Magus” seems to mirror some of Thomas Pynchon’s perspective in “The Crying of Lot 49” (published in the same year).
SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)
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Reading Progress
April 4, 2014
– Shelved as:
to-read
April 4, 2014
– Shelved
April 4, 2014
– Shelved as:
fowles
January 1, 2018
–
Started Reading
January 4, 2018
–
28.66%
"'Ultram bibis? Aquam an undam?' Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?"
page
188
January 7, 2018
–
42.53%
"What I really wanted to say was that I was enchanted and that I had, absurd though it was, to be free to be enchanted."
page
279
January 10, 2018
–
62.96%
"Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is another dimension of feeling...men are without..."
page
413
January 12, 2018
–
Finished Reading
January 16, 2018
– Shelved as:
read-2018
January 16, 2018
– Shelved as:
reviews
January 16, 2018
– Shelved as:
reviews-5-stars
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Jan 16, 2018 05:05PM
Ian, that's a ridiculously good review. Sounds like a book I might like - might need to bump it up the list.
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Wow, quite an in-depth review, Ian! I was happy to see this pop up on my feed as this book is an old favourite of mine.
Amazing review, Ian. I also was taken by this phenomenal story.
Listen Marv; you've missed the entire point about us white, male, American, po-mowers, and pee-po-mowers. We have loads of good reasons for liking poorly written, low selling books which incorporate the standard p-po-mo and po-mo traits. Among them are;
1) We can tell each other how special and intelligent we are.
2) In meeting we can kiss each other's asses.
3) We can share and dance to the funky music played by white boys.
4) We don't have to pay Fowles-type prices.
5) We actually like obscure and/or flowery thesaurus words;.
Watchew know about America from Aborigineville anyhow?
1) We can tell each other how special and intelligent we are.
2) In meeting we can kiss each other's asses.
3) We can share and dance to the funky music played by white boys.
4) We don't have to pay Fowles-type prices.
5) We actually like obscure and/or flowery thesaurus words;.
Watchew know about America from Aborigineville anyhow?
ConK wrote: "Listen Marv; you've missed the entire point about us white, male, American, po-mowers, and pee-po-mowers. We have loads of good reasons for liking poorly written, low selling books which incorporat..."You do know that John Fowles is British, right?
T.D. wrote; "You do know that John Fowles is British, right? "
I guess; really wasn't thinking about it. You do know that my comment was intended to address the very first line in Marv's review, which I'll duplicate here; "The Magus” is a novel that achieves everything that most of the books pushed and promoted by white American male post-modernists fail to." Right?
If there is any follow up, the answer is "DUH."
I guess; really wasn't thinking about it. You do know that my comment was intended to address the very first line in Marv's review, which I'll duplicate here; "The Magus” is a novel that achieves everything that most of the books pushed and promoted by white American male post-modernists fail to." Right?
If there is any follow up, the answer is "DUH."
Edward wrote: "Ian, that's a ridiculously good review. Sounds like a book I might like - might need to bump it up the list."Thanks, Edward. I'm sure you'd enjoy it.
T.D. wrote: "Wow, quite an in-depth review, Ian! I was happy to see this pop up on my feed as this book is an old favourite of mine."Thanks, TD. I wonder what I would have thought if I'd read it when younger. It's the sort of book that could trigger an obsession.
deleted user wrote: "Watchew know about America from Aborigineville anyhow? "We get most of your remainders, though not for a buck, unfortunately.
deleted user wrote: "T.D. wrote; "You do know that John Fowles is British, right? "I guess; really wasn't thinking about it. You do know that my comment was intended to address the very first line in Marv's review, w..."
See my fifth par.
Glenn wrote: "Amazing review, Ian. I also was taken by this phenomenal story."Thanks, Glenn. You seem to have written the definitive review. As usual!
Ian wrote: "T.D. wrote: "Wow, quite an in-depth review, Ian! I was happy to see this pop up on my feed as this book is an old favourite of mine."Thanks, TD. I wonder what I would have thought if I'd read it ..."
Funny you should mention that ;) I was in my twenties, and read every one of Fowles books within eighteen months or so, though I'd not begun with this one. I was introduced to his work when I was about twelve when (how weird is this) our Weekly Reader, which was a catalogue of books to purchase that was distributed to school kids, had The Collector as one of its options. So, yeah, I read that when I was twelve. But I did not catch Fowlesmania until I read The Magus in my early twenties. I have a first edition in my library back home in Texas which is stored, perhaps forever, in my sister's attic.
Correction: I read The Magus, Mantissa, The French Lieutenant's Woman, A Maggot (wins Worst Repulsive Title Ever award), The Ebony Tower, and Daniel Martin. That is not all of his books though it is most of his novels, from what I can see looking at his GR author page.
Ian wrote: "deleted user wrote: "Watchew know about America from Aborigineville anyhow? "We get most of your remainders, though not for a buck, unfortunately."
Ha ha!
Great review! I read The Magus in my early 20's and have always quoted it as my favourite book. Not sure how much I understood of it then, but I've never forgotten the lush, summery, mysterious, magical and romantic atmosphere of that Greek island. A bit afraid of reading it again in my 50's in case it disappoints :)
Just saw your great review, Ian. I read this my 20s as Richard (above) did, and I really enjoyed it. I'm sure I completely missed any deep and meaningful stuff, or you'd think I might remember it. I do seem to remember a physical landscape and some sort of game, but I can see from your review how little I must actually have absorbed. Duh.
Best review I have found so far, as it helps me think about the book and get rather a lot more from it. Thank you!
Len wrote: "Best review I have found so far, as it helps me think about the book and get rather a lot more from it. Thank you!"Thanks, Len. I hope you get to review the novel.
