Heraclitus against the barbarians: John Fowles's 'The Magus.' - John Fowles Issue

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1996 by Paul H. Lorenz

Most men live as though their thinking were private possession(1)

To domesticate magic, that is science; To accept the limitations of scientific rule, That is magic, or leads to magic.(2)

In John Fowles's The Magus, as in his poem "Barbarians," the real threat to humanity can be found not only inside the walls of Western culture, but also ensconced within the very walls of our own individual consciousnesses. This is revealed as Nicholas Urfe takes part in the godgame of self-discovery which obviates the barbarism within his own self-construct, within each of his assumptions and presumptions. It is a barbarism which blinds him to the subconscious existence within himself of life-sustaining values as well as to an awareness of his interconnectedness with others. It is a barbarism - and this is the central premiss of Fowles's godgame - which can only be removed from Western culture through the process of individuals, like Nicholas, discovering within themselves the freedom to act in ways which are not dictated by the outmoded social structures of the culture they were born into.

The Magus is a novel "about the difficulties of attaining personal freedom, especially in terms of discovering what one is" (Barnum 201). But this task is complex because Fowles is confronting one of the basic constructs of Western culture, what Wilson Harris has described as a deep-seated belief in an "authorial civilization" which "runs hand in hand with various barbarisms that reside in the most cultivated personalities, in ourselves as well as others" (50). This belief in "authorial civilization" manifests itself whenever a person or an institution, from a position of power, establishes key concepts as inviolable so that no real dialogue on certain issues is possible because the person in a position of power (e.g., Nicholas) believes that his position rests on a foundation which is absolute and unchangeable. It also manifests itself when a writer attempts to control the actions of his characters or the responses of his audience. One way for a writer to avoid participating in the "authorial civilization" he is questioning is to make the "author" as much a fiction as the "characters" in the text he writes (Harris 51). This is why, in leading Nicholas toward a discovery of the true nature of personal freedom, Fowles constantly reminds his readers of the writer's godlike power to create and control fictional worlds. Like Conchis, Fowles is playing a godgame with the minds of his readers: he is experimenting with the possibility that his readers' eyes, like those of Daniel Martin, can be opened to the expanded world of Heraclitean "whole sight." Thus, in The Magus, there is a blending of form and function. The writer as well as the reader "must live the myth" as it is coming into being (Barnum 194) for although fiction requires a creator or, at least, an assembler or a compiler, it does not require the heavy hand of a controller. Fowles argues in The Aristos that if the universe had had a creator, "his second act would have been to disappear" (19), just as Conchis and Lily disappear after the conclusion of the godgame in The Magus so that a changed Nicholas can confront his world with the knowledge that he too has the power to control the game. As such, the godgame is an instrument of liberation.

Fowles knows that for The Magus to succeed, his readers, like Nicholas, must enter the "marriage" of complementary, syncretic opposites where, in the tension between a multitude of Heraclitean extremes, life truly exists (cf. Aristos ch. 6). Heraclitus complained that the people of his time did not understand how "a thing agrees at variance with itself" [fragment 78! (Kahn 65), how the living and the dead, the young and the old, the mortal and the immortal are one and the same [fragments 92 & 93] (Kahn 71). For Heraclitus, all life exists in the living tension between complementary pairs of opposites which he perceived as single forces playing against each other like the "bow and the lyre" producing music, harmonie (which Empedocles called Aphrodite or Love), the counterpart to Strife or Conflict. The Heraclitean world is one based on "the principle of proportion or agreement which creates a harmonious unity out of potentially hostile powers" (Kahn 196). It is a world in which "Conflict is Justice" [fragment 82] (Kahn 67) and "Man's character is his fate" [fragment 114] (Kahn 81), a world where every entity, whether fictional or actual, is free to act naturally.

In The Aristos Fowles presents his personal interpretation of the Heraclitean philosophy which informs The Magus. According to Fowles, Heraclitus described mankind as divided into a moral and intellectual elite, the aristoi, and an unthinking, conforming mass, the hoi polloi. These are two Heraclitean extremes, but between them there are infinite gradations of moral and intellectual acuity which can be (and are) actualized in men and women. In fact, Fowles argues, "the dividing line between the Few and the Many must run through each individual, not between individuals" (9-10). Viewed in this way, Fowles and other modern Heracliteans can identify the good with the thoughtfully considered moral actions of the aristoi, who possess whole sight, and evil with the thoughtless actions of the blinder-wearing hoi polloi without justifying any system of totalitarian or aristocratic rule (in the modern sense of the word), for each of us contains within ourselves elements of both the aristoi and the hoi polloi. This is why the only meaningful area in which moral or social change can be discussed or actualized is within the consciousness of a single individual (cf. Kierkegaard 29-32). Initially an "existentialist," it is not surprising that Fowles shares this Kierkegaardian awareness with Camus, who also recognized the ability of art to bring about a renascence of "justice and liberty" (Camus, "Artist" 210-12) through the reestablishment of a Heraclitean equilibrium (Camus, "Helen's" 188-91). For Fowles, a person with whole sight knows that "we all live at a crossroads of irreconcilable poles" whose very irreconcilability "constitutes our escape." With whole sight, a person knows that "the Many are like an audience under the spell of a conjuror, seemingly unable to do anything but serve as material for the conjuror's tricks" even though "the true destiny of man is to become a magician himself." This requires that a person like Nicholas accept the limited nature of the freedom available to the individual, accept the inevitability of personal isolation, and accept the responsibility of learning to use his particular powers to "humanize the whole" (Aristos 213-14).