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

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

The original edition of The Magus (1965), unlike the revised edition (1977), was quite sympathetic to Nicholas. It was dedicated to Astarte, the Phoenician earth goddess/queen whose intervention in the sacrifice of her son by Isis led to the resurrection of Osiris and the establishment of a religion which promised eternal life to all who were initiated into its mysteries (Campbell 1.425). Yet, the original ends with Nicholas turning his back and walking away from Alison in a kind of male victory. In this version, the metamorphosis achieved consists in Nicholas becoming "as firm as Alison herself" (606) in his determination to control his own life. The revised version,(3) which is less sympathetic to Nicholas and lacks the dedication to Astarte, ends with the suspended image of Alison still trying to convince a recalcitrant Nicholas that without her he will "never be more than half a human being" (667). In the revised version, the question of whether or not Osiris will accept reanimation in a religion of life is left open, as it still is in the Heraclitean tension of our own world.

Each of the characters in The Magus is an individual manifestation of a syncretic entity. Nicholas Urfe represents the consciousness of the average English man, just as John Briggs, Nick's replacement on Phraxos, both in the next school year and in the next cycle of the godgame, represents the consciousness of the average American. After Nicholas meets Briggs, he comments, "I began to understand why Conchis had picked him. If one had taken a million young college-educated Americans and distilled them down into one quintessential exemplar one would have arrived at something like Briggs" (633). The characters are syncretic because the godgame is a kind of experiment to test the possibility of metamorphosis within the consciousness of the average educated Western male. The events of the godgame are meant to be instructive. They are not meant to be understood as literal truth, but rather as metaphorical descriptions of complex modes of feeling.

In the godgame, Nicholas must be viewed as an anti-hero. He is an Oxford-educated male who feels that Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life is the same "Socratic honesty," a product of our "authorial civilization," that Fowles exposes in Daniel Martin.(4) As a result of his training, Nicholas places a higher value on words and appearances than on substance. In his club at Magdalen, "Les Hommes Revoltes, "Nicholas, showing rare whole sight, hints at how the novel should be read as he explains how he and his friends:

argued about being and nothingness and called a certain kind of inconsequential behavior "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 behavior. We duly felt the right anguishes. Most of us, true to the eternal dandyism of Oxford, simply wanted to look different. In our club, we did. (19)