INTRODUCTION
“A character is either ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it, fictionalize it, in a word you put it away on a shelf – your book, your romance autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo Sapiens.”
Fowles/FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN, pg.87
The first thing that came to my mind after reading THE MAGUS was a strange feeling of having been exposed. I felt that, as a reader, I had been put to a very complex test, that most of my expectations had been deceived and that my reactions had been anticipated and played upon like in a diabolic psychological game. THE MAGUS seems to be, in a very peculiar and abstract way, accessible and inaccessible at the same time. The novel is in fact the story of a modern Sir Gawain who after having fought the Green Knight, eventually learns how to treasure love. You could argue that it is Ferdinand instead of Sir Gawain and Prospero instead of the Green Knight. I shall come back to these intentional resemblances in one of the following chapters of this paper. Things become more complicated if you try to dwell upon the idea of game. This change of perspective may bring into attention the fact that the story is not concerned with a character, but with deceiving a character or rather with the mechanism of deceiving. Moreover, the relation between the two main characters in the novel, Nicholas Urfe and Maurice Conchis, is somehow similar to that between and author and his reader. I would say not only that it is similar, but that it was meant to be that way. Nicholas and the reader both are given a set of texts. Nicholas is supposed to use those texts exactly the way a reader does. On the other hand, Maurice Conchis does exactly what an author does: he tells stories and those stories are to go through Nicholas’ frame of mind. Being a first persons narrative, the reader is tempted to take Nicholas’ judgements for granted, thus making all the (apparent) interpretative mistakes that the character does. Actually the character is devised such as to build up a series of expectations in the reader, expectations that will all be deceived. The point I will try to make in this essay is that the narrative structure of the novel is devised as a highly accurate analysis of the act of reading and that the author and the reader both are given parts and act as characters in the novel, mimicking the acts of writing and reading, respectively. THE MAGUS deconstructs the process of reading in order to analyze how a reader reads a text and how that particular text offers preferred readings.
I. GOING BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES
“We know the world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when the characters and events begin to disobey us that we begin to live.”
Fowles/FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN, pg.86
The process of reading as a theme (be it major or secondary) is also present in other novels by Fowles. In THE COLLECTOR, for instance, the story is a parable. The main character creates a world (based on his own experience) isolated from the rest of the world. He feels secure within those limits where every thing has its fixed place. The rest of the world has nothing interesting to him other than offering some ‘elements’ which he thinks that will fit into his own ‘arrangement of things’ so to say. One of these ‘elements’ is a women. The problem is that she will not fit into his universe. So he thinks the only solution is to force her to enter his world, to make her take it for granted, with no other alternative. But such a solution only brings about the death of the girl. One possible reading of this parable could be the killing of meaning. Considering this possible reading, the main character, the murderer, may be seen as a naive reader, a very obscure interlocutor who in his narrow-mindedness kills the meaning of a text by desperately trying to give it his own meaning, limitedly framed in his own experience.
As different from THE COLLECTOR, in FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN, the role of the reader is explicitly observed. The author actually invites the reader to cooperate. Fowles ventures to write a Victorian novel in the 20th century. Such a daring project has to take into account the fact that the modern reader should be prepared to consider the changes in mentality that have taken place since the dawn of Victorianism and also to discourage whatever prejudices a modern reader might have about Victorianism. The solution found by Fowles was to disrupt the narrative discourse in order to allow explanations by the narrator. To allow these explanations into the text, the author operates a change in perspective – from the omniscient point of view (a narrative convention often broken into the novel, like in the following example: “Charles did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waives quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost, and I do not mean he has taken the wrong path.”, pg. 66) to “I” as a narrator. A whole chapter (Ch.13) is dedicated to dissertations about writing. Moreover, the narrator has an interlocutor, a “you”, supposedly being the reader. “Perhaps, you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right string and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner” (pg.85). So here we have to do with a would-be reader whose reactions are anticipated and guided. But the guidance is sometimes mischievous. The reader is bound to follow those guidelines and thus he is trapped as his created expectations will not always be met. Let us consider, for instance, a comparatively similar process present in an episode of the novel. In Chapter 27, Charles goes to Dr. Grogan to let him know that Sarah is safe and sound. He also tells the doctor what is going on between him and Sarah and asks for advice. The doctor says that Charles has unknowingly fallen in love with the girl and Sarah is only trying to deceive him with her sense of guilt, as she wants to draw his attention on her. In the following chapter, Charles reads a series of documents (given by Dr. Grogan) related to several cases of hysteria, which is supposedly responsible for Sarah’s misbehaviour. After Charles reads them, he is expected to act accordingly, that is to refuse and discourage all the passes made by Sarah. That is Dr. Grogan’s advice, that is what Charles says he will do and that is what the reader expects. But the reader will be very surprised to find out that Charles does not give up and that Sarah is not hysterical, but on the contrary, a charming and sensible woman. Her cunning strategies can hardly be said to be symptoms of hysteria. They prove to be mere feminine weapons, so to say. This technique of creating certain expectations and then deceiving them is widely used in THE MAGUS, as we shall see.
Furthermore, FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN has two endings. After dwelling upon Charles-Sarah relationship, the author offers a Victorian ending to the story, a would-be happy ending (a feature not necessarily Victorian). Although deep inside him Charles loves Sarah, he is a gentleman, he belongs into a very restrictive social class and therefore: 1) he cannot marry a woman of such low social position; 2) he cannot break his engagement to Ernestina. In other words, he cannot accept that he loves Sarah and he must convincingly take this as a fact. So he forgets about her, (in the same way the story forgets about the parallel relationship between the couple Sam and Mary, two servants, two commoners that is), he goes back to Ernestina, marries her, takes over her father’s business (this concession could be accepted because it happens towards the end of Victorianism) and lives happily ever after. At this point the reader is told that such ending simply cannot be (the reader has already been told that this story could hardly be a novel in the age of Allain Robbe Grillet and Roland Barthes, pg.85). This solution to the story may be a Victorian happy ending, but it simply cannot be what a modern reader would expect. A modern happy ending, if a modern novel is to accept any clear-cut happy ending, would rather have Sarah as Charles’ lover. If that is what the reader expects (and the reader is surely suggested to expect that), he is wrong again, because Charles does go back to Sarah, but the unimportant (from a Victorian point of view) pair of characters, Sam-Mary, suddenly becomes of vital importance. It is Sam that is responsible for Charles’ losing not only Sarah, but also his respectable position in the society.
If Fowles experiments and plays with the reader in THE COLLECTOR and FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN, he goes far beyond that in THE MAGUS. The text is also an open opera, as Eco would call it. But beyond that, it seems to disrupt all the classical boundaries between the well established elements of the work of art as seen by M.H. Abrams(1): universe, artist, audience –three equidistant points that have in their centre the work of art. THE MAGUS is literature turned upon itself. According to Wolfang Iser, the literary work “cannot be identical with the text or with the concretization, but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must be virtual in the character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the objectivity of the reader” (pg.21). For Iser, the role of the text is to ‘designate’ instructions for the production of the signified (pg.65) which in the case of literature is the aeasthetic object. The role of the reader, Iser argues, is to follow these directions and as such to produce the text, a text to be precise. In THE MAGUS, these instructions are not only contained in the structure of the text, but they become part of the story. The implied author and the implied reader are of course present as elements of the text, but they are also illustrated and given form in the story. They become characters in a text where intertextuality is a landmark. Wayne Booth defines the implied author as a kind of an alter-ego of the author, a sort of puppet master responsible for the designs, values, cultural norms and moral standards. If we are to agree with this definition, we may notice that in THE MAGUS the implied author is paralleled by a character, Maurice Conchis, who acts exactly this way. Moreover, the main character in the novel, Nicholas Urfe, is acting as the implied reader, that is he is given a set of directions that he will carry out in his own way. For Iser (pg.22), “the meaning of a literary text is not a definable entity, but, if anything, a dynamic happening”. Indeed, what else do Conchis and his team do than to offer Nicholas a set of more or less reliable clues and to let him use those clues in order to produce texts, to produce meanings. As such, the text creates its own reader that has been given the part of a character. The whole story on the island of Phraxos seems to be a dynamic happening. On the one hand, there is Maurice Conchis, a magician story teller and director, and on the other hand, Nicholas Urfe, a rather naive reader (and actor for that matter) who falls in all the possible traps an author can lay for his readers.
II. THE IRRESISTABLE LIAR
“Am I ever going to be told what you really think you are doing?”
“Lie upon lie.”
“Perhaps that’s our way of telling the truth”. But then as if she had known she had smiled once too often, she looked down and added quickly “Maurice once said to me –when I had just asked a question rather like yours – he said ‘An answer is always a form of death’”.
Fowles/THE MAGUS, pg.626
This section is concerned with aspects of texts and intentionality in THE MAGUS. I will start off from the deconstructivist definition of reading, as given by David Buchbinder (pg.57) – the reading of any text is the identification of a particular discourse in it. According to Buchbinder, the process by which we as readers arrive at such an identification includes our abilities with the linguistic code with which we manipulate the meaning of the text. But as a code is in a close relation with cultural structures and values, when we read we bring to the tex a set of assumptions that may be ours, or that may be what we believe to have been the assumptions of the culture which produced the text. These assumptions we bring to the text are called by Derrida “supplement” (2). I have brought into discussion the concept of supplement, because it is an element which was thoroughly taken into account in THE MAGUS. The complex structure of the novel was devised such as to mislead the reader. A process like this presupposes an anticipation of the reading process, reader responses and the supplement that the reader will bring into the text.
I will now suggest a comparative reading of two texts:
1. “You don’t believe what I’m telling you and I know you don’t believe me, but after we’ve settled this matter, follow me and willingly cooperate as if I were telling the truth.”
John R Searle (3)
2. “if it is a part of his game, experiment, whatever it is, I don’t care a damn how many lies he tells you about me. But I do care if you start believing them.”
The first text is a definition of a convention called by John Searle “fictional statement”, a convention present in any novel. The reader has to accept it in order to have access to the text, to follows the directions of the text and thus to produce it. Moreover, the text has an “I” and a “YOU”, that is an addresser and an addressee. According to Roman Jacobson, these two roles are present in any text, not just as two points between which the communication takes place, but as active roles in the process. The first text has a subject who carries out the process of “knowing” and “telling” – it is the addresser. The addresser certainly has an interlocutor – the addressee. The addresser offers a convention and assumes it is accepted. The addresser and the addressee become “WE”. Without this subject, or rather subjects (I, you), without the cooperation between the two there is no text. We can also notice that the “I” projects a model of “you” (a “you” that accepts the convention), that is the addresser anticipates his addressee. The addresser assumes that his audience is able to carry out a series of interpretative operations, to tell similarity from difference, to play a game. Considering the author-text relationship, Wayne Booth says that the author insinuates himself into the structure of the work. This means that the implied author is a text strategy able to establish certain semantic correlations. The same goes for “you”. Umberto Eco (pg.250) defines the implied reader as the intellectual ability of sharing the text, of cooperating in producing the text. From now on, I will refer to the implied author and the implied reader as two text strategies. It is also worth mentioning that the fictional statement refers to a potential reality: it is issued in terms of “telling”, “not believing”, “acting as if believing”. That is, in fact, what any novel requires – a convention, a game.
The second text, taken from THE MAGUS says nothing else. Just that it is not an overt discourse on the theory of literature, but a dialogue in a novel. This means that a convention which is implicit in any novel was transferred to the characters in the novel. It is not the only piece of evidence in this respect in THE MAGUS. Directions on what a reader should do or should not do are abundant in the novel. In the “foreword” to the revised version of the book, Fowles says: “If THE MAGUS has any ‘real’ significance, it is no more than that of the Rorscharcht test in psychology. Its meaning is whatever reactions it provokes in the reader. (...) I did intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of God, from the supernatural, to the jargon ridden scientific; that is a series of human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute knowledge and absolute power. The destruction of such illusions seems to me an eminently humanist aim.” I am not going to enter too deep into this paratext of THE MAGUS, but I think it is relevant as far as intentionality is concerned. There is a direct reference to the reader and to his role, that is to his expected role. A reader should follow his reactions, that is the only way to have access to a text. This is what Nicholas is eventually taught, as almost up to the end he does exactly the opposite. He is presented with a series of lies (or texts, if you like). He know that they are lies and does not accept them as such. He tries to find out what is behind them, which is something he is not allowed to do. This kind of inquiry proves to be fruitless and leads to nowhere. In fact Conchis does not lie to Nicholas. The owner of Bourani warns him several times that he had entered a wonderland and that he should act accordingly. When the ‘actors’ leave the scene, Nicholas is not able to find any meaning of what has happened to him. The only outcome that he can make out of this is the experience of what he has been through. There is a striking similarity between reading and Nicholas’ story. What happens to him when he enters Bourani is what happens to any reader when he begins to read a text. His reality as a person is disrupted and he enters the fictional reality of the book.
III. PROSPERO IN WONDERLAND
“I think that’s some kind of clue. The place of mystery in life. Not taking anything for granted. A world where nothing is certain. That’s what he is trying to create here.”
“With himself cast as God.”
“But not out of vanity. Out of intellectual curiosity. As a hypothesis. To see how we react. And not one kind of God. Several.”
Fowles/THE MAGUS, pg.339
Umberto Eco, when speaking of narrative structures, defines a possible world as a cultural construction (pg.79). According to him, a narrative world borrows, except for the case of given indications to the contrary (for instance in case of indications of the following type: the square circle could travel in time), properties of the real world and in order to do so it sets into motion highly recognizable characters. That is, for instance, when a magician is need in a story, it is more convenient to hint at Prospero, the archetype magician. This will also imply that if a particular character lives on an island (or is more likely to live on an island), that particular island will be a variant of some sort of the island in THE TEMPEST. When the transfer of such highly recognizable character is operated, it is very likely that the whole structure from which it was taken should somehow be implicit in the new structure. However, the main reason for which the transfer is made, as Eco says, is to save energy and not to re-tell a well-known story. The ‘wonders’ that Conchis works on Nicholas may resemble the ones worked by Prospero, but Conchis and Nicholas have their own and unique story.As I have said, Nicholas entering Bourani is like a reader’s entering the reality of the text. Once he sets foot in this wonderland, the reality he has lived in so far is disrupted. Nicholas’ passage from one reality to another is not only hinted in the text. These two worlds are clear-cut in the structure of the novel. The first section of the novel ends exactly before Nicholas’ first visit to Bourani. His return to the reality which he has left is marked in the same way. The story of his return is told in the last section of the book.
Conchis makes all the necessary operations to prepare Nicolas for the experience which is to come. Then Conchis tells a story (supposedly, the story of his youth, of his first love – Lily, of his participation in World War I). After hearing this story, back to his room, Nicholas hears a song: “At first hallucinatorily faint, impossible to pinpoint, it began. I thought it mnust be coming from the walls from the gramophone in Conchis’ bedroom (...).
Then – unimaginable and strangeness of it, the snack of it, the sound swelled again and I knew beyond doubt what was being sung up there. It was ‘Tipperary’. Whether it was the distance, whether the record, because it must have been a record, had been deliberately slowed there seemed to be some tonal distortions as well – I couldn’t tell, but the song came with a dreamlike slowness and dimness, almost as if was being sung out of the stars and had had to cross all that night and space to reach me. (...).
Soon it was as if I had imagined everything. I lay awake for at least another hour. Nothing more happened; and no hypothesis made sense. I had entered the domain.” (pg. 133-134).
The next day, Conchis resumes the story of his youth. He speaks about his talent for music and about his first love. At this point, Nicholas is deep inside the domain. When he goes to bed again he hears music. This time it is not coming from a distant point, but from downstairs where, as he goes to see what it is, Conchis and nobody else but Lily are playing the harpsichord. Now, I would like to look back at what Fowles said about THE MAGUS, that if it has any real significance, it is no more than a Rorscharcht test in psychology. I would like to bring into discussion the opinion of a critic that literally uses Rorscharcht test in literary criticism. It is not because I should intend a psychoanalytical approach to the text, but because I think his definition of reader’s response is very relevant to THE MAGUS. The critic’s name is Norman Holland. He discusses art in terms of the centrality of the ego’s mediating activities between the urge to fulfil desire and the necessity of coping with reality. According to Holland, interpretation is a function of identity (4). As he or she is so he or she reads, Holland argues; we perceive the text the way we perceive reality – through a pre-existing schema: “each of us will find in the literary work the kind of thing we particularly wish to fear the most.
From this point of view, I think it is easier to understand what happens to Nicholas. He has entered the domain. He is told about Lily de Seitas, but he simply cannot believe that the girl who is playing the harpsichord is Lily. He cannot believe that Lily is Lily. So lily will become Julie Holmes in the same way the melody he heard was “Tipperary’, but there were some ‘tonal distortions in it’.
IV. PARTNERS IN CRIME OR BROTHERS IN ARMS?
“At some unseen signal the students all rose. Everyone in the room stared at me. I was aware that I wanted to make the right choice something that will make them remember me, that will prove them all wrong. I knew I was judge only in name. Like all judges, I was finally the judged; to be judged by my own judgement”
Fowles/THE MAGUS, pg.516
Nicholas may be a failure in his ‘real’ life, but he is not a failure if he is to be judged by his responses towards Bourani. There have been, we are told, several other readers of Conchis’ texts, the most recent of which being John Leverrier and Mitford. After leaving Greece, Nicholas meets them both and has the opportunity to compare their experiences with his. At this point in the novel, we may notice how much different Nicholas is from what he used to be at the beginning of the novel when he acted very much like Mitford, whereas now he is inclined to agree with Leverrier. Leverrier has enjoyed his experience from outside, as a spectator, and he chooses not to share it with anyone, not to spoil the beauty of it. Nicholas tells Leverrier that they are fellow victims, but the latter does not agree with him. Nicholas sees himself as a victim because he wasn’t a mere spectator, he was a participant. As different from the two, Miford could get nothing from his visit to Bourani, because of his inability to exercise his imagination faculty. Conchis has labels for each of them: Leverrier is intelligent, Miford is hopeless and Nicholas is somewhere in between the two, he is ‘elect’. Conchis thus hints that he rejects the obscure visitors to Bourani, he welcomes the intelligent ones, but he will always prefer the emotive ones. Because they are psychic (the way Nicholas is, although he doesn’t believe it). It is easier for the muse to make them write poems.
“ ‘What’s a muse?’
‘A lady who makes a gentleman write poems.’
‘Does he write poems?’ “ (Fowles/THE MAGUS, pg. 592).
I have based my interpretation of the narrative structure of THE MAGUS on my belief that the novel belongs into that privileged class of books that are about writing books. THE MAGUS is a meta-text rather than a text. It is a text about texts. The novel tells at least three stories: the story of what happens to its characters; the story of what happens to its naive reader and the story of what happens to itself as a text.
I have tried to analyze how the concepts of implied author and implied reader operate in this text and I have found out that the relations between them have been transferred to some of the characters in the novel. I have used this as an explanation for the disrupted structure of the novel. I have also tried to demonstrate that the parallelism between the pair implied author-implied reader and a pair of characters, Conchis-Nicholas is intentional. But may it is not (although I doubt it.). maybe it only seems that way, because according to Eco any text creates its own model of reader, its implied reader, that is. By that he means that the text postulates its implied reader as a cooperation strategy, thus constructing a reader able to illuminate those data contained in it that are less obvious. In other words, the implied reader of THE MAGUS is required to carry out the same operations of acknowledging relations as the character Nicholas is invited to carry out. THE MAGUS tells the story of a character and offers at the same time a set of norms to its implied reader, whose story it actually tells. This according to Eco happens in many texts: De te fabula narrator.
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Fowles, John – THE MAGUS, Picador edition, 1988, Pan Books Ltd.
- FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN, Triad/Panther Books, 1978
- THE COLLECTOR, Triad/Panther Books, 1976.
SECONDARY SOURCES:
Booth, Wayne - THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 1978;
Buchbinder, David - CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY AND THE READINGS OF POETRY, Berkeley Old Style & Novarese Book, 1991;
Eco, Umberto - LECTOR IN FABULA, Univers, 1991.
Fish, Stanley - DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 1989;
Freund, Elizabeth - THE RETURN OF THE READER, Methuen, London & New York, 1987;
Iser, Wolfang - THE ACT OF READING, o theory of the aesthetic response, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978;
Krieger, Murray - TEORIA CRITICII, Univers, 1991.
NOTES:
1. See Freund, pg.6;
2. See Buchbinder, ch.4 DECONSTRUCTION, pg. 57-73;
3. See Eco, pg. 253-254;
4. See Freund, ch: THE RELATION OF THE READER TO DAYDREAMING – Norman Holland on Transactive criticism, pg. 112-133.
© catalin stefan, bucuresti, december 1994
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