THE IMAGE OF A MAGICIAN IN JOHN FOWLES’S THE MAGUS
THE IMAGE OF A MAGICIAN IN JOHN FOWLES’S THE MAGUS

Summary/Abstract: Critics usually agree that the basic scheme of The Magus plot relies on the magician-apprentice relation between Conchis and Nicholas. In the course of his education, compared by critics to Elusinian mysteries (Fleischman 1976: 299–301) or to the Tarot deck (McDaniel 1980–81), also suggested in the novel itself, in the first edition, by the quotation from Rider-Waite Tarot deck, and in the revised edition by June clarifying the source of their names (Fowles 2004: 477), Nicholas is to gain the true knowledge about the world. Critics have also reached consensus with regard to the nature of this knowledge. Fleischman (1976) writes about the godless universe, McDaniel (1980–81) lays stress rather on the discovery that all that is important in life is love, while Nadeau (1980–81) calls attention to the need of acceptance of subjectively conceived reality which allows freedom from the existing scientific, social and cultural structures. It is also the object of general agreement that this novel should be read in relation to another work by Fowles, The Aristos (1964), as it constitutes a practical application of Fowles’s philosophy presented in the earlier work. Thus, referring to Conchis’s words directed to Nicholas ‘‘You are now elect” (Fowles 2004: 531), critics agree that Nicholas’s education has been completed (even if he realised that only after some time) and that he belongs now to the aristos. This intertextuality and strong dependence of the meaning of the book on another text corrupts The Magus and draws attention to the artificiality of the whole world presented in it. On the one hand, the story presented in the novel is now not interpreted as an autonomous whole but as a part of an argument, on the other hand, placing itself in an intertextual continuum, discourse gains precedence over story turning the whole project into an exercise in narcissistic fiction in which the author comments on the narrative strategies of telling and understanding stories.

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