Heraclitus against the Barbarians: John Fowles's The Magus

Abstract

Most men live as though their thinking were private possession(1) To domesticate magic, that science; To accept the limitations of scientific rule, That magic, or leads to magic.(2) In John Fowles's The Magus, as in 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 revealed as Nicholas Urfe takes part in the godgame of self-discovery which obviates the barbarism within own self-construct, within each of assumptions and presumptions. It barbarism which blinds him to the subconscious existence within himself of life-sustaining values as well as to an awareness of interconnectedness with others. It barbarism - and this 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 novel about the difficulties of attaining personal freedom, especially in terms of discovering what one is (Barnum 201). But this task complex because Fowles confronting one of the basic constructs of Western culture, what Wilson Harris has described as 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 whenever person or an institution, from position of power, establishes key concepts as inviolable so that no real dialogue on certain issues possible because the person in position of power (e.g., Nicholas) believes that position rests on foundation which absolute and unchangeable. It also manifests when writer attempts to control the actions of or the responses of audience. One way for writer to avoid participating in the authorial civilization he questioning to make the author as much fiction as the characters in the text he writes (Harris 51). This why, in leading Nicholas toward discovery of the true nature of personal freedom, Fowles constantly reminds readers of the writer's godlike power to create and control fictional worlds. Like Conchis, Fowles playing godgame with the minds of readers: he experimenting with the possibility that readers' eyes, like those of Daniel Martin, can be opened to the expanded world of Heraclitean whole sight. Thus, in The Magus, there blending of form and function. The writer as well as the reader live the myth as it coming into being (Barnum 194) for although fiction requires creator or, at least, an assembler or compiler, it does not require the heavy hand of controller. Fowles argues in The Aristos that if the universe had had creator, his second act would have been to (19), just as Conchis and Lily disappear after the conclusion of the godgame in The Magus so that changed Nicholas can confront world with the knowledge that he too has the power to control the game. As such, the godgame an instrument of liberation. Fowles knows that for The Magus to succeed, readers, like Nicholas, must enter the marriage of complementary, syncretic opposites where, in the tension between multitude of Heraclitean extremes, life truly exists (cf. Aristos ch. 6). Heraclitus complained that the people of 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. …