The Magus

“In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love.”

As Nick and Alison grow closer, Nick comments on how, in his era, it is easier to admit sexual desire than love. Physical intimacy is far easier than emotional intimacy, since the latter involves being vulnerable. Nick’s changing ideas of intimacy will form a key component of his character arc.

“Alison was leaning slightly against me, holding my hand […] I suddenly had a feeling that we were one body, one person, even there; that if she had disappeared it would have been as if I had lost half of myself. A terrible deathlike feeling, which anyone less cerebral and self-absorbed than I was then would have realized was simply love. I thought it was desire. I drove her straight home and tore her clothes off.”

One of the novel’s recurrent motifs is that Nick already has the answer to his quest before beginning the search. These lines show that Nick is already in love with Alison even before leaving Greece, but his illusions prevent him from admitting the fact.

“Alison said very little, but I was embarrassed by her, by her accent, by the difference between her and one or two debs who were sitting near us. She left us for a moment when Billy poured the last of the Muscadet.

‘Nice girl, dear boy.’

‘Oh…’ I shrugged.

‘You know. Attractive.’

‘Cheaper than central heating.’

‘I’m sure.’

But I knew what he was thinking.”

The exchange between Nick and his collegemate pillories the younger Nick as superficial, and is also a sarcastic take on the class divide prevalent in Nick’s Britain. Nick’s attitude would not be uncommon in an Oxford-educated young man of his generation; he immediately compares Alison unfavorably to the “debs” or upper-class debutantes sitting next to them, feeling he has been short-changed.

“I read and I read; and I was like a medieval king, I had fallen in love with the picture long before I saw the reality.”

Nick is captivated by Greece long before he visits the country, its “picture” or ideal reality subsuming actual experience. The comparison to the “king” refers to a particular motif in medieval, romantic, and Gothic traditions where a knight or king falls in love with the beautiful image of a lady. Nick’s lines set up a tension between idealized (and unreal) image and messy reality, one of the text’s central conflicts that reflects Narrative Instability as Metaphor for Reality.

“It took my breath away when I first saw it, floating under Venus like a majestic black whale in an amethyst evening sea […] Its beauty was rare even in the Aegean, because its hills were covered with pine trees, Mediterranean pines as light as greenfinch feathers. Nine-tenths of the island was uninhabited and uncultivated: nothing but pines, coves, silence, sea.”

This passage is an example of Fowles’s use of detailed figurative language to bring alive the novel’s settings and themes. Fowles uses the simile of a whale to describe the dark, beautiful hump pf Phraxos emerging from the sea. The use of imagery is seen in descriptions such as the “amethyst” ocean and the pines light as the feathers of birds. Nick’s colorful description of Phraxos immediately establishes the island as a land of enchantment, making it clear why Nick loses himself in its maze.

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

This highlighted passage in the book of modern poetry Nick discovers on the beach is from T. S. Eliot’s 1942 poem, “Little Gidding.” The lines underscore the text’s motif that the answer which one seeks lies within the self, illustrating the quest for an authentic self amid illusions. Since the book of poems has been planted by Conchis for Nick to find, the lines can be seen as an early clue for Nick that his adventure will be realized in self-knowledge. The passage is also an example of the text’s use of literary allusion to bolster its themes.

“I was increasingly baffled by Conchis. At times he was so dogmatic that I wanted to laugh, to behave in the traditionally xenophobic, continentals-despising way of my race; at times, rather against my will, he impressed me.”

As these lines show, irony is an important literary device in the novel, often highlighting Nick’s deliberate denial of reality. Here, Nick describes Conchis as “xenophobic” because of his outdated ideas about nationalities, yet Nick himself often makes reductive comments about Conchis’s “Mediterranean” nature, Greece’s wildness, and morality being a northern European concept.

“‘The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.’

‘I suppose one could say that Hitler didn’t betray his self.’

‘You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.’”

Illustrating The True Meaning and Price of Freedom and the quest for the authentic self amid illusions, this exchange between Conchis and Nick indicates that the truly free choice is one that is aligned with oneself or nature. Conchis also offers a moral lesson, arguing that Hitler’s evil would never have succeeded if the millions of ordinary Germans had stayed true to their goodness and upheld their freedom.

“The octopus came reluctantly but inevitably, slow-whirling, flesh of drowned sailors, its suckered arms stretching, reaching, searching. Conchis suddenly gaffed it into the boat, slashed its sac with a knife […]

‘I have caught a thousand in this place. Tonight another will move into that same hole. And let himself be caught as easily.’

‘Poor thing.’

‘You notice reality is not necessary. Even the octopus prefers the ideal’ […]

‘Well, how do you like the world below?’

‘Fantastic. Like a dream.’

‘Like humanity. But in the vocabulary of millions of years ago.’”

An example of the text’s animal symbolism, in this passage the octopus represents the human being who prefers illusions and inertia to reality, invoking narrative instability as metaphor for reality. The octopus knows that the hollow in which its species drifts is merely the illusion of safety, yet it prefers to repeat old behaviors rather than change its fate.

“The events of the week-end seemed to recede, to become locked away, as if I had dreamt them; and yet as I walked there came the strangest feeling, compounded of the early hour, the absolute solitude, and what had happened, of having entered a myth […] to have been young and ancient, a Ulysses on his way to meet Circe, a Theseus on his journey to Crete, an Oedipus still searching for his destiny. I could not describe it […] As if the world had suddenly, during those last three days, been re-invented, and for me alone.”

Nick’s exuberance after meeting Julie can be read as a metaphor for the power of fiction. The possibilities of fiction make reality magical, suggesting anything is possible even in the mundane world. At the same time, Nick’s euphoria is a note of caution: One must not abandon real life for fantasy. This passage also illustrates the text’s use of allusions from Greek mythology and literature. Ulysses or Odysseus is the hero of the Homeric epic The Odyssey, while Theseus is a hero from Greek mythology who enters the labyrinth of Crete to slay the half-bull, half-man minotaur. Oedipus is the tragic protagonist of the eponymous play by Sophocles, seeking to evade the cursed destiny in which he marries his own mother.

“I saw the Apollo scene in a different light. Conchis was evidently like certain modern poets: he tried to kill ten meanings with one symbol.”

An example of metatextual irony, Nick’s comment is a dig at poets who try to pack too much meaning in a single symbol. While Nick thought the Apollo scene was meant to convey a myth, Conchis indicates that the scene also shows the victory of Apollo (wisdom) over Dionysius (wild sexuality). The real irony of course is that Nick himself represents Dinoysius, governed by his animal urges.

“Utram bibis? Aquam an undam? Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?”

Conchis attributes this cryptic Latin quote to De Deukans. Unlike some other Latin epigrams used in the novel, the real-life authorship of this couplet is unclear. Open-ended in meaning, the couplet invites several interpretations. In one interpretation, the water represents reality, the wave illusion; in another the water is the mundane experience, while the wave is adventure. In either case, the answer is probably that experience is both water and wave, a balance between the mundane and the extraordinary.

“She had a certain exhalation of surrender about her, as if she was a door waiting to be pushed open; but it was the darkness beyond that held me. Perhaps it was partly a nostalgia for that extinct Lawrentian woman of the past, the woman inferior to man in everything but that one great power of female dark mystery and beauty; the brilliant, virile male and the dark, swooning female.”

Nick’s description of Julie illustrates his problematic, sexist attitudes toward women and even himself. He compares Julie to a passive object—the door that waits to be opened—while he himself is the active principle, the light to Julie’s “darkness.” The narrator satirizes the outmoded notions of his younger self, highlighting how he seeks meaning through artificial constructs about men and women.

“We took photographs of each other, of the view, and then sat down on the windward side of the cairn and smoked cigarettes, huddled together because of the cold. Alpine crows screeched overhead, torn in the wind; wind as cold as ice, as astringent as acid. There came back the memory of that mind-voyage Conchis had induced in me under hypnosis. They seemed almost parallel experiences; except that this had all the beauty of its immediacy, its uninducedness, its being-now-ness.”

While Nick often yearns for a mysterious experience that takes him to a primordial reality, this passage shows the mystery lies in the now itself. Nick’s beautiful experience with Alison is rooted in contemporary reality—the young people taking photos of each other and the landscape, huddling together and smoking cigarettes for warmth—but is as magical as an out-of-body hallucination.

“Wolves don’t hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.”

As Nick and Alison find themselves in brief trouble during their descent from Parnassus, Nick reflects on the muleteer’s words about wolves being social animals. The wolves hunting in pairs is a metaphor for Nick and Alison, who are stronger together than away from each other. Further, the lines also highlight how the philosophy of individualism often ignores the social nature of human beings.

“And shall I tell you something? I was doing the mother act. Just for a moment, when she smiled, I did think that. I did think how I’d like to have your children and…have my arm round them and have you near me. Isn’t that terrible? I have this filthy disgusting stinking-taste thing called love … God, syphilis is nice compared to love…and I’m so depraved, so colonial, so degenerate that I actually dare show you…”

These lines illustrate why Alison symbolizes truth and emotional honesty in the novel. Though Alison begins the text in a similar place as Nick—hesitant about intimacy—these lines show her subsequent growth in the quest for an authentic self amid illusions. Alison admits to loving Nick and wanting “ordinary” things like children and domesticity, even though they may seem small-minded to Nick’s intellectual persona. Alison’s sarcastic comment about syphilis being preferable to love is a barb at Nick.

“You will find that Artaud and Pirandello and Brecht were all thinking, in their different ways, along similar lines. But they had neither the money nor the will—and doubtless, not the time—to think as far as I did. The element they could not bring themselves to discard was the audience.”

Conchis’s lines are an example of the text’s use of metafictional play, with Conchis comparing his theatre to the next step of drama, where the audience itself becomes characters. The in-joke here is that reality itself is already like this advanced theatre, with people participating in the play of existence even while observing it, invoking narrative instability as metaphor for reality. Further, Fowles also compares Conchis’s theatre to reading a novel, where the reader is not passive, but participates in the text by creating new meaning.

“Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women—and absurd.”

Conchis’s lines to Nick critique the hypermasculine values that lead to war. Though they are sympathetic to women, his quote is also reductive by contemporary standards as it makes generalizations about male and female behaviors, and defines them by biology alone.

“She turned at the door; left the tiny pause of the actress before her exit line. ‘My name isn’t Julie, Nicholas. And I’m sorry we can’t provide the customary flames.’

This time I sat fully up—flames, what flames—but before I could speak she had pulled the door open and stepped aside. Light flooded in. There was a violent cascade of figures.”

This passage shows how Fowles blurs the lines between truth and fiction in the novel, invoking narrative instability as metaphor for reality. Nick is still in bed when Julie abruptly exits the room like an actor exiting the stage; her reference to flames is an allusion to the hell which Nick will shortly find himself in. The light flooding the room and the cascade of figures in black further confounds Nick’s sense of reality.

“I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.”

An example of the text’s use of literary allusions, Nick’s lines are also darkly ironic. He notes how his life has abruptly shifted from a great romance by D.H. Lawrence (with clearly defined roles for men and women) into an absurdist, dystopian novel by Franz Kafka. The switch shows how the Lawrentian ideal was never reality.

“I know they said some terrible things to you at that mock trial, Nicholas. But you were the judge. And if the terrible things had been all that was to be said about you, you would not have given the verdict that you did. Everyone there knew that.”

Illustrating the quest for an authentic self amid illusions, the older Lily de Seitas indicates to Nick that his trial or test has melted away his impurities to reveal his truth. Nick could have been moved to seek revenge because of the manner in which he was humiliated at the trial, yet he chose forgiveness, proving his mettle.

“The basic principle of life is hazard.”

Functioning as the archetypal wise woman in the text, Lily is also the Earth mother to Conchis’s authoritarian father. In this capacity, she explains Conchis’s “godgame” to Nick: Despite all systems of meaning human beings try to impose on life, life is fundamentally a matter of chance. Of course, Lily’s words cannot be taken as definitive, since Nick notes that chance is not the reason he landed up in Phraxos—his presence was engineered by Lily and Conchis.

“I had to break out of this waiting-room I was in.”

As Nick’s lines toward the novel’s end show, the waiting room is an important symbol in the text, representing limbo. One cannot stay in the waiting room forever, but must take action, whether it be Conchis staging his meta-theater, or Nick searching for Alison and embracing the true meaning and price of freedom.