The Godgame Revealed în the Magus

The Godgame Revealed in “The Magus”

"Freedom of will is the highest human good; and it is impossible to have both that freedom and an intervening divinity."( John Fowles, “The Ariostos”)

The Magus is the story of young Nicholas Urfe, an intelligent Oxford graduate, who begins an affair with an Alison, an Australian woman he meets at a party. This relationship gets more serious than Nicholas can stand, so he decides to take a position as an English instructor at the Lord Byron School in the Greek island of Phraxos. Bored, depressed, disillusioned, and overwhelmed by the Mediterranean island, Nicholas contemplates suicide, and then takes to long solitary walks. On one of these walks he stumbles upon the wealthy Greek recluse Maurice Conchis, who apparently lives alone on his island estate. Nicholas is gradually drawn into Conchis's world, his paradoxical views on life, his mysterious persona, and his eccentric masques. After he is toyed with and becomes part of an experiment meant to teach him about the value and limitations of freedom, Nicholas will eventually return to live in his own world. There, he will see Alison again and be left to make a choice about their future as a couple. 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, 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 would embrace it. 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" in his determination to control his own life. The revised version, 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".

The first name Fowles meant to give his novel was The Godgame, a title that would have been perhaps more explanatory and less mystifying. By calling his novel The Magus, Fowles purposely directs our attention towards Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, and we can clearly make connections between Shakespeare’s character, Prospero the magician, and Fowles’ character, Conchis. Both characters are symbols and devices used by the author in order to demonstrate a lesson he teaches the reader. In both writings the lesson is about freedom of choice and the dangers of being given complete freedom. Neither Prospero, nor Conchis have real power over the other characters (Prospero is nothing without his magic books), they are only meant to guide and help them find their own freedom. The characters live the illusion that they are being controlled and that is what makes them prisoners. In order to become liberated, they must learn to become responsible. That is why, in The Magus, Conchis and Lily disappear after the conclusion of the godgame and leave a changed Nicholas to confront his world with the knowledge that he too has the power to control the game.

Fowles plays many games with names in The Magus, besides the obvious one with the identities of Lily/Julie and Rose/June. Nicholas's family name is Urfe, which Fowles explains in the foreword to the revised edition is his own childhood pronunciation of "Earth". Nicholas claims to be related to Honore d'Urfe, the author of the seventeenth-century pastoral called L'Astree, or The Star, which Nick does not read until after he leaves Phraxos. Nick's roots, as his name suggests, are clearly in the earth, but his pretensions are with the gods in the sky. When he finally reads L'Astree, he discovers that the pastoral is a story of earthly rather than celestial values. It is his own story: the story of a man who has been dishonest in love, who must struggle to win back the trust of his lover. Even this game with names suggests that Nicholas has within himself, in his heritage, all which is necessary to achieve a metamorphosis of perception which will allow him to live in harmony with present realities. This game of names continues with Maurice Conchis. An issue is made of the pronunciation of the "ch" in his last name. The islanders pronounce "Conchis" with a hard "ch," so that it is homophonic with the plural of "conch," the spiraled gastropod which is often used to symbolize feminine mystery and appears in mythology as the shell trumpet of the Tritons. Conchis himself prefers his name pronounced with a soft "ch" as in the word "conscious," or childishly mispronounced, "conscience". Conchis becomes an instrument for the reawakening of Nick's conscience, especially that feminine moral consciousness which lies buried deep in the subconscious prehistory of the Urfe family. Even the title of the novel is part of a word game. While the original edition began with an identification of the word "magus" with the magician in a pack of Tarot cards, the revised edition makes this only one of the possible interpretations or masks which the title assumes. The word "magus" is also related to the Magi of the Bible who were among the first to recognize the arrival of a new world of values. The methodology of Conchis invokes yet another interpretation of "magus." Conchis's use of Lily/Julie in his attempts to convert Nicholas to a religion of life is reminiscent of the methodology of Simon Magus, an early Christian heretic important enough to be mentioned by name in the Bible. Simon Magus proclaimed himself "the divine power that is called Great". Mircea Eliade talks about Simon Magus’ religion as of an attempt to synthesize the celestial male-dominated religion with the earth-centered feminine religion. It can be assumed that one purpose of the godgame is to show Nicholas a state of consciousness in which there is a balance between male and female principles, between the carnal and the spiritual, between the dialectical unreality of words and the physical actuality of the things they signify.