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Masculinity on Trial: the Magus

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3 Masculinity on trial: The Magus My monstrous crime was Adam's, the oldest a nd most vicious of all male selfishness: to have imposed the role I needed from Al ison on her real ",If. (M, p. 341 ) Tire Golkctor leaves many issues implicit but unexplored: what is the relationship between male power on the onc hand and male sexual fantasy o n the other? To what extent is it possible for men to cha nge, to escape the script of masculinity, to abdicate from employing their power? Tire Magus allows these questions to be addressed both in terms of the power of a male character over women and in terms of the power over the reader of the book's fantastical voyage. N icholas Urfe is quile literally put on trial for his 'monstrous crime'. II is simultaneously an indictment of his behaviour as a man and a test of his capacity to change that behaviour in response to different values. As the design of the book makes clear, he is an individual example of what Fowles sees as male 'values' at work generall y on the personal level ofindividual relationship and the wider level of social processes such as war. In Fowles's words, he 'took on, if not the true representaLi ve face ofa modern Everyman, at least that of a partial Everyman of my own class and background.' (MRV, p.9) But the exploration of the issues involved is, if anything, more problematic than in The Collector. Though less directly perverse, the mystifying and surreal conceptions of The Magus serve both to expose male sexual fantasies and seduce the reader with them. Itselaborate tapestry is a fonn of camouflage behind which we can detect its origins in what seems to have been, on Fowlcs's part, a very immediate sense 45 MALE MYTHOLOGIES THE MAGUS of guill, or even angt=r, about male social power. for Greece, she calls him 'a snob, a prig, a twopenny·halfpenny If Nicholas is less overtly pervel'SC than Clegg as an example of Oon Juan' (M, p.34). male allitudes, he is no less a case study of the limiLSofmasculinity. The picture we get of U rfe is hardly auspicious, and the In the museum towards the end of the original version of the epigram from de Sade-'a professional rake is rarely a man to be book,! Mrs de Seitas says to him ' If there was a Department of pitied' (M , p.9)-can be read as both ironic and literal. The Young Men I should certainly take you to it. I would li ke to have book's scheme is to bring Urfe to account for his exploitative you identified.' (M, p.540) The label would probably be attitudes by means of the masque and trial. He is, however, such mo.l.t-prtdatory. As he looks back on his experiences prior to going an unsympathetic character even by his own report that one is to Greece. the picture Urfe paints of himself is of the classic 'lone tempted to question whether it is worth the effort. As he himself wolf'. This is specifically true of his approach to re lationships, admits in the revised version, 'All right. 1 treatedAlison very badly.· which he saw according to the needs of his own ego and which he I'm a born cad, a swine, whatever you want. But why the colossal manipulated by virtue of his social power as a male. He informs us perfonnancejust to tell one miserable moral bankrupt what he is?' that with women his '''technique'' was to make a show of (M RV, p.626) In Olshen's view, thiscasLS a partial doubt over the unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a success of the novel itself: 'Surely the main deficiency in the conjurer with his white rabbit, I produced the sol itary heart.' (M , characterisation of N icholas lies in his attraction for the females of pp.l5~6 ) This emotional trickery was self-confessedly a 'show', a the novel when he seems to have none whalSOCver for the reader.'2 playing-out of roles rather than an attempt at real relationships. it is one of the contradictions of the book that Urfe as a character He almost literally scripted his affairs: 'I became as neat at ending does not justify the amount of time and attention spent on him. liaisons as at starting them.' (M , p. 16) His hero was D.H. Despite Fowles's view that there is 'certainly meant to be some Lawrence, 'the greatest human being of the century' (M, p. II), progression in Nicholas's character',3 at the cnd of both versions whose atlraction for him, we learn later, lay partly in his vision of he remains fundamentally unchanged in tenns of his attitudes to sexual relations as male dominated, 'the woman inferior 10 man in women and his exploitation of his own social power. What change everything but that onc great power of female dark mystery and there might be we must imagine as subsequent to the cvenLSofthe beauty; the brilliant, virile male and the dark, swooning female.' book, as the retrospective narrative invites us to do. And much of (M, p.214) T his male mystification led Urfe into a familiar round , the time what we see of him is not simply an archetypal male buta of the pursuit, conquest and abandonment of the different women stereotype. So why has Fowlesconstructcd such an elaborate book he chanced upon: ' I didn't collect conquesLS; but by the time 1 left around him? Oxford I was a dozen girls away from virginity. I found my sexual There are a number of possible answers to such a question, the success and the apparenLly ephemeral nature of love equally sheer entertainment value of the book's bewildering existential pleasing. 11 was like being good at golf, but despising the game. quality being one. But as far as our argument is concerned, seeing One was covered a ll round, both when one played and when one The Magus as an investigation of male mythologies inevitably didn't.' (M, p. 16) U nlike Clegg, Urfe's 'disease' was, as he later leads into conLradictions, both in the character and in Fowles's identifies it, 'congenital promiscuity' (M, p.235), but they share shaping of the book. It will be of use initially to look at the ways in the same sexual obsession with power. Aiison, clearly his mentor which the character embodies central aspects of masculinity as from the beginning, 'didn't fa ll for the solitary heart; she had a Fowles views it and how those are invest igated, before considering nose for emotional blackmail' (M, p.28). She describes him as 'the Fowles's own position. affairt tU ptau type' (M , p.23). And later, during 'a white-hot It is the very typicality of Nicholas and his behaviour that is the outpouring of contempt for men' once Urfe has decided to leave pivot of the book's analysis. As a middle-class man of his .6 " MALE MYTHOLOGIES THE MAGUS gt=neration, he is a walking cliche and Fowles shows him up as feeling; but I liked things dry' is there as a tactic to show Urfe such. The retrospective narrative viewpoint is one way in which acting out the self-delusions of male imagery. The strategy of self­ this is managed. Urfe is supposedly looking back over his past exposure is a continuing one throughout the book. It maintains behaviour from the unspecified vantage point of many years (M, the suggestion of a potential for change but it is a notion which, as p.SS). This allows nOt simply for detachment but for overt self­ we shall see, the book structurall y discourages us from seeing as a indictment giving the impression that the later Urfe can now see real possibility except outside of this fiction. And equally, it also through his earlier manipulative attitude. Having disposed of functions as a confession, absolution through speech as in Clegg's Janet, 'a fundamentally silly girl I knew I didn't love' (M, p.16). case. The reader is put in the position of receiving this guilty man's he tells us he became involved with Alison ina way which struck a testimony and re-enacting his pursuit of the fantaSies of the deeper note than his previous affairs: ' I suddenly had a feeling that masque. These elements of narrative seduction become we were one body, one person ... A terrible deathlike feeling, increasingly ambiguous as the book develops. which anyone less cerebral and self-absorbed than I was then Urfe's masculine identity can be directly related to his time. would have realized was simply love. I thought it was desire. I Fowles has said that ' he was meant to be a typical inauthentic drove her straigh t home and tore her clothes off.' (M, p.29) The man of the 1945-50 period',5 and Urfe himselffeeis that Conchis later Urfe exposes how he used Alison as a stopgap before his was interested in him for 'some sy ndrome r exhibited, some depal1ure for Greece. He lied about the extent of his interest in her category I filled. 1 was not interesting in myself, but only as an (M , p.2S) and was 'deceiving her with another woman during the example.' (M, p.81 ) At the trial he is said to typify what Conchis latter part of September. The woman was Greece.' (M , p.33 ) The described in his supposed book The Midctntury Prtdicament, the stagey rhetoric of his note when he left-'Oh God, if only I was failed rebel who has adopted 'a mask of cynicism that cannot hide worth waiting for'-is blatantly denied by the sense of relief he [his] more or less paranoiac sense of having been betrayed by life' admits to having feh: 'The thing I felt most clearly, when the first (M, p,433).
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