My paper:

Lauren Scull

Mythologies

Dr. Sexson

12-6-11

Myth in The Magus:

Nick Urfe’s Volatility of Belief and Calasso’s ‘Three Regimes’

In Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony the author asserts that, “man’s relationship to the gods passed through two regimes: first conviviality, then rape. The third regime, the modern one is that of indifference.” (53) Likewise, he adds, “there was an age when the gods would sit down alongside mortals, as they did at Cadmus and Harmony’s wedding feast in Thebes.” (53) That, however, was at an earlier time. Now, according to Calasso, the gods’ indifference towards man has created a similar reaction from humanity, a modern secularism sprung from a world unaccustomed to contact with the divine.

Similarly, throughout John Fowles’ The Magus, Nicholas Urfe’s response to his seemingly super-natural experiences, and to the sort of “living” mythology taking place on Bourani is nearly always rejection, no matter how tactile the experiences might seem.

Nicholas, like the other characters in the novel, is constantly re-negotiating his belief system to account for a new kind of schizophrenic reality that at once confirms and rejects the divine. Consequently, the volatility of each character’s understanding of his or her reality in The Magus demonstrates how mythology impresses itself on even the most vehement of secularists, or as Calasso writes, “how mortal mind and body are still subject to the divine, even when they are no longer seeking it out…” (53)

Nicholas’ atheism is most specifically manifested by his rejection of the female divine. Throughout the book he repeatedly casts off his bonds to female figures, especially those that he is closest with. Before we even meet Allison, we are told of his wayward affair with Janet, a schoolmaster’s daughter, whom he quickly cuts ties with when he recognizes her desire to marry. Yet, even this relationship was preceded by several others, and he admits that, “I became almost as neat at ending liaisons as at starting them.” (21) Clearly, Nicholas seems to have a gift for dismantling the female psyche, even comparing himself to a magician, “revealing the solitary heart”, overcoming the wishful goddess with his powerful faithlessness.

             His rejection of Allison however isn’t nearly as “neat” as the other women. Brooding over his loneliness, his regrets, and his newly diagnosed “syphilis”, Nicholas confesses to Conchis that he “turned her down”, to which Conchis tellingly replies, “you sound like Adonis. Have you been gored?” (144) Conchis’ allusion to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis evokes both Nicholas’ goddess-rejection and Allison’s subsequent retribution. Nicholas’ self-interest and “love of freedom” is continually at the bottom of his coldness towards females, and it is likewise his most internalized reason for leaving Allison.

As Conchis points out however, freedom is only lawlessness; it is the ability to act without morality, without God. Referring to the Nazis, though clearly meant to convey a larger message, he tells Nicholas,

“They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”                                                                                                            

If Nicholas is the quintessential, “semi-intellectual” (508) of an “amoral and permissive era” (512) then he is representative of what Calasso described as the “indifference” of modern humanity’s relationship to the divine. Likewise, as Calasso writes, “the familiarity between god and man lost, with the ceremonial contact through sacrifice impoverished,” Nicholas, like all modern men, would be “exposed to a gusting violence.” (53) Nicholas’ refusal to play at Conchis’ “god-game” thus results in a series of quite violent interventions, first with the Germans, and later as full-scale abductions where, while he is not raped, he is robbed of his dignity and has his most intimate desires exposed and ridiculed.

Yet, while Nicholas is certainly a skeptic, he appears to waver between the perhaps imperfect divisions of conviviality-rape-indifference that Calasso prescribes.  In fact, Nicholas’ “indifference” to the divine seems to merely mask a greater curiosity for it, and perhaps even a fear of personal inadequacy in its presence.  In his conversations with Lily de Seitas, whom he compares to Demeter, he is concerned that his “crassness” might offend her. To thwart this insecurity about his atheism, he consistently employs his Oxford education and his knowledge of literature when faced with situations he cannot account for within his comfortable secular reality.  Rather than accepting Conchis’ antics as a supernatural or divine force, he spends the majority of the novel searching in vain for clues to the real identity of the “man behind the curtain”, only to find that every “advancement” he makes on the case is yet another element of the conspiracy.  In the end, he is nearly consumed by his paranoia that Conchis and the other members of the god-game are actually omnipotent, yet remains skeptical nonetheless.

Though he is constantly given examples of Conchis’ reach, Nicholas continues to try to outsmart him, every dead-end further engendering his cynicism; he is now “more than ever impossible.” (654) Like Conchis, like Prospero, like modern-man, Nicholas still tries to overcome these “divine” forces in his increasingly confused life with the power of his books; he is not a deity but a “magician”, a mortal seeking to overcome the power of God. In the end, as Calasso describes it, it is Nicholas’ confusion about these “ritual approaches to the divine” that prevent him from ever reaching conviviality with Allison. Nearly pantomiming Orpheus who foolishly looks back at Eurydice, Nicholas’ lack of faith in Allison, his decision not to “choose” her this time results in her final judgment towards him: “she will never speak, never forgive,” (656) and in this final statement is perhaps woven a warning from Fowles, that one day the gods may stop existing altogether, that, like Allison, “the great Pan is dead.”

 AND

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