The Use of Metanarrative in The Magus

The Use of Metanarrative in the Magus
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Umm Al-Qura University Journal of Educational , Social Sciences & Humanities 7


Dr. Hend T. Al-Sudairy
Asistant Professor of English Literature
Girls' Collage of Education
Riyadh

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8 Vol. 18 - No. 1, Thul-Hijjah I 1426 H. January 2006

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Abstract

Metanarrative is a technique which has been used heavily in Post-
Modern literature. According to the Free Dictionary Encyclopedia the
term "Metanarrative" is defined as "a term used in postmodern discourse
to refer to narrative about narratives. It is a story that justifies stories."
This method of narration aims at conveying a major theme that is
engulfed within other subordinated narratives. However, metanarrative is
used when the author disappears from the text, and one of the characters
replaces him.
This paper's focus is J ohn Fowles' use of this technique to serve his
main theme, which is the self quest, in his novel The Magus (1965).
The hero's quest, in The Magus, is not only for his identity, but also for
his principles and attitudes towards life, and people, where he stands
amid the world, and in the end realizes that people around him form part
of his life and are essential to his existence.

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Metanarrative is a technique which has been used heavily in
Post-Modern literature. According to the Free Dictionary
Encyclopedia the term "Metanarrative" is defined as "a term
used in postmodern discourse to refer to narrative about
narratives. It is a story that justifies stories." Also Gerald
Prince defines it as:
A metanarrative can include any grand, all-
encompassing story, classic text, or archetypal account of the
historical record. These grand, all-encompassing stories are
typically characterized by some form of transcendent and
universal truth' in addition to an evolutionary tale of human
existence. (72)
This method of narration aims at conveying a major
theme that is engulfed within other subordinated narratives.
However, metanarrative is used when the author disappears
from the text, and one of the characters replaces him.
This paper's focus is J ohn Fowles' use of this technique to
serve his main theme, which is the self quest, in his novel The
Magus (1965). This theme is a favorite one in postmodern
novel for example, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man where the
reader sees the lost identity of modern man. Ellison's hero is
called throughout the book with a descriptive name "invisible
man". Invisible Man demonstrates the individual's quest for
identity. The protagonist is a representation of man's endless
search of the self. This invisibility is not only to others who
are unable to see him but it applies to him as well who is
unaware of his authentic identity: "a man invisible in his
impotent self-knowledge" (Hersey 116). The hero's quest, in
The Magus, is not only for his identity, but also for his
principles and attitudes towards life, where he stands amid the
world, and in the end realizes that people around him form part
of his life.
The story, The Magus, a fictional autobiography, narrates
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Nicholas Urfe's past. Nicholas moves from London to Phraxos
and takes the job of an English language teacher at the only
boys' school on Phraxos. He is there on the Greek island of
Phraxos to escape his latest love affair with Alison, back in
London, on this island; he meets the mysterious millionaire
Maurice Conchis, the master of the narration, and falls in love
with Lily, the actress portraying the millionaire's dead fiance.
Nicholas is a mature narrator who looks back on his past life.
Looking back on his life he realizes that he made many
mistakes. He appears wiser and older in his present narration.
The story's first person narrative situation is uniquely suited
for presenting Nicholas's insight and gained self-knowledge.
This self-knowledge is granted through the help of Conchis's
many narratives. These narratives are the means that enable
Nicholas to realize his weaknesses and his real self and needs.
Conchis's plan is to reflect and mirror Nicholas's defects in his
own narration to help him gain a self-knowledge. Conchis's
narrative consists of different approaches interweaved into a
series of narrations. In order to achieve the hoped for self-
knowledge, Nicholas had to go through a web of Greek myths,
psychoanalysis, Nazis doctrines, and different explanation of
the mysterious events. Not only that but he also created a semi
real incidents from Conchics's imaginary past. At the closure
of the book Nicholas is capable of breaking free of Conchis's
control over him. He is able to resist Conchis's mysterious
world of narration and to think of the life a head of him with
his new knowledge of his real being.
Nicholas tells the story years after it took place. He
allows the reader to participate emotionally and mentally by
denying him any anticipation or explanation of the events from
his recent knowledge. The experience is presented as it had
happened. The reader goes through the same experience that
Nicholas has experienced.
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Hence, Nicholas is the narrator of his own history; we read
the story from his point of view and the reader sees incidents
through Nicholas's eyes. The hero in this novel plays two
roles: one outside the text, the other within the text. This dual
role gives him the right to mix reality with fiction. It also
entitles him to analyze, explain, and connect things without
being accused of violating his role as a character in a fictional
work.
However, this technique is not a new one; the reader finds it
in the late 19
th
and early 20th century as in Thackeray, a 19
th

century novelist. But what is new about it is its aims as the
website Wikipedia describes these aims as: Metanarratives are
not usually told outright, but are reinforced by other more
specific narratives told within the culture. Examples of
metanarratives might include the story of the emerging utopian
society (which is thought to reinforce Marxism and various
religions).
Hence, under the theme of self-quest in the Magus there
are other themes such as romance, humiliation, lost sense of
obligation and principles, mythology, and science which
support and reinforce the major theme.
The novel presents unusual events. The fictional world
colors the supposed real one. Reality is only conceived
through mazes of tests. Modern world is a world of
amazement, new inventions are encountered everyday in the
morning news, and science develops rapidly. Man's history
changes according to the new scientific discoveries. These
changes make man live in a skeptical world; theories are
contradictory, and man is lost among them. He does not know
what to believe and what to reject and doubt just like the
Magus world. The novel's world has no boundaries, there is
nothing to rely on as Rommerskirchen says: Conchis's domain,
Bourani, is a world where the usual rules and laws have been
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repealed. There is no boundary between fiction and reality,
conventional patterns of explanation prove not only to be
insufficient but also misleading as Nicholas has to realize
again and again. (49)
Through reading the novel, one realizes that it is not only
Nicholas who is lost in Conchis's story telling web, which is
conveyed to the reader through Nicholas own narration, but
the reader too.
By the end of the novel, the reader is aware of the
change within Nicholas' personality. This change is the
novel's aim which is about man's struggle for freedom from his
selfishness, human weakness in his quest for self-discovery as
Carol Barnum states: "'the Magus is a novel "about the
difficulties of attaining personal freedom, especially in terms
of discovering what one is.'" (quoted in "Heraclitus"). This
search of identity is conveyed to the reader through the
godgame in which Conchis and Lily are telling stories that
construct a fictional world. This fictional world is meant to
help Nicholas in his quest for his real identity.
To intensify the theme of search of identity the
narrators physical appearance is not described throughout the
novel neither from his own point of view nor from an outside
observers view. This absence of physical description serves
another purpose, which is reinforcing the illusion of the reality
of the text, and also to show that the narrator or inventor of the
text, as the novel seems to imply is unaware of some aspects of
himself. Therefore, there is a need to explore these aspects to
arrive at the true self.
Metanarrative thus serves to present the change within the
persona, the development and the break from the lost identity
into a fixed one. In order to achieve the expected identity, the
narrator or man in general must go through many processes or
experiences as Madan Sarup pinpoints: There are, broadly
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speaking, two models of identity. The traditional' view is that
all the dynamics (such as class, gender, 'race') operate
simultaneously to produce a coherent, unified, fixed identity.
The more recent view is that identity is fabricated, constructed,
in process, and that we have to consider both psychological
and sociological factors. (14)
Fowles, successfully, uses the metanarrative to
emphasize the development of Nicholas's self. Metanarrative
helps Nicholas to explore his place in society, and his
relationship with others. It also makes him realize his
weaknesses and faults and it exposes to him his reality before
and after Bourani's experience. Nicholas starts to show
humanity towards others; he gives money to a poor peasant
family aboard a steamer, then the reader sees him befriending
Kemp "a sluttish, battered, chain-smoking [woman]" (The
Magus 586). She is different from the women who used to
attract him before. Moreover, Nicholas's old pose of romantic
apprehension is replaced with a healthy and seminal self-
doubt: What was I after all? . . . Nothing but the net sum of
countless wrong turnings. . . . All my life I had tried to turn
life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had acted as if a
third person was watching and listening and giving me marks
for good or bad behavior. . . a god like a novelist, to whom I
turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity
to feel slighted, the ability to adopt himself to whatever he
believed the novelist-god wanted. (The Magus 549)
Nicholas's gradual realization of the self and its real needs, and
the acknowledgment of the others' right to be noticed and
respected is the aim of 'metanarrative'. This realization and
quest of the self are what Todorov describes in his analysis of
La Quete du Graal: narrative relates a quest; what is being
sought, however, is not an object but a meaning . . . .
Throughout the narrative the reader has to wonder about the
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meaning of the Grail.
The principle narrative is a narrative of knowledge;
ideally, it would never end. (Genres in Discourse 33)
The same thing is applicable to the novel The Magus.
Throughout the novel the reader wonders about the aim of
Conchis's narrative and what does it lead to. Conchis's
narrative is not narrated for the sake of narration only and
passing time but it has an aim. The aim is Nicholas's
realization of his real self and true identity. This aim is the
target of all the narratives in the novel. The subordinated
narratives have provided, through the entangled stories within
the major narrative, the core of being to Nicholas and showed
him the reason behind his existence.
Hence, the author behind the text tries, and succeeds, to
present the fact of two selves, a former self and a new one in
which the second is not a reformed earlier life but a
transformation. The young man, Nicholas, who listens, is
captivated, believing he can discover what is at the abyss,
which is the truth behind the old man's narrated past, when the
reality is that at the end the truth lies in self-knowledge.
Nicholas's two selves are obvious to the reader before and
after his life in Greece. At first he appears apprehending love
and restricting his relationship with women as
Rommerskirchen puts it:
Nicholas's relation to women illustrates very clearly
his incorrect notion of freedom, which is connected with the
influence of his nemo. He is neither prepared nor able to get
emotionally involved but is always searching for merely short-
term and, at least as far as he is concerned, superficial
relationships. (41)
Later he changes and admits the change; he realizes how
wrong he was to judge people according to his own idea about
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them without seeing beyond himself as when he talked about
Lily or J ulie (her real name): I realized at last what J ulie's final
look at me had been like. It was that of a surgeon who has
performed a difficult operation successfully; peeling off the
rubber gloves, surveying the suture. (Magus 497)
The look was that of a person who is watching the effect of her
role in Conchis's narrative and also her own narrative about
him, but he mistook it to be a look of love at first but now he
understands what it was. In this passage the change is
obvious, especially in the use of the word "realized" instead of
"understood" or "knew". There is a new revelation for him a
new light to see people and life through like the way he
reflects on Alison as Rommerskirchen has pointed: "she was
mysterious, almost a new woman; one had to go back several
steps, and start again; and know the place for the first time"
(The Magus 662). Nicholas's quotation of this line from
'Little Gidding,' however, indicates that it is not so much
Alison who has changed, but rather Nicholas himself, and that
his change enables him to discover features in her he could not
or would not see before. Thus he now does more justice to her
personality. (73)
This change or realization would not be attainable for
Nicholas without the experience on the Greek island.
The whole experience is built on multiple narrations.
Nicholas's past is reconstructed in front of him through
Conchis's narration. This construction of the past events leads
to a Fukuyaman view of the end of those who refuse to accept
others and reject communication on liberal bases, denying
them space to live and the respect they deserve and grudging
them their own stand in life or accepting them as they are.
Hence, Conchis tries endlessly to open Nicholas's eyes
to the core of his problem, which is being a self-centered
person. Nicholas sees the world through his own self and his
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own needs. Conchis in his endeavor to change Nicholas to a
better person uses many different narrations. He, intelligently,
uses Nicholas's fascination with literature to attract him to play
the game which he, Conchis, has started. This fascination is
part of Nicholas's problem because he does not regard people
as human beings but as characters in a literary work as
Katherine Tarbox puts it: The literary always rules Nicholas's
consciousness. To him, people are never people but characters;
incidents are always familiar scenes in some familiar drama.
He variously casts himself as Robinson Crusoe. . . and so
forth. Nicholas's greatest problem is his inability to see the
distinctions between fiction and reality, real feelings and
posturings, identity and persona. (18)
This aim of showing Nicholas his mistakes and
shortcomings is the motivation behind all those narratives in
the Magus. Nicholas could have stopped the metanarrative
earlier if he had discovered its goal, or realized his failure in
accepting others with their human weaknesses but he failed as
Tarbox explains:
Conchis offers a lavishly produced dramatization of
Nicholas's shortcomings, designed to show Nicholas the truth
about himself. Many times the magus insists that it is
Nicholas who makes the masque. . . . His reaction to the events
determines the future of the events, and the game may be
stopped when Nicholas discovered its meaning. (18)
Unfortunately, Nicholas fails to recognize his faults so
the narrative continues. New subordinated narratives are
produced as each narrative must make its own point explicit.
The series of narrations start with Conchis's long-lost love of
his youth. This love story between Conchis and Lily is
basically the story of Nicholas and Alison, the complicated
relationship. The narration has its desired effect on Nicholas.
"Conchis paused. There was no emotion in his voice; but I
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[Nicholas] was thinking of Alison, of that last look she had
given me" (The Magus 155).
As the main narrative is broken into other narratives
within, the reader becomes aware of varying degrees of change
in Nicholas's personality. The novel starts as a conventional
one then it turns to be completely different from that. Tarbox
has a similar view: the narrator adopts an ironic stance of the
older, sadder, wiser man toward the events of his early life.
But that perspective is abruptly changed early on as the novel
slips into another genre, the bildungsroman, where the narrator
gives an unimpassioned account of his growth toward
maturity. (33)
Nicholas appeared to be confused about the shape of his
recent life. The narration encounters this confusion with a
mysterious utterance. The narration appears to be a romantic
tale while it actually explicates a Conradian impressionism
(the trial, maize with no center or end) conveying a new
revelation of the self and self-knowledge.
However, Nicholas's confusion changes at the end of the
novel though this is not said clearly. He is saved, thanks to
Conchis's narration and the semi-real incidents of the past
which Conchis has constructed for him. He realizes his
irresponsibility in organizing his life. Also he is able to admit
and confront his weaknesses and mistakes. The change is
clear in the way he becomes involved in Conchis's past and
other characters' status in life. He goes in search in archives
for Conchis's name, real identity and profession and also
search for other people whom Conchis has mentioned in his
narrative. He tries to arrive at the truth of the whole narration.
Nicholas searches, reads, and writes letters, and goes as far as
meeting people in his pursuit of the truth behind the narration.
Nicholas is not the same pretending, cynical man the reader
encounters at the novel's opening.
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Works Cited:
Primary Source:
J ohn, Fowles. The Magus. New York: Dell, 1965. Secondary
Sources:
Aubrey, R. J ames. J ohn Fowles: A Reference Companion.
New York: Green Wood, 1991.
Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. New York: St.
Martin P, 1986.
Fokkema, Alied. Postmodern Characters. Amsterdam: Rodpi,
1991.
Gerald, Prince. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of
Narrative. New York: Kelly Muensterman, 1982.
Hersey, J ohn. Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays.
New J ersey: Prentice Hall, 1974.
Lorenz, H. Paul. "Heraclitus Against the Barbarians: J ohn
Fowles's ' The Magus.'-J ohn Fowles Issue".17 Aug.2004.
<http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_
nl_v42_ai_18412889>.
"Metanarrative." English Wikipedia. 24 Apr. 2004.
http://fixedrefrence.org/en/20040424/wikepedia/metanarr
ative "Meta-narrative." Free Dictionary Encyclopedia. 2
Aug. 2004. http : // encyclopedeathefreedictionary/ com /
meta-narrative.
Rommerskirchen, Barbara. Constructing Reality: Constructivism
and Narration In J ohn Fowles's The Magus. Frankfurt:
Peter Lang, 1999.
Sarup, Madan. Identity, Culture, and Postmodern World.
Edinburgh:Edinburgh UP, 1996.
Tarbox, Katherine. The Art of J ohn Fowles. Athens: Georgia
UP, 1988.
Todorove, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Trans. Catherine
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Porter. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Todorove, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard
Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.
Uspensky, Boris. A Poetics of Composition. Trans. Valentina
Zavarin and Susan Wittig. Los Angles: California UP,
1973.

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