translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

This metafictional aside may be read as two things at once (in keeping
with the kind of reader one is); on the one hand, it might be taken for
a neutral ground where the freedom of choice is still very much
possible, since it lies in the future; on the other hand, it might imply
that, despite its preaching in favour of total freedom, it remains an
intrusive exercise which, by telling the reader what not to expect from
the text, is actually telling him/her what to read into it. In other
words, the preface is illustrative of Fowles’s fiction, one which
demolishes pretensions of divine powers, both on the part of the
writer (as author) and on the part of the reader. (Praisler, 2005: 78)
In The Magus, what Fowles seems to imply is that he tries to create an
alternative linguistic structure or fiction which signifies or implies the old
form (realistic novel), the reader being invited to re-construct the old form
and the meaning. Even though the novel begins under the guise of a
realistic novel, this is only one of the numerous tricks played on the reader.
It may be said that The Magus is one of those novels which seem to be
“focused on traditional means of conveying message, portraying characters
and actions […] employing the conventions of realism as they acknowledge
their artificiality.” (Praisler, 2005: 70) It is interesting to see how in the first
chapter of the book the conventions of realism and the “violent hierarchies”
of the Victorian era are indirectly referred to and criticized. They are seen
as “the grotesquely elongated shadow,[…], of that monstrous dwarf Queen
Victoria and as an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and
Tradition and Responsibility.” (1983: 15) Thus, from the very beginning,
although indirectly, the author points to the conventions of the traditional
novel which he rejects and turns inside out and upside down. Using the
godgame as a metaphor for the complex process of writing, Fowles deals
with the question of authority obliquely discussing and commenting on the
paradoxical status of the writer and on the role and status of fiction
itself. What Fowles constantly rejects is the notion of an author-god. In
many of his metafictional novels, The Magus included, Fowles “implies not
the disappearance of authorial control in contemporary fiction, but rather a
shift toward its blatant exposure.” Like many other metafictional writers,
he “operates and functions with a freedom of exposing illusion for what it
is – a device used to mask narrative as a construct and a figment of one’s
imagination.” (Vieira, 1991) Fowles chooses “undisguised invention, against
the duplicitous ‘suspension of disbelief’” because he is one of those
novelists who “perceive the need to face the fictionality so apparent in
literature but not always so apparent in our daily lives.” (Vieira, 1991)
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