translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

If only implied in The Magus, this constant refusal to take up the
position of the omniscient narrator is directly referred to in The French
Lieutenant’s Woman:
The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the most
aleatory avant-garde novel has managed to extirpate its author
completely); what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the
Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing; but in the new theological
image, with freedom our first principle, not authority. (Fowles in
Praisler, 2005: 152)
In The Magus, Conchis may be seen as the embodiment of the
omniscient narrator, whereas omniscience is metaphorically rendered and
constantly brought under scrutiny in the form of the godgame played at
Bourani. Conchis says many times that “the masque is a metaphor” meant
to educate Nicholas (to see the artificiality of the roles he plays) and the
reader to see the inner workings of omniscience and its artificiality, its
(dis)illusions. “The role of Conchis, and of God, for Fowles is like that of
the novelist vis-à-vis his fiction.” (Foster, 1994: 39)
Conchis is a god-like type of narrator who manipulates his characters
and this seems to become clear enough from what his ‘actors’ (standing in
fact for the ‘characters’) say about him. Julie will tell Nicholas that:
“Everything we say, he hears. He knows.” (196) […] There is a sense in
which he perhaps can hear everything we say. […] Nothing to do with
telepathy. That’s just a blind. A metaphor.” (213) Conchis himself
emphasises the fact that Lily, as a character in the story he narrates,
“…always does exactly what I want.” (170) His ability to hear and know
everything without being in their presence may be interpreted as a
reference to the omniscient narrator’s ability to be in several places at once
and know everything about his/her characters, even their innermost
thoughts and feelings.
Nicholas, in his turn, says “I feel I’m some sort of guinea-pig, God
knows why.” (218) and later, during the same conversation with Julie/Lily:
“You must have seen you’re in the hands of someone who’s very skilled at
rearranging reality.” (219) He thinks that “Conchis was trying to recreate
some lost world of his own and for some reason I was cast as the jeune
premier in it, his younger self. […]; now I uneasily felt myself being
manoeuvred into a butt.” (192) Nicholas is very angry with Conchis
because he has the power to create and then make disappear at will the
world he creates: “I walked back through the darkness, feeling depressed,
and increasingly furious that Conchis could spirit his world away; deprive
me of it, like a callous drug-ward doctor with some hooked addict.” (243)
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