translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Like Nicholas, Conchis is a self-conscious narrator (a technique
specific to metafictional writings), aware of the fact that, as he narrates, he
creates the story and its meaning and, just like Scheherazade, he wants to
provoke a certain response from his narratee. He is a master of story-telling
and even postpones the narration of the next story for the day or days to
come, the effect being one of suspense.
He stopped speaking for a moment, like a man walking who comes to
a brink; perhaps it was an artful pause, but it made the stars, the
night, seem to wait, as if story, narration, history, lay imbricated in the
nature of things; and the cosmos was for the story, not the story for
the cosmos. (150)
There was silence. The crickets chirped. Some night-bird, high
overhead, croaked primevally in the stars.
‘What happened when you got home?’
‘It is late.’
‘But – ‘
‘Tomorrow.’ (132)
Commenting briefly on the writer’s ability to be at once a
metafictionist who experiments new techniques and an ingenious narrator
who loves to tell stories, Thomas C. Foster states that:
Fowles frequently points out that he is engaged in creating a literary
artefact as well as giving narrative duties to his characters, who use
their own stories to teach or convert other characters. The magical
abilities of his Magus are largely narrative. The net result of these
strategies is to remind readers of the uses to which narrative can be
put and the fictiveness of his whole enterprise. (1994: 17)
The last pages of Part One may be considered as the threshold
between the real world and the fictitious/fantastic world. Nicholas feels
this change and expresses it long time before his leaving for Greece, when
he says he feels as if he were a character from the universe of the romance,
“a medieval king” (40). The new world that opens for him is one where
there are only the mysteries of Greece: “But then the mysteries began.” (63)
The insistence on mysteries indicates that we enter a fictional world in
which “Second meanings hung in the air; ambiguities, unexpectedness.”
(85) It is in this part (chapter 10) that The Magus begins its voyage into the
fantastic, the imaginary, representing the perfect time and setting for
Conchis’s tricks.
On the island of Phraxos, Nicholas enters a mysterious world that is
in fact the world of fiction itself. The references to this constant crossing of
or rather…stop on the threshold between reality and fiction are numerous.
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