translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Nicholas: his family, his ambitions, his failings. The third person is apt,
because I presented a sort of fictional self to them, a victim of circumstances
[…].” (347)
Conchis insists on the fact that ‘Lily’ is a fictional character and not a
real person – “‘She is not the real Lily’” (170), whereas ‘Lily’, when
Nicholas tells her: “’There are so many things I want to know about the real
you’,” answers: “’The real me’s a lot less exciting than the imaginary
one.’“(291)
The Magus illustrates Fowles’s conception of a novel as a literary
game played with an intellectual reader who is his equal. This game played
with an intelligent reader is indirectly referred to throughout the novel.
One such reference is Nicholas’s remark that:
In some obscure way, one I was to become very familiar with, it
flattered me: I was too intelligent not to be already grasping the rules
of the game we played. It was no good my knowing that old men
have conned young ones like that ever since time began. I still fell for
it, as one still falls for the oldest literary devices in the right hands and
contexts. (139)
Conchis asks from Nicholas a suspension of … belief: “‘I do not ask
you to believe. All I ask you is to pretend to believe.’” (137) This request
may be read as an invitation to us readers to join the literary game. The
author has one of his characters say that: “‘It is like hide-and-seek,
Nicholas. One has to be sure the seeker wants to play. One also has to stay
in hiding. Or there is no game.’” (208) Fowles’s literary game in The Magus
has its own logic and purpose or, to put it in Nicholas’s terms, there are
“two elements in his game – one didactic, the other aesthetic” (162) and
these two elements represent a thesis of the novel’s own game. Fowles
wants to offer both:
…a pleasing surface for the reader who is eager to establish links
between the real and the fictional, and give the text the depth
expected by the active, inquisitive reader who seeks to reach the ‘true’
message underneath the dialogism of the text. (Praisler, 2005: 78)
As Michaela Praisler emphasises:
Nicholas Urfe’s incursions at the heart of fictionality and his analyses
of the way in which it is constructed and perceived make the novel a
document of postmodernism, with its obvious questioning of realist
conventions and simultaneous parodic acknowledging that,
unfortunately, realism still has control over the way in which
literature is read, taught and evaluated. (2005: 81)
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