translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Katherine Tarbox, in her turn, states that:
The author refuses to collect his readers. He desires in his fiction to
allow the reader the same psychoanalytic, reconstructive experience
as the protagonist, with its attendant, sometimes uneasy freedoms.
(1988: 9)
Through his unusual technical strategies Fowles shows in each novel
how limited our seeing is in everyday life, how time bound and
tradition bound we are, how accustomed we are to looking at the
world with collector-consciousness […]. (1988: 8)
The story Fowles tells all readers in his novels is that of individual
freedom. His main preoccupation seems to be that of making us all
understand what an important role fiction plays in achieving this
individual freedom. In his interview with Katherine Tarbox, Fowles
pointed out:
Life does condition us so frightfully, that it’s terribly difficult to sense
… the underlying nature of existence. You know, we are caged more
and more by present society in roles, and I think being able to see
through the roles is most important…. Most people like to be
conditioned; unfortunately, it’s a fallacy that everybody wants to be
freer in the sense we’re talking about. They’re much happier I think,
having fixed routines and a limited way of life. (in Tarbox, 1988: 8)
Fowles believes in the power of fiction to awake us from this
“existential torpor” and in “his extravagant metaphor of the godgame,” he
implies that “fiction itself is the great awakener, the great teacher. […]
Fiction is the great existential adventure.” (Tarbox, 1988: 8)
Thomas C. Foster considers The Magus an “allegory of the act of
reading” and we would like to add to his statement our own interpretation.
Bearing in mind that, in John Fowles’s conception, reading equates with
self-knowledge, we think this is one of the reasons why the labyrinth,
symbolic of initiation and self-knowledge, is so often referred to in the
book. Thus, The Magus may also be seen as an allegory of the quest of the
self. Entering the labyrinth of John Fowles’s (meta)fiction, as uncomfortable
as it may seem at a first glance, proves in the end stimulating and
gratifying since our search will have made us achieve a better
understanding of our true self and of the world.
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