The Magus, A Revised Version

by John Fowles

  ‘Mr Urfe, you must long ago have come to the conclusion that you have fallen into the hands of madmen. Worse than that, of sadistic madmen. And I think my first task is to introduce you to the sadistic madmen.’ Some of the others gave little smiles. His English was excellent, though it retained clear traces of a German accent. ‘But first we must return you, as we have returned ourselves, to normality.’

  He signed quietly to my two guards, who had come back beside me. Deftly they untied the rosetted white ribbons, pulled my clothes back to their normal position, peeled off the black forehead patch, turned back my pullover, even brushed my hair back; but left the gag.

  ‘Good. Now … if I may be allowed I shall first introduce myself. I am Doctor Friedrich Kretschmer, formerly of Stuttgart, now director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Idaho in America. On my right you have Doctor Maurice Conchis of the Sorbonne, whom you know.’ Conchis rose and bowed briefly to me. I glared at him. ‘On his right, Doctor Mary Marcus, now of Edinburgh University, formerly of the William Alanson White Foundation in New York.’ The professional-looking woman inclined her head. ‘On her right, Professor Mario Ciardi of Milan.’ He stood up and bowed, a mild little frog of a man. ‘Beyond him you have our charming and very gifted young costume designer, Miss Margaret Maxwell.’ ‘Rose’ gave me a minute brittle smile. ‘On the right of Miss Maxwell you see Mr Yanni Kottopoulos. He has been our stage manager.’ The man with the beard bowed; and then the tall Jew stood. ‘And bowing to you now you see Arne Halberstedt of the Queen’s Theatre, Stockholm, our dramatizer and director, to whom, together with Miss Maxwell and Mr Kottopoulos, we mere amateurs in the new drama all owe a great deal for the successful outcome and aesthetic beauty of our … enterprise.’ First Conchis, then the other members of the ‘board’, then the students, began to clap. Even the guards behind me joined in.

  The old man turned. ‘Now – on my left – you see an empty box. But we like to think that there is a goddess inside. A virgin goddess whom none of us has ever seen, nor will ever see. We call her Ashtaroth the Unseen. Your training in literature will permit you, I am sure, to guess at her meaning. And through her at our, we humble scientists’, meaning.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Beyond the box you have Doctor Joseph Harrison of my department at Idaho, and of whose brilliant study of characteristic urban Negro neuroses, Black and White Minds, you may have heard.’ Joe got up and raised his hand casually. ‘Anton’ was next. ‘Beyond him, Doctor Heinrich Mayer, at present working in Vienna. Beyond him, Madame Maurice Conchis, whom many of us know better as the gifted investigator of the effects of wartime traumata on refugeee children. I speak, of course, of Doctor Annette Kazanian of the Chicago Institute.’ I refused to be surprised, which was more than could be said of some of the ‘audience’, who murmured and leant forward to look at ‘Maria’. ‘Beyond Madame Conchis, you see Privatdozent Thorvald Jorgensen of Aalborg University.’ The ‘colonel’ stood up briskly and bowed. ‘Beyond him you have Doctor Vanessa Maxwell.’ Lily looked briefly up at me, bespectacled, absolutely without expression. I flicked my eyes back to the old man; he looked at his colleagues. ‘I think that we all feel the success of the clinical side of our enterprise this summer is very largely due to Doctor Maxwell. Dr Marcus had already told me what to expect when her most gifted pupil came to us at Idaho. But I should like to say that never have my expectations been so completely fulfilled. I am sometimes accused of putting too much stress on the role of women in our profession. Let me say that Dr Maxwell, my charming young colleague Vanessa, confirms what I have always believed: that one day all our great practising, as opposed to our theoretical, psychiatrists will be of the sex of Eve.’ There was applause. Lily stared down at the table in front of her and then, when the clapping had died down, she glanced at the old man and murmured, ‘Thank you.’ He turned back to me.

  ‘The students you see are Austrian and Danish research students from Doctor Mayer’s faculty and from Aalborg. I think we all speak English?’ Some said, yes. He smiled benignly at them and sipped a glass of water.

  ‘Well, so, Mr Urfe, you will have guessed our secret by now. We are an international group of psychologists, which I have the honour, by reason of seniority simply’ – two or three shook their heads in disagreement – ‘to lead. For various reasons the path of research in which we are all especially interested requires us to have subjects that are not volunteers, that are not even aware that they are subjects of an experiment. We are by no means united in our theories of behaviour, in our different schools, but we are united in considering the nature of the experiment is such that it is better that the subject should not, even at its conclusion, be informed of its purpose. Though I am sure that you will – when you can recollect in tranquillity – find yourself able to deduce at least part of our causes from our effects.’ There were smiles all round. ‘Now. We have had you, these last three days, under deep narcosis and the material we have obtained from you has proved most valuable, most valuable indeed, and we therefore wish first of all to show our appreciation of the normality you have shown in all the peculiar mazes through which we have made you run.’

  The whole lot of them stood and applauded me. I could not keep control any longer. I saw Lily and Conchis clapping, and the students. I cocked my wrists round and gave them a double V-sign. It evidently bewildered the old man, because he turned and bent to ask Conchis what it meant. The clapping died down. Conchis turned to the supposed woman doctor from Edinburgh. She spoke in a strong American voice.

  ‘The sign is a visual equivalent of some verbalization like “Bugger you” or “Up your arse”.’

  This seemed to interest the old man. He repeated the gesture, watching his own hand. ‘But did not Mr Churchill

  Lily spoke, leaning forward. ‘It is the upward movement that carries the signal, Doctor Kretschmer. Mr Churchill’s victory-sign was with the hand reversed and static. I mentioned it in connection with my paper on “Direct Anal-Erotic Metaphor in Classical Literature”.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. I recall. Ja, ja.’

  Conchis spoke to Lily. ‘Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, Aureli patheci et cinaedi Furi?’

  Lily: ‘Precisely.’

  Wimmel-Jorgcnsen leant forward; a strong accent. ‘Is there no doubt a connection with the cuckold gesture?’ He put finger-horns on his head.

  ‘I did suggest,’ said Lily, ‘that we may suppose a castration motive in the insult, a desire to degrade and humiliate the male rival which would of course be finally identifiable with the relevant stage of infantile fixation and the accompanying phobias.’

  I flexed muscles, rubbed my legs together, forced myself to stay sane, to deduce what reason I could get out of all this unreason. I did not, could not believe that they were psychologists; they would never risk giving me their names.

  On the other hand they must be brilliant at improvising the right jargon, since my gesture had come without warning. Or had it? I thought fast. They had needed my gesture to cue their dialogue; and it happened to be one that I hadn’t used for years. But I remembered having heard that one could make people do things after hypnosis, on a pre-suggested signal. It would have been easy. When I was clapped, I felt forced to give the sign. I must be on my guard; do nothing without thinking.

  The old man quietened further discussion. ‘Mr Urfe, your significant gesture brings me to our purpose in all meeting you here. We are naturally aware that you are filled with deep feelings of anger and hatred towards at least some of us. Some of the repressed material we have discovered reveals a different state of affairs, but as my colleague Doctor Harrison would say, “It is what we believe we live with that chiefly concerns us.” We have therefore gathered here today to allow you to judge us in your turn. This is why we have placed you in the judge’s seat. We have silenced you because justice should be mute until the time for sentencing comes. But before we hear your judgment on us, you must permit us to give some additional evidence against ourselves. Our real justifica
tion is scientific, but we are all agreed, as I explained, that the requirements of good clinical practice forbid us to make such an excuse. I now call on Dr Marcus to read out that part of our report on you which deals with you not as a subject for experiment, but as an ordinary human being. Dr Marcus.’

  The woman from Edinburgh got up. She was about fifty, with greying hair cut boyishly short; no lipstick, a hard, intelligent, quasi-lesbian face that looked as if it had singularly little patience with fools. She began to read in a belligerent transatlantic monotone.

  ‘The subject of our 1953 experiment belongs to a familiar category of semi-intellectual introversion. Although excellent for our purposes his personality pattern is without subsidiary interest. The most significant feature of his lifestyle is negative: its lack of social content.

  ‘The motives for this attitude springs from an only partly resolved Oedipal complex. The subject shows characteristic symptoms of mingled fear and resentment of authority, especially male authority and the usual accompanying basic syndrome: an ambivalent attitude towards women, in which they are seen both as desired objects and as objects which havebetrayed him, and therefore merit his revenge and counter-betrayal.

  ‘Time has not allowed us to investigate the subject’s specific womb and breast separation traumas, but the compensatory mechanisms he had evolved are so frequent among so-called intellectuals that we may posit with certainty a troubled period of separation from the maternal breast, possibly due to the exigences of the military career of the subject’s father, and a very early identification of the father, or male, as separator -a role which Doctor Conchis adopted in our experiment. The subject has then never been able to accept the initial loss of oral gratification and maternal protection and this has given him his auto-erotic approach to emotional problems and life in general The subject also conforms to the Adlerian descriptions of siblingless personality traits.

  ‘The subject has preyed sexually and emotionally on a number of young women. His method, according to Doctor Maxwell, is to stress and exhibit his loneliness and unhappiness -in short, to play the little boy in search of the lost mother. He thereby arouses repressed maternal instincts in his victims which he then proceeds to exploit with the semi-incestuous ruthlessness of this type.

  ‘In the usual way the subject identifies God with the father-figure, aggressively rejecting any belief in Him.

  ‘He has careerwise continually placed himself in situations of isolation. His solution of his fundamental separation anxiety requires him to cast himself as the rebel and outsider. His unconscious intention in seeking this isolation is to find a justification for his preying on women and also for his withdrawal from any community orientated in directions hostile to his fundamental needs of self-gratification.

  ‘The subject’s family, caste, and national background have not helped in the resolution of his problems. He comes of a military family, in which there were a large number of taboos resulting from a strongly authoritarian paternal regime. His caste in his own country, that of the professional middle-class, Zwiemann’s technohourgeoisie, is of course marked by an obsessional adherence to such regimes. In a remark to Doctor Maxwell the subject reported that “All through my adolescence I had to lead two lives.” This is a good layman’s description of environment-motivated and finally consciously induced para-schizophrenia – “madness as lubricant”, in Karen Horney’s famous phrase.

  ‘On leaving university the subject put himself in the one environment he would not be able to tolerate – that of an expensive private school, the social transmitter of all those paternalistic and authoritarian traits the subject hates. Predictably he then felt himself forced both out of the school and out of his country, and adopted the role of expatriate, though he insured himself against any valid adjustment by once again choosing an environment – the school on Phraxos – which was certain to provide him with the required elements of hostility. His work there is academically barely adequate and his relationship with his colleagues and students poor.

  ‘To sum up, he is behaviourally the victim of a repetition-compulsion that he has failed to understand. In every environment he looks for those elements that allow him to feel isolated, that allow him to justify his withdrawal from meaningful social responsibilities and relationships and his consequent regression into the infantile state of frustrated self-gratification. At present this autistic regression takes the form mentioned above, of affaires with young women. Although previous attempts at an artistic resolution have apparently failed, we may predict that further such attempts will be made and that there will be the normal cultural life-pattern of the type: excessive respect for iconoclastic avant-garde art, contempt for tradition, paranosic sympathy with fellow-rebels and non-con-formers in conflict with frequent and depressive and persecutory phases in personal and work relationships.

  ‘As Doctor Conchis has observed in his The Midcentury Predicament: “The rebel with no specific gift for rebellion is destined to become the drone; and even this metaphor is inexact, since the drone has at least a small chance of fecundating the queen, whereas the human rebel-drone is deprived even of that small chance and may finally see himself as totally sterile, lacking not only the brilliant life-success of the queens but even the humble satisfactions of the workers in the human hive. Such a personality is reduced to mere wax, a mere receiver of impressions ; and this condition is the very negation of the basic drive in him – to rebel. It is no wonder that in middle age many such failed rebels, rebels turned selfconscious drones, aware of their susceptibility to intellectual vogues, adopt a mask of cynicism that cannot hide their more or less paranoiac sense of having been betrayed by life.”’

  While she had been speaking the others at the table listened in their various ways, some looking at her, others sunk in contemplation of the table. Lily was one of the most attentive. The ‘students’ scribbled notes. I spent all my time staring at the woman, who read, and never once looked at me. I felt full of spleen, of hatred of all of them. There was some truth in what she was saying. But I knew nothing could justify such a public analysis, even if it were true; just as nothing could justify Lily’s behaviour – because most of the ‘material’ this analysis was based on must have come from her. I stared at her, but she would not look up. I knew who had written the report. There were too many echoes of Conchis. I was not misled by the new mask. He was still the master of ceremonies, the man behind it all; at web-centre.

  The American woman sipped water from a glass. There was silence; evidently the report was not finished. She began to read on.

  ‘There are two appendices, or footnotes. One comes from Professor Ciardi, and is as follows:

  ‘I dissent from the view that the subject is without significance outside the matter of our experiment. In my view one may anticipate in twenty years’ time a period of considerable and today almost unimaginable prosperity in the West. I repeat my assertion that the threat of a nuclear catastrophe will have a healthy effect on Western Europe and America. It will firstly stimulate economic production; it will secondly ensure that there is peace; it will thirdly provide a constant sense of real danger behind every moment of living, which was in my opinion missing before the last war and so contributed to it. Although this threat of war may do something to counteract the otherwise dominating role that the female sex must play in a peacetime society dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, I predict that breast-fixated men like the subject will become the norm. We are entering an amoral and permissive era in which self-gratification in the form of high wages and a wide range of consumer goods obtained and obtainable against a background of apparently imminent universal doom will be available, if not to all, then to an increasingly large majority. In such an age the characteristic personality type must inevitably become auto-erotic and, clinically, autopsychotic. Such a person will be for economic reasons isolated, as for personal ones the subject is today, from direct contact with the evils of human life, such as starvation, poverty, inadequate living c
onditions, and the rest. Western homo sapiens will become homo solitarius. Though I have little sympathy as a fellow human being for the subject, his predicament interests me as a social psychologist, since he has developed precisely as I would expect a man of moderate intelligence but little analytical power, and virtually no science, to develop in our age. If nothing else he proves the total inadequacy of the confused value judgments and pseudo-statements of art to equip modern man for his evolutionary role.’

  The woman laid down the paper and picked up another.

  ‘This second note comes from Doctor Maxwell, who of course has had the closest personal contact with the subject. She says:

  ‘In my view the subject’s selfishness and social inadequacy have been determined by his past, and any report which we communicate to him should make it clear that his personality deficiencies are due to circumstances outside his command. The subject may not understand that we are making clinical descriptions, and not, at least in my own case, with any association of moral blame. If anything our attitude should be one of pity towards a personality that has to cover its deficiencies under so many conscious and unconscious lies. We must always remember that the subject has been launched into the world with no training in self-analysis and self-orientation; and that almost all the education he has received is positively harmful to him. He was, so to speak, born short-sighted by nature and has been further blinded by his environments. It is small wonder that he cannot find his way.’

  The American woman sat down. The old man in the white beard nodded, as if pleased with what had been said. He looked at me, then at Lily.

  ‘I think, Doctor Maxwell, that it would be fair to the subject if you repeated what you said to me last night in connection with him.’