Games and Godgames in The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman Ellen McDaniel

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 1985, pp. 31-42 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.0083

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GAMES AND GODGAMES IN THE MAGUS AND

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN

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Ellen McDaniel In his classic anthropological work, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga remarks that anthropology and its sister sciences have stressed too little the importance of play and game

in human culture. According to Huizinga, Homo ludens, the playing man,

deserves at least equal place beside Homo sapiens in the anthropological nomenclature (1). From the profusion of games, contests, and play activities in his works of fiction, John Fowles underscores Huizinga's assertion that "in the absence of the play-spirit civilization is impossible"

(101). Fowles's interest in the evolutionary struggles and competitions

of men and women has led him to investigate in both his essays and his fiction many of the competitive activities in which men and women participate, from childlike play to adult contests for high stakes. His claim in The Aristos is that "Games are far more important to us, in far deeper ways, than we like to admit" (158). Fowles inherits his interest in the game from one of his historical mentors, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In The Aristos Fowles de-

scribes Heraclitus as a man who preferred to unravel riddles and to play with children rather than to associate with his intellectual peers. Heraclitus' writings are perplexing riddles themselves. However, Fowles has

studied and derived from them many of his own ideas in The Aristos
Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 1985. Copyright by Purdue Research Foundation. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

31

about the "tensional nature of human reality" (83). Heraclitus was a philosopher of dialectical relationships. He asserts that opposition and harmony share a unity in their separateness because each makes the other possible and necessary. Therefore, human occupations that admit both conflict and concordance follow the natural order of things. Heraclitus found in the human occupation of game-playing a particularly
apt metaphor for the structural fundamentals of a dialectical universe.

"Lifetime," for example, Heraclitus tells us, "is as a child at play, moving pieces in a game" (Kahn 71).
A student of Heraclitean dialectic and a great lover of sports, es-

pecially cricket, Fowles not surprisingly employs game imagery in his fiction to structure plot and characterizations ("Cricket" 100). However, the fact that his characters' activities are often described as play and
game should not suggest to the reader that these activities are superficial or nonserious. Charles Smithson's aimless travel and fossil-hunting "hob-

bies" in The French Lieutenant's Woman could be called "mere play" (120), but Conchis' godgame in The Magus is an important arrangement
thoughtfully constructed for Nicholas Urfe's benefit. Supporting Fowles's

broad application of game-playing are three game analystsJohan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and linguist Emile Benvenistewho all attribute
to games serious and nonserious functions and whose diverse theories are compared in Jacques Ehrmann's article "Homo Ludens Revisited." These three theorists place game-playing on a continuum that stretches from the frivolous and instinctual to the metaphysical and sacred. In Ehrmann's analysis, "the zone of play is caught, like limbo, between the hell of 'reality' subject to instincts and the paradise of the sacred, of the divine." Ehrmann goes on to say that the "low" and "high" realms of frivolous and sacred game-playing bear unmistakable "moral implications" (36). Ehrmann's analysis proves helpful in delimiting the boundaries and

characteristics of the "zone of play" in The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles uses the same game metaphor to describe both

the shallow, exploitive activities of Nicholas and Charles and the beneficial "godgames" of Conchis and Sarah. However, he shows clearly that the games of the frivolous young men differ significantly in their objectives from the games of his more enlightened characters, who as "magi" use their games for moral instruction. Why the game is played not that it is played or how it is playeddistinguishes the two "societies"
of Fowlesian -characters from each other. His "Games" chapter in The Aristos explains this distinction:
There are means-oriented societies, for whom the game is the game; and ends-oriented

societies for whom the game is winning. In the first, if one is happy, then one is successful;
in the second, one cannot be happy unless one is successful. The whole tendency of 32 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

evolution and history suggests that man must become means-oriented if he is ro survive. (159)

The societies to which Charles and Nicholas first belong are endsoriented. The "style" of the man is the man; transient conquests of wealth, women, and prestige are the rule and requirement. Fowles's "godgames," however, encourage a moral and emotional athleticism that can sustain the individual in all of his human occupations, especially in his practice of what modern existentialists have called responsible freedom. The godgame functions as a training ground for the inexperienced protagonist, who learns and practices skills that will be useful when the godgame is over. The protagonists usually proceed through both frivolous and sacred games on their way toward the most vital competition of all. This competition is described by David Williams in "The Ebony Tower" as the moral struggle between what one is and what one ought to be (113). Nicholas and Charles run this gamut of games to find that the struggle to be one's better self is the only competition that is actually evolutionary and rewarding.

In Homo Ludens Huizinga lists and discusses the characteristics of

nonserious play. Nearly word for word, Huizinga's list sounds like a description of the activities and interests Nicholas and Charles pursue in the opening chapters of The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. These men pass most of their lives in hobbies or amusements that have

no moral function, utility, or seriousness. The sports they pursue are always played in the same way and for the same reasons (Huizinga 13), and always according to precisely defined rules within orderly, fixed boundaries (4). Their objective is to form relationships in which they
know they can dominate.

Like Peter in Fowles's short story "The Cloud," Nicholas and Charles are "hunting men" (288). Both are also collectors, like Clegg in The Collector. Both hunting and collecting require acts of seizing or
destroying in order to possess. Charles's seemingly harmless hobby,

fossil-hunting, closely resembles Clegg's hunting and pinning of butterflies. However, for both men, the act of collecting becomes more of a habit than a hobby; and like Clegg, Charles begins to believe that he has a right to whatever he wants. Charles's inflated self-regard assures him that no one is better fit to own Winsyatt (his uncle's estate) or to marry the wealthy Ernestina Freeman than himself. He looks upon his uncle's property as his "piece of England" (195), and he figures to double his possessions when Ernestina becomes "truly his; in his bed and in his bank" (130). Charles's happiness derives from taking what he desires, and he finds in the end accomplishment justifying the means
that secured his success. He mistakenly conforms to social conventions that encourage acquisitiveness and extol material wealth. Nicholas Urfe in The Magus shares this same narrow vision of success.
GAMES AND GODGAMES 33

He plays games for sexual conquest, a price that he becomes skilled at

winning. Specifically, Nicholas plays a game of his own design called "the solitary heart." Again, this game "collects" women as easily as Clegg collected butterflies. Early in The Magus, when he recalls his days at Oxford, Nicholas describes the game and its infallibility as a means
to the end he desires: My "technique" was to make a show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjuror with his white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart.

I didn't collect conquests, but by the time I left Oxford I was a dozen girls away from virginity. I found my sexual success and the apparently ephemeral nature of love equally pleasing. It was like being good at golf, but despising the game. (21)

Although Nicholas protests that he does not "collect conquests," his

behavior proves otherwise. Habituated to the short-term affair, Nicholas exploits Alison with this same conscienceless game. Anxious to be free of her so that he can take a new teaching job abroad, Nicholas once

again conjures up the "solitary heart." He leaves her a well-rehearsed

letter and some money (insinuating that she is the whore she has called

herself) and "escapes" to Greece. The fact that Alison "had loved [him]
more than [he] had loved her' ' gives Nicholas the satisfaction of having "in some indefinable way won." Proud of his "emotional triumph," Nicholas sets out for Greece humming all the way to Victoria Station

to "celebrate his release" (48).

Charles and Nicholas seem very different. Charles is a dignified Victorian gentleman of great wealth, education, and social position. Nicholas is a modern, melancholy pseudo-poet with few possessions other than a long line of sexual conquests. However, the gentleman and the poet demonstrate an equal talent for injuring people to serve private, acquisitive ends. Charles is just as dishonest and sadistic as Nicholas exemplified by his lies to Ernestina, his careless teasing of Sam, and his neglect of his uncleand his gentlemanly activities are as close to shallow game-playing as Nicholas' conjurings of the "solitary heart." Both men also share a talent for disguise and play-acting, which are important properties of the game (Huizinga 13). In his article on the "rationality" of play, Phillip E. Lewis discusses the drama of game, arguing that when exhibited, games are as dependent on spectacle, histrionics, and staging as the dramatic play. Guise, pretense, and calculation preside over the players' actions in both kinds of play, and

what is gained in each is gained through controlled artifice (138). Charles's many varieties of "cryptic coloration" (145), like Nicholas' "solitary
heart," are disguises worn to conceal Charles's true identity and to control the situations in which he finds himself. Playing "Alarmed Pro-

priety" (144) to Sarah in the Undercliff, for example, keeps her within
the boundaries of her station and class as well as within the rule-bound

territory of "duty" (47).

34 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

Games are substitutes for life, representing worlds in which absolute order reigns. In games, life is radically stylized to remove complex, illogical, or unsymmetrical elementsas in the "lifestyles" of Nicholas

and Charles (Holquist 110). These men are equally guilty of living "lifestyles" (in the worst sense ofthat cliche) that give life a perfection
it does not actually have. Nicholas admits his "narcissistic belief in the importance of the lifestyle" (21) when he adopts the "uniform" of "Les Hommes Revokes," a group of "fellow odd men out," who all wore dark grey suits and drank very dry sherry (17). Charles derives his lifestyle from the rules of acceptable aristocratic behavior. He is quick to see how badly Ernestina's "unladylike" tantrum over his disinheritance undershoots this model. Unlike this "draper's daughter," Charles shows the "traditional imperturbability" of his class, "that fine aristocratic refusal to allow the setbacks of life ever to ruffle one's style" (201). Although each deludes himself into believing that his behavior is unique, both are terrified of uniqueness. They have chosen familiar models to emulate and have exchanged their real potentialities for predictable lifestyles. The game theorist Roger Caillois defines game as a ritual of equation and a stereotyped invention that removes the elements of mystery and uncertainty through unchanging rules and objectives (153-154). This definition could as accurately define the inherited formulas Charles and Nicholas have allowed to play their lives for them. In their artificial playing at life, Charles and Nicholas achieve a power and superiority that they could not have in a life played without masks and fixed rules. As Fowles writes in The Aristos, "to be able to win a game compensates the winner for not being able to win outside the context of the game" (158). Of course, their power is purely illusory.

The game controls and dominates them, playing them as puppets in a

deterministic fiction. However, the saving feature is the disappointment they begin to feel when playing these games. Bored and jaded, Nicholas and Charles are tempted into playing the godgames proposed by Conchis
and Sarah.

To use one of Nicholas' expressions, he and Charles are "set to chase" (202), pursuing adventures they never suspect will cut off all return to their former shallow sports. The adventures they pursue belong to new games, but games of a very different kind and "higher" on the game continuum previously described. Both young men accept a chal-

lenge from game-players who play for entirely different reasons and
rewards. Charles and Nicholas, who feel thoroughly confident in their skills when they admit themselves into relationships with Sarah Woodruff and Maurice Conchis, are surprised when they find themselves "trumped," their control preempted by the expert masters of a game

that has as its winning objective the "unblinding" of its participants.

GAMES AND GODGAMES 35

In Conchis' "godgame" and Sarah's "strategems" (354), game-playing rises to a level of constructive purpose, morality, and productiveness. These "serious" games are as instructive as they are creative, and they share little in common with Charles's and Nicholas' rule-bound play. Conchis and Sarah maneuver with a common purpose. Their strategies to help Nicholas and Charles reconstruct their lives begin with the dismantling of the former structures on which Nicholas and Charles depended. Conchis and Sarah first assume a mastery over the young men by manipulating them into positions of complete powerlessness. Nicholas and Charles, accustomed to dominating their relationships, suddenly find themselves the "dupes" and "victims" of these enigmatic figures who see through each mask of their inauthentic, stylized lives. Another characteristic of game-playing that Huizinga has exposed is that a game is destroyed if its rules are transgressed or ignored (11). When Sarah disregards the rules of "Duty" and when the women of the godgame revoke Nicholas' "Urfe laws," these two men's structures come crashing down. Charles's and Nicholas' respective laws of propriety and promiscuity are exposed as spurious standards powerless to preserve either morality or love. In The French Lieutenant's Woman Dr. Grogan remarks to Charles

that a man's destiny is made by "his choice of Gods" (151). Fortunately, Sarah is able to redirect Charles's destiny by exposing the true nature
of Charles's God. With Sarah's assistance, Charles realizes that he has

been bound all his life by the iron law of a "machine," a deus ex

machina that has caught him up in its wheels of "vicious" circular

process:

He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties

and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all its deepest yearnings. That was what deceived him; and it was totally without love or freedom . . . but also without thought, without intention, without malice, because the deception was in its very nature; and it was not human, but a machine. That was the vicious circle that'haunted him. . . . (363)

One hundred years later, the same "deceptive machine" that ruled Charles catches Nicholas Urfe up in its manipulative process. Conchis, however, uses a gambling metaphor to describe this machine, warning Nicholas to reject the "cogged dice" (126) that have continually defeated him in the corrupt social games he has played. Yet the godgames of
Conchis and Sarah do not end when Nicholas and Charles see the

structures formerly controlling them for what they are. These men, though their sight is clearer, still seek a bounded and controlled context
in which to live. Neither is yet able to accept his freedom and to act
alone.

Nicholas and Charles, when they are convinced of the deception in

36 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

their first "gods," simply exchange these authorities for new ones. They choose to accept the authority of the godgames. Nicholas becomes thoroughly enchanted with the mysterious masque staged exclusively for him. He falls in love with the fictions, the riddles, the play-acting and the players. Unburdened of his inferior fictions, all Nicholas wants is to remain inside this fabulous domain. "Let it all come," he appeals, "even the Black Minotaur, so long as it came" (322). Nicholas reveals

how completely the godgame controls him on the afternoon he spends

alone with Julie and June. Their conversation is suddenly interrupted by warships passing by the island. The contrast between the ugly world from which the warships come and the beauty of Conchis' private kingdom troubles Nicholas:
we were looking . . . into a world where there were no more Prsperos, no private
domains, no poetries, fantasies, tender sexual promises ... I would have sacrificed all

the rest of my days to have this one afternoon endless, endlessly repeated, a closed
circle. . . . (353)

Nicholas feels a uniqueness conferred on him as a member of the

godgame. Believing that he may even become an indispensable part of

its cast, he permits himself to fantasize about a potential access to both

twins, a double possession of the "dark and the pale" (319). The selfish
and philandering Nicholas of the solitary heart has not yet been expunged. Charles also believes himself to be a rare species of man. However, he never expects to be so rare as to be left altogether alone. When Sarah frees him from convention's iron machine, he believes that he will share
his exile with her. He looks to a future of love and companionship, of

standing with Sarah in the Uffizi, of "dressing Sarah! Taking her to Paris, to Florence, to Rome!" (365). He does not know that he will

spend his future as a solitary "outcast" (427). After this goddess delivers
him from the machine, she absconds. As she tells him years later when he finds her again, she believed that it was necessary for her to destroy the lies that artificially derived her first influence over him. She lied in order to attract him to her, but to continue an intimacy founded on such dishonesty would be wrong. Sarah tells Charles: "I believe that I was right to destroy what had begun between us. There was a falsehood in it" (448). The godgames of Sarah and Conchis prove to be valuable devices

for educating the two men. However, the godgames are still games.
They are limited, contrived experiences that, though instructive, cannot
be substituted for life in the real world of human action. Conchis and

Sarah have helped Nicholas and Charles see through their first mistaken
identities, but the two men still must separate their real identities from

their roles in the godgames. Conchis says of his own game, "This is
GAMES AND GODGAMES 37

not a real world. These are not real relationships" (282). Like any other game, his godgame must end so that it can begin again the next summer and carry another "victim" through its processes. Therefore, like Sarah, Conchis absconds with his game, forcing Nicholas to face a solitary exile. To allow Nicholas to believe in the godgame any longer would be a violation of the first of the godgame's two commandments: that lies,
even the best, well-intended fictions, must never form the basis for human

relationships. Thus, Conchis and Sarah abscond, leaving Nicholas and

Charles with the godgame's teachings but free of its control.

Certainly, this paradox of using games to cure chronic game-players of playing games perplexes. However, all of the games, godgames, and other gamelike activities in these two novels are finally undermined to leave the protagonists alone, free of artifice and control, and staring into
the face of life's real competitions. Nicholas and Charles are like children who, for the first time, are led outside the narrow boundaries of their

games and asked to succeed without masks and rules. They have passed
through many changing structuresfrom frivolous pastimes and amuse-

ments to serious training contestsinto unplanned, unbounded freedom

full of endless permutations and possibilities. Instead of rules to follow, there are choices to make. Instead of prescribed objectives and boundaries

designed to preserve the game, there is the perdurable quest to preserve

oneself.

Near the end of The Magus, Nicholas meets Lily de Seitas in the

British Museum to ask her for extended help and advice. However, she
tells him that "the godgame is over," to which Nicholas responds, "The what?" Mrs. de Seitas repeats, "The godgame . . . because there is no God, and it is not a game" (625). Nicholas must understand and

accept the "unfakable truth" of his freedom (418). His ties to the
godgame have been severed, and he is completely alone with no accompanying structure or guide. Con chis had tried to explain this phenomenon of freedom to Nicholas in one of his reminiscences of the war, but

Nicholas was unprepared for the truth. Only when the godgame is over
does Nicholas comprehend Conchis' lesson: "There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves" (129). Paradoxically, what Nicholas is only beginning to realize at the end

of The Magus is that he does possess a guiding structure to help him

choose and act. When Nicholas entered the SALLE D'ATTENTE, he

was rigidly fixed in his selfish pursuits and convinced that he could never be different from what he was. But the godgame assists Nicholas to develop a moral being capable of dominating the shallow egotist he had been. Thus, when Nicholas stands in the arena of the underground courtroomhis self-esteem run through with the "bandillera" of humiliation and scornhe no longer acts to save face or to get revenge. At this point, a more violent conflict rages inside him between the
38 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

Wimmel part of his nature, which would strike Lily, and the Conchis half of him, which would not permit such a terrible action. He knows that he has "absolute freedom of choice," but he is restrained by the one safeguard on this liberty: the responsibility not to injure another human being, which is the second commandment of the godgame:
... I know I had absolute freedom of choice. I knew I could do it if I wanted.

Then suddenly.
1 understood.

I was not holding a cat in my hands in an underground cistern. I was in a sunlit square ten years before and in my hands 1 held a German sub-machine-gun. And it was not Conchis who was playing the role of Wimmel. Wimmel was inside rnc, in my stiffened backthrown arm, in all my past; above all in what 1 had done to Alison.
THE BETTER YOU UNDERSTAND FREEDOM, THE LESS YOU POSSESS IT.

And my freedom too was in not striking, whatever the cost, whatever eighty parts of me must die. whatever the watching eyes might think of me; even though il would seem, as they must have foreseen, that I was forgiving them, that I was indoctrinated, their dupe. . . . All of Conchis' manoeuvrings had been to bring me to this. . . . (517-518)

Conchis' game brings Nicholas back to the truth disclosed during the mysterious mind-voyage Conchis engineered for Nicholas at Bourani. "Being is endless interaction" (239), a claim that Heraclitus made centuries ago. Responsible freedom is a dynamic human condition of alternating harmony and discord that needs no objective other than its own vital self-perpetuation. Nicholas can never be "victimized" as long as he assumes responsibility for his own choices and actions. At the end of The Magus, Nicholas stands equally godless and gameless with Alison in Regent's Park. However, Alison has come to him

from the "temple of Demeter" still showing Lily de Seitas' influence.

Nicholas notes changes in Alison's dress and speech and remembers that
Alison "took on the colour and character of those she loved or liked,

however independent she remained underneath" (650). Guarded and wary of Nicholas, Alison will not face him honestly but continues "playing to their script." Nicholas understands now that no one is watching them: "There were no watching eyes. . . . The theatre was empty. . . . They had absconded, we were alone" (654-655). Therefore, Nicholas believes that it is absolutely "necessary"no breaking of the godgame's second commandmentto "commit pain" in order to break Alison's remaining attachment to the godgame (641). She has "[his] part now" and must make an independent choice whether to leave or to join Nicholas (653). The pain from the slap is necessary to awaken Alison from her hypnotic submission to the godgame so that she can learn what
Nicholas knows.

Charles Smithson likewise experiences a new freedom when he recognizes that he as well is no longer watched or controlled by any other
GAMES AND GODGAMES 39

force except the force inside himself. He realizes, standing in the Exeter church, that there is no God to turn to and no judges in the pews behind him. Just as Darwin's theories had hurled man into infinite time and space when they stormed through the rigid Linnaean hierarchies, Charles's awareness of his absolute freedom suddenly crumbles his former allegiances to duty, class structure, and material wealth. He is free with infinite room to develop and a wide "choice of methods" to aid him. He throws off possession as his primary purpose in life, choosing instead to make his own continued development his first goal (295-296). In the Exeter church, Charles confronts not only his freedom but his own double nature, his "better and worse self" (360). The "tugof-war" or Doppelgnger debate between these two parts of him energizes Charles's progress. Fowles writes this dialogue of self and soul for Charles to illustrate the kind of struggle that emerges in an individual who is both responsible and free. Charles understands this inner competition to be the "power of self-analysis, " which is the human being's "special privilege in the struggle to adapt" (296). Charles learns that evolution the phenomenon he thought he understood before Sarah corrected his assumptionsrolls over all that fixes and prohibits change, including those social edifices that had held him up as a "superior" being. Confronted now with the actual complex nature of evolutionary competition and selection, Charles realizes that the structures of class roles and wealth that had supported him were as powerless as a "straw hut in a hurricane" (120).

Without these petty human laws and boundaries, Charles stands

together and equal with all other human beings in the life struggle,

including his "dismissable" man, Sam (372). One of the well-wrought

ironies in this novel, created at the protagonist's expense, stems from

this relationship between master and servant. In one scene, Sam has the opportunity to warn his master of their equality in nature. Charles,
who has been carelessly teasing Sam for his behavior with the maid,

Mary, gets from his servant the truth that stands above the social rank
that separates them: "We're not 'orses. We're 'ooman beings" (HO).

By the novel's end, Charles has learned this truth of equality and has
entered the real fields of human competition. His intention is the same as Sarah's, to "never be the same again" (174) but to rise continually

to "higher things" (344). He also knows that this rise is accomplished not through one gesture of responsible freedom but through a lifelong
series of these acts. Life is not "one riddle" or "one guess" or "one

throw of the dice" (467) but is a ceaseless competition played, for the
most part, inside one's own heart and intellect. In both novels, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, games and godgames lead each protagonist to an end that is not an end. Nicholas and Charles spin off into lives that are a perpetuum mobile guided
40 MODERN FICTION STUDIES

by belief and being rather than make-believe and collecting. However,

a dilemma remains in both novels. Both of the last two endings of The

French Lieutenant's Woman bring Charles to the same "conclusion." His humanity has been preserved whether he wins the girl or not. The same is true of Nicholas in The Magus. An enigmatic still life interrupts just
as Alison is about to choose between accepting or rejecting Nicholas'

long-overdue profession of love. However, Alison's decision to go or to stay will not alter the nature of Nicholas' private accomplishment. By leaving his novels unfinished, Fowles suggests that he might have
written more but has chosen rather to stop. Nicholas and Charles have
arrived at a balance of self and soul, heart and mind, that is an ac-

complishment to mark new beginnings, not endings. Fowles therefore

leaves the reader with the sense of having reached a nucleus of humanity and freedom from which a better life will grow. Each man has found "an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build" {French 467). The inconclusiveness also recalls us, the readers, to our present place in time and to the reality we inhabit apart from the novel's make-believe world. Whether we have been aware of it, we have been manipulated

by the magus-novelist John Fowles, whose novels are themselves godgames of contrivance and myth for the purpose of teaching truths.
However, like Conchis, Fowles cannot sustain his godgames. Nor does he want his reader to believe that these novel-godgames are any more

real than the godgames of Conchis and Sarah. Fowles, therefore, leaves
the final choice to us rather than to his protagonists. We must finally
decide the destinies of Nicholas and Alison and Charles and Sarah, and those destinies will be constructed by our imaginations. Fowles releases

us from his manipulative imaginings so that we can imagine independently, and this exchange of control is intended to "disintoxify" the reader {Magus 521). Like the poet in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," we must finally leave the art object's provocative world, a world arrested in time where lovers "win near the goal" but never reach it. The still life at the end of The Magus seems intentionally written to invoke the scene on the urn. Fowles writes of Alison: "She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense" (656). The author intrudes at the end of The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman to suspend suddenly the world of the novel, the kind of ending Fowles still likes to write. In his latest novel, Mantissa, he leaves his main character, the novelist Miles Green, "floating, godlike, alpha and

omega (and all between), over a sea of vapor" (196). The "sea of
vapor" represents the imaginative possibilities open to both reader and writer when the text ends and no longer controls our choices. Like Alison, we are slapped awake and find ourselves free of manipulation,
GAMES AND GODGAMES 41

without a script to follow. We awake to the "stinging smell of burning leaves" (656), the leaves or pages of a book burning, and a brief
awareness of a freedom found. The suspension that concludes these novels is Fowles' way of offering "fragments of freedom," the freedom of

independent creation that Keats acknowledged was both beauty and

truth.

WORKS CITED

Caillois, Roger. "Riddles and Images." Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 148-158.
Ehrmann, Jacques. "Homo Ludens Revisited." Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 3157.

Fowles, John. The Aristos. Boston: Little, 1970. ___The Ebony Tower. Boston: Little, 1974. -----The French Lieutenant's Woman. Boston: Little, 1969. ___The Magus: A Revised Version. Boston: Little, 1977. ___"Making a Pitch for Cricket." Sports Illustrated 21 May 1973: 100-114. ___Mantissa. Boston: Little, 1982. Holquist, Michael. "How to Play Utopia: Some Brief Notes on the Distinc-

tiveness of Utopian Fiction." Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 106-123.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon, 1962.

Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.
Lewis, Phillip E. "La Rochefoucauld: The Rationality of Play." Yale French

Studies 41 (1968): 133-147.

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