Narrative Fiction, Experience-Taking, and Progressive Male

Standpoints

Brooke Lenz

Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Volume 47,

Number 3, September 2014, pp. 141-157 (Article)

Published by Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mos.2014.0027

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/555667

Access provided at 10 Jan 2020 10:27 GMT from University of Cambridge

This essay explores the narrative strategies of Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and John Fowles’s The
Magus. The essay argues that, by encouraging and then deterring what social psychologists call readers’
“experience-taking,” the novels compel readers to entertain the protagonists’ progressive standpoints and to
interrogate problematic gender norms.

Narrative Fiction,
Experience-Taking, and
Progressive Male Standpoints
BROOKE LENZ

t first sight, Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve and John Fowles’s The Magus

A seem to have little in common. Carter conceived of New Eve as “a feminist tract
about the social creation of femininity” (“Notes” 38); Fowles, who began writ-
ing The Magus in the nineteen-fifties, first published the novel in 1966, and then
revised it over a decade after its original publication, conceded that it “must always
substantially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent” (10).
The two novels are dissimilar in style and tone and in the particulars of plot and set-
ting. Yet both authors indicated an interest in interrogating the roles and assumptions
that structure everyday existence, especially as these social norms support problem-
atic relations between the sexes.
This shared interest led both authors to experiment with the narrative presenta-
tion of their protagonists’ unusual stories. Eve(lyn), the “New Eve” of The Passion of
New Eve, and Nicholas, the “anti-hero” of The Magus, begin as fairly typical young
men of their class, education, and culture, but subsequently undergo (and reflect on)

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142 Mosaic 47/3 (September 2014)

trials imposed upon them by mysterious individuals who seek to correct their imma-
ture and misogynistic attitudes. As they progress through these projects, Eve(lyn) and
Nicholas experience radical transformations that lead to altered perspectives, partic-
ularly in their relationships with women. These emerging perspectives approximate
the “progressive male standpoints” (337) described by the philosopher Larry May as
“egalitarian theoretical and practical position[s] from which men can critically assess
male experience and traditional male roles [. . .] [and can] come to understand how
their participation in certain social arrangements may contribute to inequality and
oppression” (338). Such perspectives are important, May argues, because they can
potentially “produce reasonable critiques of male roles and yet still be believable
enough to motivate men to change their lives” (351). Generally, May argues, such
positions are best achieved through direct, personal experience. However, he notes, “it
is not impossible to replicate a set of experiences through imagination,” as one might
come to understand a friend’s pain by extrapolating from a similar personal trauma
or injury (341). Yet May does not consider reading as a potential catalyst for attaining
a progressive male standpoint, though literature consistently functions to challenge
readers’ attitudes and assumptions and even, as psychologists Raymond A. Mar and
Keith Oatley have argued, “possesses a number of advantages over the expository
communication of social information—advantages afforded by both the abstraction
and simulation of social experience” (182). Indeed, other recent studies in social psy-
chology have suggested that, through a process called “experience-taking,” readers of
fictional narratives can “let go of key components of their own identity—such as their
beliefs, memories, personality traits, and ingroup affiliations—and instead assume
the identity of a protagonist, accepting the character’s decisions, outcomes, and reac-
tions as their own” (Kaufman and Libby 2) and that this process “has the potential to
create durable changes in behavior” (16).
Because they quite effectively “replicate a set of experiences through imagina-
tion,” The Passion of New Eve and The Magus provide an opportunity to explore how
some specific narrative strategies employed in complex fictional texts might promote
this kind of experience-taking. Though somewhat differently motivated—Carter by
specifically feminist aims, Fowles by goals more broadly existentialist and humanist—
both authors envisioned a didactic purpose for these novels (“Notes” 38; Fowles 10)
and employed narrative conventions that encourage readers to inhabit the conscious-
ness of the experiencing protagonist. By engaging readers in dramatic re-enactments
of their strange experiences, by hinting at but deliberately withholding crucial infor-
mation, by suddenly interrupting their retrospective narratives with use of present
tense or the second or third person, and by ending their tales ambiguously, both
 Brooke Lenz 143

Eve(lyn) and Nicholas simulate for readers the “heuristic mills” (Fowles 10) that have
fashioned their transformations. Individual readers will of course have unique
responses to these stories, “coloured by one’s personality, culture, education, history,
dreaming, and so on” (Holland 1208); however, these narrative strategies encourage
responses in the range that psychologists Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley, Maja Djikic,
and Justin Mullin describe as “identification” and “empathy” in their taxonomy of
emotions of literary response (823-24), promoting a kind of immersion in the pro-
tagonists’ evolving state of mind.
The novels’ potential to function in this way depends on several factors. The
studies conducted by Geoff Kaufman and Lisa Libby suggest that readers are more
likely to engage in experience-taking when reading “a story written in first-person
voice that depicts a character who shares a relevant group membership with readers
[. . .] establishing a foundation of immediate familiarity and assumed similarity
(e.g., in terms of daily life experiences)” (3). Reducing readers’ self-consciousness (4)
and delaying the revelation of a protagonist’s out-group status (12) further enhance
experience-taking, increasing readers’ “ability to simulate the subjective experience of
the character in the story” (6) and their likelihood of “emerging from the story with
their identities, mindsets, and actions transformed” (10). Both The Passion of New Eve
and The Magus begin by revealing potentially estranging details about the protago-
nists’ identities; however, the first-person, retrospective narrative structure of the two
novels works to progressively increase a sense of shared situation between protagonist
and reader, since even readers who are repelled by the characters’ attitudes or person-
alities are immersed within the perspectives of the protagonists’ earlier, experiencing
selves as the events of each story unfold. Moreover, the events that Eve(lyn) and
Nicholas endure are themselves so bizarre and disorienting that readers must recog-
nize their own lived experience as an inadequate standard by which to judge the char-
acters’ reactions. These strategies reduce readers’ “tendency to reflect on and think
about the causes and meaning of [their own] behaviors and reactions” (Kaufman and
Libby 4) and instead promote “experiential merging with the protagonist and adop-
tion of that character’s mindset” (8).
Merging with Eve(lyn) and Nicholas in this way produces a necessarily uncom-
fortable reading experience, especially because the characters’ fundamental attitudes
undergo radical change as a result of their experiences. Whether these changing per-
spectives have the potential to disrupt readers’ attitudes toward destructive gender
norms, however, depends on whether they meet the conditions that May suggests
define a progressive male standpoint: “First, there is a striving for knowledge or
understanding based on experience, especially personal experience of traditional male
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roles and activities. Second, there is a critical reflection on that experience in light of
the possible harms to women, as well as men, of assuming traditional male roles and
engaging in traditional male activities. Third, there is a moral motivation to change at
least some aspects of traditional male roles and activities. And finally, there are prac-
tical proposals for changes in traditional male roles that are regarded as believable by
other men” (337). If Eve(lyn) and Nicholas, over the course of their respective narra-
tives, seem to genuinely meet the first three of these conditions, then they can be said
to have achieved progressive male standpoints. If their narratives can further encour-
age readers to internalize the insights produced by their ordeals through experience-
taking, then the novels can be understood as cases in which fiction can function in
place of direct personal experience as a catalyst for the development of progressive
standpoints applicable to readers’ own lives. If, however, Eve(lyn) and Nicholas fail to
achieve such standpoints or seem to readers to do so only temporarily, precariously,
or implausibly, then the novels’ potential to function as transformative narratives
fades. The indeterminacy of the stories’ endings and readers’ individual interpreta-
tions of them are thus critical to the novels’ transformative potential.

ecause Eve(lyn)’s transformation in The Passion of New Eve is both physical and
B psychological, it seems reasonable to assume that his/her transformation is likely
to be particularly thorough and enduring. However, the extremity of Eve(lyn)’s expe-
riences and the resultant ambiguity in the narrating perspective significantly compli-
cate readers’ experience-taking. Generically, the novel is complex and disorienting
(Ryan-Sautour 108). Furthermore, because the novel is narrated through a series of
flashbacks and flash-forwards, readers apprehend the story’s events through an unsta-
ble, alienated perspective (Caputo 139; Page 200). The novel’s futuristic, dystopian
setting further muddles perceptions, so that readers must immediately recognize the
world of the text as radically different from their own.
Even more disorienting are the strange hints that the narrating Eve(lyn) drops from
the very beginning of the narrative. The novel begins, for example, with a direct address
to Tristessa, the cross-dressing film star whom Evelyn idolizes as a young man and who
eventually impregnates Eve. After briefly describing the experience of watching Tristessa
on film, the narrator declares, “Tristessa. Enigma. Illusion. Woman? Ah! And all you sig-
nified was false! Your existence was only notional; you were a piece of pure mystifica-
tion” (6). Clearly this comment foreshadows events that will unfold later in the narrative,
since it indicates an intimate knowledge of Tristessa unavailable to the experiencing
Evelyn, who has just paid to Tristessa “a little tribute of spermatozoa” through the medi-
ation of “some girl or other” (5) at the cinema. However, such hints also create confu-
 Brooke Lenz 145

sion about the narrating perspective, especially when, shortly after this comment, the
narrator explains that “this otherwise forgotten girl [. . .] kept a hieroglyph of plastic in
the neck of her womb, to prevent conception; the black lady never advised me on those
techniques when she fitted me up with a uterus of my own, that was not part of her
intention” (9). Other early clues indicate a coming “rebirth” for the experiencing Evelyn
(13, 38, 39, 47), creating “a fissure between the autodiegetic narrator (whom we then
interpret to be female) and the character Evelyn, who is still signaled as male” (Page 197-
98). Such hints work to signal Eve(lyn)’s unreliability as a narrator, but simultaneously
engage readers in pursuing Eve(lyn)’s puzzling references while forcing them to suspend
any initial judgments they might come to about the protagonist, since the narrator obvi-
ously possesses crucial information that readers cannot access.
Yet readers are likely to distance themselves from Evelyn early in the novel because
of his obvious character flaws, emphasized by the details the narrating Eve chooses to
share. In describing his early obsession with Tristessa, for example, Eve(lyn) notes, “I’d
dreamed of meeting Tristessa, she stark naked, tied, perhaps to a tree in a midnight for-
est under the wheeling stars” (7). Evelyn eventually fulfills his more sadistic fantasies
during his lurid and abusive affair with an exotic dancer called Leilah. He describes, for
example, Leilah’s habit of arousing him late at night, and his typical response:

Waking just before she tore the orgasm from me, I would, in my astonishment, remember
the myth of the succubus, the devils in female form who come by night to seduce the saints.
Then, to punish her for scaring me so, I would tie her to the iron bed with my belt. I always
left her feet free, so she could kick away the rats. [. . .] If she had fouled the bed, I would
untie her and use my belt to beat her. And she would foul the bed again, or bite my hand.
So these games perpetrated themselves and grew, I suppose, more vicious by almost imper-
ceptible degrees. (27-28)

Both mesmerized and repulsed by Leilah, Evelyn admits that soon after their initial cou-
pling, “She became only an irritation of the flesh, an itch that must be scratched; a
response, not a pleasure” (31). Attracted to what he perceives as Leilah’s born victim-
hood, Evelyn is repulsed by her eventual pregnancy. Initially tormenting her by denying
his paternity—an approach he calls “the oldest abuse, the most primitive evasion”—he
admits, “As soon as I knew she was carrying my child, any remaining desire for her van-
ished. She became only an embarrassment to me. She became a shocking inconvenience
to me” (32). Evelyn is so inconvenienced by Leilah that he abandons her shortly after the
messy abortion that sterilizes and nearly kills her, escaping to the desert both exhilarated
and “festering with misanthropy” (38). Such repulsively selfish and abusive attitudes are
unlikely to evoke many readers’ sympathy or identification.
146 Mosaic 47/3 (September 2014)

However, the strangeness of the episodes that subsequently unfold, the vivid
details with which they are recreated, and the disarming authenticity of the first-
person narration combine to situate the reader within the events, as though experi-
encing them along with the bewildered and often frightened Eve(lyn). Over the course
of the novel, Eve(lyn) recounts the literal striptease of Leilah’s initial seduction (19-24);
his capture in the desert by a cult of militant feminists (45-48); his ceremonial rape,
castration, surgical transformation, and ritualistic conditioning into a woman, the
“New Eve” (54-71); Eve’s sexual slavery in the harem of a psychotic and misogynistic
cult leader called Zero (85-109); Zero’s ambush of Tristessa’s estate, culminating in the
ironic mock-wedding of Tristessa and Eve (132-83); their escape, sexual bonding in the
desert, and capture by a troupe of child soldiers who murder Tristessa (143-63); and,
finally, Eve’s complicated escape through a war-torn California (179-86). Each of these
episodes is described in vivid, dramatic detail, assaulting readers with the sights,
sounds, sensations, and feelings that Eve(lyn) experiences as events unfold.
Contributing to this sense of immediacy are Eve(lyn)’s sudden switches in narra-
tive focus. Chapter Four, for example, begins, “I am lost, quite lost in the middle of the
desert” (41); in this single-paged chapter, the reader is catapulted into a past moment
that Eve(lyn) presents as ever-present, creating a disorienting shift in time and place
that simulates his confusion and fear. Similarly, Chapter Six begins with a second-
person address: “Descend lower. You have not reached the end of the maze, yet” (49),
as Evelyn enters Beulah, the enclave of Mother and, Evelyn has already hinted, “the
place where I was born” (47). These comments work both to engross the reader in an
immediate vicarious experience and to suggest further fracturing of the narrator’s
identity. These complexities are perhaps epitomized in Chapter Seven, where Evelyn,
newly Eve, explains: “I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an
unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman’s shape.
Not a woman, no; both more and less than a real woman. [. . .] Eve remains willfully
in the state of innocence that precedes the fall” (83). In a narrative that alternates
between past and present tense, and here first person and third person, the narrator is
both Evelyn and Eve, both past and present, and the reader is likewise caught between
sympathy for Evelyn, who has endured his radical “punishment” with palpable child-
like terror, and a certain satisfaction, apparently also felt by the narrating Eve, that such
a transformation serves him right (Benedikz 85-86). Throughout this section of the
novel, this ambiguous narrative perspective both immerses readers in Eve(lyn)’s expe-
riences and confounds any simple judgments or responses to those experiences.
However, this kind of ambiguity does not invalidate the insights that Eve(lyn)
comes to as a result of his/her intense experiences; in fact, as Nicoletta Vallorani has
 Brooke Lenz 147

noted, despite the fact that for Eve(lyn) “the two genders exhibit a contiguity which
does not—and could never—become continuity [. . .] paradoxically, the resulting
chaotic disposition triggers the process of comprehension” (368). Such dawning com-
prehension is illustrated when the newly made Eve, still psychologically Evelyn, first
views herself in the mirror: “But when I looked in the mirror, I saw Eve; I did not see
myself. [. . .] I was the object of all the unfocused desires that had ever existed in my
own head. I had become my own masturbatory fantasy. And—how can I put it—the
cock in my head, still, twitched at the sight of myself ” (74-75). This scene ironically
parallels Leilah’s earlier transformations in front of her mirror, as she “became
absorbed in the contemplation of the figure in the mirror but [. . .] did not seem to
me to apprehend the person in the mirror as, in any degree, herself. [. . .] The mirror
bestowed a grace upon her, now she was her own mistress” (28-29). This scene pres-
ents a “prototypical pornographic scenario” (Simon 115), yet Leilah’s participation is
intentional; as even Evelyn notes, Leilah consciously constructs a self in the mirror
that is both detached from her real identity and that teasingly provokes the male gaze.
Leilah thus understands and manipulates her own objectification, while “Eve is
unable to control or cope with the fictionalized or artificial quality in gender identity”
(Ledwon 29). Yet as Alison Lee notes, “Since Eve is a woman when she tells Evelyn’s
story, her narration, of course, is tinged with the knowledge of what it is to be both
the subject and the object of such a look. [. . .] In this case, the male gaze is outwitted
because Eve looks back” (243). For readers, the complex interplay of male and female
points of view, of vivid immediate experience and implicit retrospective knowledge,
produces an interpretive situation both perplexing and compelling.
Clearer insights emerge once Eve escapes the compound of Beulah and is cap-
tured by Zero, the misogynistic cult figure who repeatedly rapes Eve and keeps her in
demeaning bondage. As a member of Zero’s harem, the newly female Eve recognizes
that her imprisonment is “as savage an apprenticeship in womanhood as could have
been devised for me” that forces the physically former, but still psychically present
Evelyn, s/he says, “to atone for the sins of my first sex vis-à-vis my second sex” (107).
Though Mother had tried to socialize Eve into womanhood by showing Tristessa’s
films, it is not until Eve observes Zero’s other wives in their state of shared squalor that
s/he begins to recognize the performative nature of gender, explaining, “although I
was a woman, I was now also passing for a woman, but, then, many women born
spend their whole lives in just such imitations” (101). Moreover, the suffering that Eve
experiences as a result of her sexual and existential degradation as one of Zero’s wives
begins to genuinely affect her change from man to woman, so that by the end of her
time there, s/he says, “I had become almost the thing I was” (107). These experiences
148 Mosaic 47/3 (September 2014)

prepare Eve to fully understand the womanhood embodied by, s/he soon discovers,
the biologically male Tristessa. By observing Zero’s other wives; by experiencing, as a
woman, the degradations of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of a
man; and, finally, by critically assessing Tristessa’s brilliant and completely convincing
drag, Eve(lyn) finally learns how femininity is socially constructed, especially by men’s
erotic pleasure in women’s suffering.
Yet even these lessons are tinged with ambiguity, as Eve reflects after making love
with Tristessa in the desert: “Masculine and feminine are correlatives which involve one
another. I am sure of that. [. . .] But what the nature of masculine and the nature of
feminine might be, whether they involve male and female [. . .] that I do not know.
Though I have been both man and woman, still I do not know the answer to these ques-
tions” (149-50). Such questions are never resolved by Eve(lyn); though s/he has learned
important lessons about the ways in which femininity is constructed, his/her bewilder-
ment about the fundamental “nature” of gender persists to the end of the novel.
Considering the complexity of these questions and the traumas of Eve(lyn)’s recent
experiences, this is perhaps not surprising. Yet, the ambiguity attached to Eve’s insights
also persists because the narration of the female Eve never completely sheds Evelyn’s
masculine perspective; as Michelle Ryan-Sautour notes, “the reader witnesses little dis-
cursive change in the narrative that might attest to a significant transformation” (115).
Yet the narrating Eve’s sympathetic reflections on Zero’s wives and her compassionate
longing for Tristessa, so starkly altered from Evelyn’s sadistic imaginings early in the
novel, indicate significant change in Eve(lyn)’s interpretation of social roles.
Moreover, the lingering masculine perspective implicit throughout the novel con-
veys the progressive male standpoint that Eve(lyn) achieves as a result of his/her expe-
riences. Eve does eventually decide, she says, that she does not “want my old self back”
(188), rejecting the identity of the male Evelyn when Leilah, now revealed in her true
identity as Lilith, offers her “the set of genitals which had once belonged to Evelyn”
(187). Accompanying and underscoring this decision are “the harsh comments on
Evelyn’s oppressive masculinity which are scattered throughout the novel,” as Nicoletta
Caputo argues: “In all those cases, the pitilessness of the narrating voice cannot but
reflect a consciousness that has discarded all remains of a former male condition”
(147). However, Julia Simon offers, it seems to me, a more accurate estimation of the
narrator’s consciousness: “Evelyn’s bodily transformation and his experience as a
woman reform him” (140). In order to come to a progressive male standpoint, May
argues, men “need to spend time interacting with women in non-dominating ways to
learn from them what it is like to be oppressed” (344), and this is exactly what Eve(lyn)
experiences, particularly in the “apprenticeship” in Zero’s compound when the newly
 Brooke Lenz 149

made Eve still operates through Evelyn’s masculine perspective. Though Eve chooses
her female identity by novel’s end, the fractured perspective deliberately maintained
throughout the narrative reveals the process through which Evelyn interrogates his tra-
ditional male behaviour, critically reflects on the ways in which such behaviour nega-
tively impacts women and simultaneously makes him “so unlovable” (34), and
establishes Eve’s eventual rejection of her past self as a morally motivated decision. The
“New Eve” is thus a being intimately cognizant of the inherent complexities, perfor-
mative power, and destructive potential of traditional gender roles.

icholas, the “anti-hero” of The Magus, undergoes a process that is similarly trau-
N matic, and likewise comes to significant realizations about destructive social roles
and the performance of identity. Anchored more clearly in a recognizable reality, The
Magus is perhaps less disorienting than The Passion of New Eve. However, like Carter’s
novel, it operates within a number of complex conceptual frameworks (Olshen 916-
17), and for readers, these complex and interwoven concepts function very much like
the generic features of The Passion of New Eve, so that each of Nicholas’s extraordi-
nary experiences is layered with multiple allusions (Walker 196). Thus, while the
novel’s setting is relatively familiar, the conceptual context in which the action unfolds
precludes simple acts of interpretation or judgment.
Yet this inscrutability is deliberately maintained by the narrating Nicholas
throughout the novel, creating a relationship between readers and the protagonist
that is rife with tension. Like The Passion of New Eve, The Magus primarily consists of
the unusual experiences of a bewildered protagonist attempting to make sense of
events that appear to be vitally important, essentially enigmatic, and eventually trans-
formative. Like Eve, Nicholas narrates his earlier experiences from an unspecified
future location, occasionally deriding his earlier attitudes and implying that, in the
years between the events of the novel and their telling, he has attained significant
insight into those events and their meaning. Yet Nicholas never provides these insights
to readers, nor does he explain his refusal to do so; instead, he chooses to describe the
events of what he learns to call “the godgame”—orchestrated by millionaire Maurice
Conchis on a remote Greek island—as he perceived them at the time. Barry Olshen
suggests that the evasiveness of Nicholas’s narration is inherent to the meaning of his
experiences (918); other critics have argued that Nicholas’s narrative choices instead
emphasize his unreliability (Walker 192). Yet both interpretations recognize that for
readers, Nicholas’s most salient insights are inaccessible, and his descriptions of the
godgame’s events are thus potentially misleading.
150 Mosaic 47/3 (September 2014)

Moreover, because readers are provided only the limited perspective of a charac-
ter repeatedly criticized by his older, wiser self, they are acutely aware that any imme-
diate interpretations offered by the protagonist are likely incorrect or irrelevant, but
their own insights are potentially even more amiss. In choosing to situate readers
alongside his earlier, experiencing self, Nicholas immerses readers in a vicarious expe-
rience of his participation in the godgame, thus encouraging their identification with
and empathy for his earlier self. Yet this narrative choice also traps readers within
Nicholas’s initial impressions and analyses, forcing them to perceive only what he per-
ceives, despite their knowledge that the narrating Nicholas perceives things differ-
ently. While the experiencing Nicholas seems earnest in his attempts to deconstruct
the events of the godgame in his limited, logical way, even he learns to distrust his rea-
soning as he begins to intuit the more complex emotional and psychological reso-
nances of its episodes. He thus becomes increasingly aware of his own interpretive
limitations in the face of Conchis’s stage management, just as readers are aware, from
the very beginning of the novel, that their perceptions are being manipulated by a
narrator who possesses more information than he chooses to share. While the nar-
rating Nicholas thus plays the role of Conchis, the experiencing Nicholas “mirrors us,
the actual readers, faced with his own narrative” (Walker 191). In this way, the narra-
tion of The Magus encourages readers to occupy the same experiential space as the
protagonist even as it simultaneously signals the limitations of that perspective.
Early in the novel, readers’ identification with Nicholas is likely to be especially
troubled, as he, like Eve, highlights the more repellant characteristics of his earlier self.
Beginning his story by describing his frustrations with English life, Nicholas immedi-
ately establishes his selfishness and inauthenticity. Though he claims that he “didn’t
collect conquests,” he describes in some detail his calculating approach to “sexual suc-
cess,” explaining, “I wasn’t ugly; and even more important, I had my loneliness, which,
as every cad knows, is a deadly weapon with women. My ‘technique’ was to make a
show of unpredictability, cynicism, and indifference. Then, like a conjurer with his
white rabbit, I produced the solitary heart” (23). This technique is less successful with
Alison, who “had a nose for emotional blackmail” (36). Terrified and perplexed by
their growing emotional intimacy, Nicholas misinterprets his attachment to Alison;
while at a museum, for example, he reports, “I suddenly had a feeling that we were one
body, one person, even there; that if she had disappeared it would have been as if I had
lost half of myself. A terrible deathlike feeling, which anyone less cerebral and self-
absorbed than I was then would have realized was simply love. I thought it was desire.
I drove her straight home and tore her clothes off ” (37). Persistently choosing to think
of Alison as the “stupid Australian slut” she calls herself (31), Nicholas celebrates his
 Brooke Lenz 151

escape from her when offered a teaching position on a small Greek island, despite her
obvious, even suicidal, distress: “The thing I felt most clearly, when the first corner
was turned, was that I had escaped; and hardly less clearly, but much more odiously,
that she loved me more than I loved her, and that consequently I had in some inde-
finable way won” (50). Such reflections, while emphasized by the narrating
Nicholas—a point Fowles himself made in response to critics’ disdain for his protag-
onist (Relf 126)—nevertheless are unlikely to evoke much sympathy from readers.
However, like Eve, Nicholas describes the bizarre events that subsequently unfold
with such intense detail and enthralling storytelling that readers come to vicariously
experience his mounting confusion and to occupy his state of mind. After he has left
England, Nicholas immerses readers in both the sights and sounds of Phraxos, the
Greek island to which he has come as a boarding school English teacher, and the psy-
chological complexity of his interactions with Conchis at Bourani, the isolated estate
where the godgame mainly occurs. Here Nicholas encounters mythical and historical
figures in what Conchis calls “metatheatrical” episodes notable for their vivid sensory
accompaniments (136-37, 144-46, 158-59, 185-88) and undergoes a mystical hyp-
notic experience he struggles to describe (242-45). But Nicholas is most absorbed by
Conchis’s life story, including graphic descriptions of the trenches of World War I
(115-34); a doomed relationship with a sadistic patron (179-93); a disturbing, per-
haps supernatural, experience in rural Norway (302-15); and Conchis’s encounters
with the Nazis in World War II (420-46). As Nicholas presents him, Conchis is an
expert storyteller and mesmerizing presence, and both the immediacy with which
Nicholas recounts his experiences and his frequently astute skepticism about those
experiences seduce readers into vicariously experiencing the godgame as it occurs.
Concurrently, the narrating Nicholas emphasizes his confusion, his intoxication,
and his willing suspension of disbelief during the godgame, and especially in his
involvement with the woman who is alternately called Lily and Julie. Though Nicholas
reports being repeatedly warned that things at Bourani are not what they seem, he
assumes that his developing relationship with Lily/Julie is more transparent, especially
in moments of sexual intimacy. When, for example, Nicholas arranges to meet Julie at
midnight and rushes into a passionate embrace, he explains, “in that time I thought I
finally knew her. She had abandoned all pretence, she was passionate, almost hungry”
(319), only to realize (and reveal to readers) a moment later that this is actually Julie’s
twin sister June. Only temporarily set back by this discovery, Nicholas quickly con-
cocts a new fantasy: “I saw a future where, all right, of course, I married Julie, but this
equally attractive and evidently rather different sister-in-law accompanied, if only
aesthetically, the marriage. With twins there must always be nuances, suggestions,
152 Mosaic 47/3 (September 2014)

blendings of identity, souls and bodies that became indistinguishable and reciprocally
haunting” (325). Coupled with such selfish imaginings are Nicholas’s increasingly
manipulative interactions with Alison, whom he avoids and then misleads, finally
coming to the conclusion, “I hated what I had done to her, but couldn’t do otherwise”
(284). Such revelations call attention to the disparity between the narrating Nicholas
and his earlier, less enlightened self, disrupting readers’ developing sense of shared sit-
uation with the experiencing Nicholas as he navigates the godgame.
However, whenever such moments emerge, Nicholas reveals new twists in the
godgame that effectively thrust readers back into the confusion of the experience, just
as the experiencing Nicholas is repeatedly bewildered whenever he begins to think he
has unraveled the godgame’s mysteries. Such perpetual uncertainty is epitomized in
the revelation of Alison’s supposed suicide, which Nicholas learns of just after reading
a letter from Lily/Julie that promises an impending end to the godgame. In this shock-
ing moment, Nicholas is particularly sympathetic as he reflects on his own culpability
in Alison’s misery: “And a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious self-
ishness, settled on me. All those bitter home truths she had flung at me, right from the
beginning [. . .] and still loved me; was so blind that she still loved me. [. . .] In a way
her death was the final act of blackmail; but the blackmailed should feel innocent, and
I felt guilty” (406). Yet even this sense of guilt dissipates with alarming rapidity, so that
Nicholas is able to consider confessing the whole affair to Lily/Julie, “but at the right
time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked
looked likely to be high” (408). Yet his insensitivity and selfishness are rewarded by
another twist in the godgame, when Nicholas, after finally consummating his relation-
ship with Lily/Julie, is immediately kidnapped and drugged, awakening to explanations
that suggest everything he experienced on Phraxos was contrived, including his job
and all his correspondence. What is most sinister in this revelation, he thinks, is the
possibility that Alison’s suicide might also have been contrived: “They were trying to
drive me mad, to brainwash me in some astounding way. But I clung to reality. I clung,
too, to something in Alison [. . .] An eternal inability to be so cruel. And the tears [. . .]
were not only tears for her, but also tears of rage at Conchis and Lily; at the certainty
that they knew she was dead and were using this new doubt, this torturing possibility
that could not be a possibility, to rack me” (501). Faced with such shocking develop-
ments and deprived of any information about the godgame beyond what Nicholas has
provided, readers are constrained in the range of conclusions they might come to, just
as the experiencing Nicholas simply cannot know whether Alison is alive or dead.
Such feelings intensify as Nicholas is subjected to the final episode of the
godgame, a mock trial in which his character flaws are publicly analyzed and a “dis-
 Brooke Lenz 153

intoxication” during which he is forced to watch Lily/Julie make love to another man
(496-541). Shortly thereafter, Nicholas learns that Alison is indeed alive, and thus
implicated in the godgame, but that he cannot see her; “I was on probation,” he notes,
“but no one gave me any real indication of what I was meant to be proving” (617).
The vivid details of these events and the agonizing interval that Nicholas endures after
returning to England are gripping, and Nicholas’s confusion and pain throughout are
palpable. Whatever reactions individual readers have to Nicholas’s personality or
behaviour, the narrative strategies that immerse them in this vicarious experience of
the godgame are likely to produce sympathy for Nicholas’s most basic objection: “It
was the enormity of the abuse that bewildered me [. . .] that they could crash through
law, through my job, through respect for the dead, through everything that made the
world customary and habitable and orientated” (503).
However, while readers might sympathize with Nicholas’s suffering, they are also
likely to notice the extent to which Nicholas changes for the better as a result of the
godgame. Though Nicholas rejects Alison as vulgar and cheap while enamored with
Julie, though he fantasizes about “beating her black and blue” after learning of her
duplicity in allowing him to believe that she committed suicide, by the end of the
novel Nicholas can recognize his own brutal treatment of Alison and the fact that she
is indeed “not a person whose emotional honesty needed to be put to the test” (639).
By contrast, he is able to recognize, as he explains, that “all my life I had tried to turn
life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had acted as if a third person was watch-
ing and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behavior—a god like a novel-
ist [. . .] because of it I had always been incapable of acting freely” (549). Now
cognizant of the emptiness of such performativity, Nicholas is also able to articulate
to Conchis’s collaborator Lily de Seitas his dawning sense that the godgame “allows
the duds like me freedom to become a little less imperfect” (638). Though not exactly
enlightened, Nicholas thus emerges from the godgame as a more authentic, less arro-
gant, and far more emotionally honest individual. Such improvements are demon-
strated in Nicholas’s interactions with Kemp, Jojo, Mitford, and Briggs, all of whom
help him to understand how he is perceived by others and how to make choices that,
in the words of Lily de Seitas, do not “inflict unnecessary pain” (652).
Moreover, Nicholas begins to understand in the novel’s final chapters that this
directive “was all bound up with Alison, with choosing Alison, and having to go on
choosing her every day” (652). This crucial realization suggests that as a result of the
godgame, Nicholas learns to recognize the destructive impact of his inauthentic and
manipulative behaviour and strive for what Paul H. Lorenz describes as a “balance
between male and female principles, between the carnal and the spiritual, between the
154 Mosaic 47/3 (September 2014)

dialectical unreality of words and the physical actuality of the things they signify”
(76). Such a balance is necessary, Nicholas realizes, if he is to reunite with Alison, and
this realization prompts the kind of motivational change May suggests “occurs due to
some felt compulsion to act on what one already understands.” “When external sanc-
tions are threatened,” May continues, “a person comes to feel motivated to change
behavior in a deeper sense than occurs when one merely believes that one should
change” (346, emph. May’s). Morally motivated by the thought of losing Alison per-
manently because of his own shortcomings, Nicholas experiences those “emotions,
such as shame and guilt as well as compassion and caring” that May suggests are the
result of a progressive male standpoint (347).
Yet the success of the godgame in altering Nicholas’s attitudes and behaviour is
troubled by the novel’s ending. The final chapter begins with comments from a new
narrative voice, who suggests that “the smallest hope, a bare continuing to exist, is
enough for the antihero’s future,” and who insists that after the final episode, “what
happened in the following years shall be silence; another mystery” (675). This passage
leads to the long-awaited reunion with Alison, during which Nicholas, believing that
her behaviour is scripted, savagely slaps Alison across the face and then immediately
realizes that the godgame has ended. The unidentified narrator returns, commenting,
“She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this
frozen present tense. All waits, suspended” (667), and then the novel ends with the
lines: “‘Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet’ (Tomorrow may he
love who has never loved, she who has loved may she love again tomorrow)” (Lorenz
85). Though Fowles intended this ending to be read optimistically (Relf 126), critics
have not always been convinced that Nicholas has indeed been reformed, some even
arguing that “he is fundamentally the same person at the end of the experience that he
was at the beginning: isolated, selfish, indecisive, lacking moral or spiritual commit-
ment” (Novak 76). While most critics are more generous, the ambiguity of the novel’s
ending and the mysteriousness maintained by both the narrating Nicholas and the
intrusive authorial voice admit doubt into readers’ perception of his transformation.

he ending of The Passion of New Eve is similarly puzzling. The final chapter of the
T novel begins with the cryptic comment, “We start from our conclusions,” and ends
with the even more ambiguous lines, “The vengeance of the sex is love. Ocean, ocean,
mother of mysteries, bear me to the place of birth” (191), as Eve casts off the coast of
California in a skiff. Pregnant and with limited provisions, Eve seems destined to die,
yet she apparently survives to tell her story and to arrive at the “place of birth.”
“Perhaps,” Ricarda Schmidt has speculated, “the contradictions and uncertainties of
 Brooke Lenz 155

this ending point to the fact that [. . .] the course of the heroine’s future journey can-
not yet be foretold, since new symbols [. . .] have yet to be created on a social level”
(66). While cognizant of the transformation Eve(lyn) has undergone and the positive
understanding of that transformation that Eve has come to embrace (Rogan 454), this
interpretation also emphasizes the uniqueness and the precariousness of Eve’s condi-
tion. For both The Magus and The Passion of New Eve, then, the strangely distanced
final supplications and the fact that the narrators have shared their stories at all imply
positive, hopeful resolutions, indicative of the protagonists’ improved and sustained
changes in attitude and behaviour. But these resolutions are not certain.
How, then, might such ambiguous endings affect those readers who have
engaged deeply with these protagonists’ experiences? Both Eve(lyn) and Nicholas
achieve progressive male standpoints that are radically different from their earlier,
culturally conditioned attitudes, and both seek to sustain those changes as a way of
pursuing more authentic, healthy relationships. Though these transformations are
plausible within the context of the novels, whether they can be sustained by the char-
acters is unclear, suggesting the precariousness of these standpoints. Yet this indeter-
minacy is intentional, and serves the didactic purposes of Carter and Fowles just as
effectively as the immersive narrative techniques employed earlier in each novel.
While the protagonists’ stories are written to encourage readers’ experience-taking,
the novels’ endings are written to discourage such “experiential merging” with the
protagonists, instead emphasizing the artifice of fictional texts, distancing readers
from the characters’ internal reactions, and thus simulating the endings of the radical
projects Eve(lyn) and Nicholas have undergone. As both narrators realize, their trans-
formations have occurred as a result of heuristic exercises that have emphasized the
extent to which their lives are encumbered by the roles they play and the roles they
impose on others. By absconding, both Mother and Conchis indicate that the games
have ended, and that Eve(lyn) and Nicholas must now live authentically, beyond the
scripts, both planned and improvised, that accompanied their earlier experiences. In
ending their stories ambiguously, Eve(lyn) and Nicholas similarly shift the emphasis
off of themselves and onto readers, who must “rethink society’s predominant
mythologies” (Ferreira 299) and recognize the problematic master narratives “which
can only be removed from Western culture through the process of individuals [. . .]
discovering within themselves the freedom to act in ways which are not dictated by
the outmoded social structures of the culture they were born into” (Lorenz 69). In this
process, readers are spared the trauma of transformation through direct experience,
but are nevertheless lured into an imaginative replication of another’s experience as
that individual is plausibly and radically, but precariously, transformed. By carefully
156 Mosaic 47/3 (September 2014)

nurturing and then intentionally disrupting this kind of experience-taking, the nar-
rators and their authors trust that readers will come to interrogate the social roles that
structure not only the characters’ but their own experiences.

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BROOKE LENZ is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, where
she specializes in contemporary literature in English and women’s literature. She is the author of
John Fowles: Visionary and Voyeur. Her current work considers the intersections between narrative
strategies and standpoint theory.