‘I make a new God’: Maurice Conchis and (traces of) G.I. Gurdjieff in John Fowles’s The Magus (1965)

Abstract

The article speculatively compares the fictional Maurice Conchis at Bourani in 1953 in John Fowles’ The Magus (1965) with the historical G.I. Gurdjieff at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau-Avon in 1922-1924 based in a combination of source analysis, functional comparison and cultural contextualisation. I examine the evidence for Fowles’ interest in ‘esoteric’ material in his published diaries during the long period in which he wrote and re-wrote The Magus. I argue a case for using the original 1965 rather than the revised 1977 version of The Magus because these interests are clearer in the original text and closer to the literary and cultural context of its production in the long 1950s. This is the period in which the first publications by and about G.I. Gurdjieff became available in public libraries and were discussed by broadsheet literary editors and I argue that Fowles – a keen reader of Jung with interests in telepathy and the Tarot - at minimum knew ‘of’ Gurdjieff. I compare the presenting ‘supernaturalism’ of the original version of The Magus with Fowles’s later rationalist ‘revisionism’ and I also consider the novel’s relationship with the philosophy of The Aristos (1964). Through a comparison of the biographies and pedagogies of Conchis and Gurdjieff I argue that The Magus shows Fowles’s ambivalence about the scope of rationalism and his continuing attraction to enigma and mystery. I conclude that Fowles as author, his fictional creation Conchis, and the historical Gurdjieff as comparand, share the status of a modern magus but are legitimated by different sources of authority: ‘man’ and ‘god’.