John Fowles, Oscar Wilde, and the Conspiracy of Fiction

Abstract: John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus , in which a mysterious and far-reaching "godgame" subjects the novel's protagonist to a series of deceptions that toy with his desires and punish his vanity, is a prime example of what one could call the "conspiratorial style" in fiction. Buried within the unfolding plot of Fowles's novel seem to be telling references to another text about the dangerous appeal of elaborate but unsubstantiated theories, Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," a story about one man's fatal obsession over discovering the true identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets. The Magus parallels Wilde's cautionary tale not only in its focus on the evocative power of the artistic muse but also in how it explores the distorting effects of desire and the lure of solving what may well be unsolvable.