Re-reading John Fowles’s The Magus from the Greek Culture Perspective

When John Keats wrote his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” he dedicated it not to the Greek object of art but to everything that it represented through the immortalized images and values that the urn preserved and mysteriously concealed. Many years later, another English writer, this time a post-modernist one, got inveigled into the Circe-like mirage of Greece. While Keats foregrounded the classic aspects of Greek specificity and art, Fowles repainted a wild and contradictory Greece, powerful and seducing. Through its ancient culture, this image inherits the paradigm of the contemporary world, the Dionysian paradigm. Thus post-modernist Fowles rediscovers Greece different from the typical perspective, a fascinating and deceiving mermaid to whom the ode is dedicated. The focus of this study is on how Greece seduced the Fowlesian literary creations and how much its culture and specificity influenced John Fowles. This interest gets substantialized in by revealing the Greek aspects that appear in the novel The Magus and the way they create new suggestive layers of the Fowlesian text.