Marina MacKay, Washington University in St Louis
All fiction for me is a kind of magic and trickery--a confidence trick, trying to make people believe something is true that isn't.[1]
Sir Angus Wilson, novelist, critic, journalist, playwright, and professor, has always been seen as that very English figure: the all-round man of letters. In his novels of the fifties and sixties he minutely dissected the moral and psychological crises of the English middle classes, so his early seventies adventure in the global, postmodern, postcolonial novel was, to say the least, unexpected. Although knighted for his services to literature, Wilson is much less read than he once was, and the decline of his reputation may be dated from the publication of this seventh novel, As if by Magic (1972).[2] Taking English liberalism into global contexts, Wilson shows how postcolonial English sensibilities have colluded with neocolonial exploitation and economic Realpolitik.
The novel has two parallel narratives and two heroes. One narrative strand follows Alexandra, a graduate of a new university who, finding herself pregnant, pursues the hippie trail to Goa in the late sixties, along with her two partners, working-class Ned and nouveau riche Rodrigo. In the second strand, Alexandra's gay godfather, the plant geneticist Hamo Langmuir, travels around Asia to witness the effects of his experiment, the miracle-yield rice "Magic." Aside from these concerns of personal and professional development, we are told by the subheadings that Alexandra and Hamo are on other missions: Alexandra is "in search of a hero," Hamo in search of "the perfect youth." Partaking as it does of the sexual freedoms of the sixties, witnessed at first hand by Wilson while a professor at the radical University of East Anglia, the novel was never going to be free from risk for a novelist of middlebrow seriousness in his late middle age.
The novel, however, formally enacts this freedom, dissolving the omniscient third-person narration of Wilson's early fiction into a series of pastiches: Dickens, de Sade, Forster, the Old Testament, "Angry" realism, and so on. It is tempting indeed to describe this as a postmodern novel, except that As if by Magic ridicules jargonistic critical approaches, caricaturing literary smugness as itself a brand of colonization of art. When the heiress Alexandra is asked to finance an avant-garde film, we are told that "she had no idea what a meta-movie might be, but if it had anything to do with meta-novels then she didn't wish to have anything to do with it."[3] Here, the narrative seems to have itself become metafictional, but while "metafiction" has some critical currency, "meta-novel" is a neologism; it only sounds like a critical term, such as might be applied, for example, to the work of Christine Brooke-Rose (with whom Wilson worked at the wartime code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley Park) or B. S. Johnson, who, ironically, had dismissed Wilson as a social realist: "I'm sure social historians in the future will look to Angus Wilson … and say, 'Yes, that's what it must have been like to live then.'"[4] The trap for the postmodern reader is clear: the global, narratively unstable As if by Magic may allude to "meta-novels" and allow its audience to congratulate themselves on their recognition of a self-referential device, only to realize that they are being sent up along with Alexandra's pretentious friends.
Alexandra's allusion to the "meta-novel" links her to her mother, Zoe, who represents overtly the middlebrow, Sunday-supplement sector of Wilson's original readership, and demonstrates their misguided intellectual complacency. She embarrasses Alexandra--and the reader--when she attempts to engage with her daughter's interests: "'But I thought character in the novel had been dissolved.' 'Oh, Mama, please!' 'Yes, I know, darling, not in neo-trad and all that …'" (62). Shame at Zoe's desire to parade her limited knowledge is evident in Alexandra's attempt to silence her, but Alexandra's desire to distance herself from her mother is defeated by their shared social class, explicit in their forms of address--Alexandra's "Mama" is matched by Zoe's "darling." Alexandra is nevertheless correct to suspect that her mother will betray her ignorance; her "and all that" gives the lie to her appearance of knowledge, as indeed does her allusion to "neo-trad," which, like the "meta-novel," is sheer invention. The joke is against both the middlebrow parroting of nonsensical neologisms and the highbrow, academic recognition of a self-referential device, Wilson as "neo-trad." Like "meta-novel," "neo-trad" almost slips through the critical net because, as Rodrigo says in another context, "it does sound wonderfully like a quote, doesn't it?" (84).
Rodrigo says this when he discusses the kind of literature for which the epithet "neo-trad" might be created. "[M]ore real than the Angries" (84), Alexandra's father, author of Above his Station, alludes to and exploits the formula of "Amis or Wain or Braine or Osborne": "It didn't sell because it didn't flatter the middle-class book buyers by sufficiently distancing them from real working people--in the Midlands, or in the North, or in some other region of absurd accents, or among freak out-of-work actors with sweet stalls. In fact, among anybody they could patronise. It was just about working people in the South--right where they live" (30). Perry attacks the taste for so-called realism as a freak-show mentality. Middle-class taste operates as a kind of appropriation. Perry is himself a character who has walked in from an "angry" novel. His marriage to Zoe, "above his station," replicates the hypergamous aspirations of the hero of a 1960s British novel; he has clearly married "above his station," and the resulting frustration is infused with generically predictable misogyny: "All his fury against Zoe welled up in him and, mingled with it, a delicious vision of this girl's (for he still must call her so) thighs and buttocks stripped naked.… If the little bitch's body should come between him and a weekend's solid writing, he'd have her fired the following week. He registered his thought with a swaggering gesture, and so was able to accept it" (31). The tawdry sexual aggression is a sublimation of his fury at his wife's emasculating wealth, and Perry comes to accept this machismo by naturalizing it with a "swaggering gesture," in other words, by making it appear disingenuous. He is conforming to type; his misogynistic violence links him with the angriest of angry young men, even while he demonstrates the performative sense of "Lucky" Jim Dixon.
His fiction is a straight transcription of his reality into a novel; and Perry's "inner life" is only conveyed through the scenes between working-class Jack and moneyed Honey. Art and life to him are naively linked, and the question of interpretation a matter of making the reader "see" a predetermined truth, a totaling vision that the dissolved, unstable As if by Magic rejects. Ironically, it is to a totalizing interpretative appropriation that Perry owes his eventual success: "Honey's marriage has been taken as a sort of symbol of the fruitlessness of the sixties" (393).
This politicization of the personal--so characteristic of the era's consciousness-raising ethos--is, however, linked to an irresponsible liberalism. Alexandra expects her adolescent sexual revolution to protect her from the consequences of her actions: "our game seemed so important that it made me feel we were different" (103). This "game" involves the threesome assuming roles from their favorite reading, particularly Women in Love and The Lord of the Rings, which Rodrigo describes as "a kind of play on a grand scale" (79). The scale of this play is so great that it encroaches on Alexandra's reality and surpasses it; the game becomes greater than its "real" consequences. What starts as "a bit of camping up" (79) turns into a breakdown that is itself described as "like a play" (161). The unselfconscious use of literature as magic has turned reality into a theater, a transformation perpetuated by literacy's liberal currency: "We're not science students or engineers" (79). This unqualified value makes Alexandra feel herself "different" and magically exempt from the physical, social, and moral consequences of her actions.
As well as its elitist, individualistic results, sexual magic will, Alexandra believes, bring a new world, and freedom from what Ned calls "all the usual bourgeois crap" (102): "The whole of their tripling … was to show that Birkin need not have failed, that Lawrence was wrong, that the old hard lines of man/woman could be dissolved into man/woman/man or into every combination of love you could think of" (99-100). This "magic" is flawed on the microcosmic level, because Alexandra inevitably falls pregnant, and, as a wider program, is as bourgeois as the existing paradigm: "the world's changed by changing the power groups. Fucking in threes is quite irrelevant," her uncle Leslie tells her (114). Leslie's echoing of Ned's phrase "bourgeois crap" emphasizes the young people's involvement in the system they are trying to subvert, while the literary precedents cited highlight the establishment nature of the rebellion, and that such a rebellion is, in fact, passé. When he goes on to describe their unconventional tripling as "Bloomsbury group nonsense," Leslie argues that their behavior represents a solipsistic, snobbish kind of liberal humanism, and, ascribing this to Zoe, he again links Alexandra to her foolish, middlebrow mother. Youthful idealism is not the basis for a revolution, but only a phase in individual consciousness--Alexandra's ambitions merely represent the privileged leisure of middle-class adolescents, and class is shown to be inescapable.
When he contrasts history and literature--power groups versus Bloomsbury group--Leslie is ironically implicated in the same recycling of culture because he inadvertently inverts the famous Aristotelian dichotomy. For Leslie, history is more valuable than poetry, but his criterion for establishing meaning is the ascendancy of implicitly economic power groups. But the novel also discredits this system of values, for, even if the magic fails, that which replaces it finds unfortunate spokespeople. When Alexandra abandons her search for an effective magic, her mother tells her that "there is this feeling that the sixties have been rather disastrous, and that we're glad to turn our back on them" (391). The vagueness of Zoe's "feeling" and general "we" suggests again her inane adherence to Zeitgeist cultural phenomena. Her reasoning is entirely fatuous: "I think that's what made Leslie decide to go all out for money. He felt that all his ideals about teaching were a lot of nonsense, or so he told me. I mean that really a great number of them are unteachable. And that anyway there are other ways of living than the narrow literate ones we've tried to impose" (391). Zoe confusedly pays lip service to the liberal distaste for imposed standards, but perpetrates the liberal heresy of describing people as "unteachable." Ideals are replaced by the unambiguous decision "to go all out for money." Literature's failure to provide a magic solution is ironically linked to the loss of Leslie's ideals; the teaching of history, so much more "realistic" than literature, has equally lost its magic.
More incongruous than the juxtaposition of literature and history is that of the humanities and the sciences: Alexandra's sense of literature's inadequacy is matched by the failure of Hamo's genetic modification programs. His hybrid "Magic" has solved one set of starvation problems, only to create a new dispossessed from the "hopeless lands" (232), where Magic is useless. A "perfectionist in everything" (17), Hamo's professional ambition mirrors his specificity of sexual predilection; in a travesty of scientific detachment, each of his lovers must be "A perfection among the few optimum varieties" (21): "Who knew what unknown, what fruitful cultivars he might find there in that primitive peasant economy? Beauty, at any rate, the perfect form, where religion, diet, climate, language were all impenetrably alien, would stand alone, anonymous, unspoiled by muddying claims of human intimacy" (75). The idea of penetration where all else is "impenetrable" is represented by a fastidious repulsion from human commitment, and the equivalence between Hamo's sexual preferences and his scientific method is cast back at him by the disgusted, disgusting Jonkheer: "I suggest that instead of insulting your host by buggering his servants, you look for your leavings in the slums of the cities of Asia. Luckily your very valuable scientific rationalization of our local agriculture has made sure that the bazaars and public places are filled with the scum overflowing from the waters of hopeless paddy fields" (180).
The notion of the "hopeless" lands comes to haunt Hamo on his world tour, and his old categories are parroted just as his conscience seems to awaken; hopeless lands raise not scientific problems but "social questions" (232). Hamo's great visions of problem-solving magic are complicated by his increasing awareness of "a high, distant overtone of perpetual, desperate woe. Could it be the natural noise of the world, as he began to fancy?" (222).
The conversion from disinterested scientist to compassionate campaigner is an unlikely transformation, but Hamo does not, in fact, change; the novel does not optimistically evidence the humanistic sympathy of the divine idiot, but instead demonstrates the impossibility of self-knowledge and the ever-present danger of self-delusion. Those around Hamo mistakenly accept his new engagement with human problems, and his Dickensian sidekick complains about his "bloody conscience" (302). He appears to be linking himself with the people dispossessed by his work; he is, as they are, in the "sad class" of the "hopeless," but he questions not himself, nor even his science, but only the direction his science has taken. Hamo's initial feelings towards his creation are those of a deity, the "giant rice god, bearer of fertility" (355) that he becomes in the Indian peasant mind, in an ironic linking of progressive science and primitive superstition: "Hamo saw it all and it was very good" (286). This travesty of Old Testament language exploits the tired cliché of the geneticist "playing God" in a very literal way, because Hamo not only appropriates the role of creator, but the style is also playfully parodic.
The comparative banality of Hamo's achievement, expressed in the repetition of tedious agricultural detail, highlights the ridiculousness of his aspirations, just as it reduces science itself to the level of superstition. Despite Hamo's apparent conversion the metaphor remains the same: "At least, if by his unconsidered, self-indulgent blabbing to the Press he had misled these poor men into believing that he could help, he must have the courage to go there and show them the god that had failed" (360). Hamo still sees himself as a superhuman presence; even his quixotic appearance before the mob is motivated by egocentricity. The reference to a deity, however, is not theological--although the Dostoevskyan divine idiot is obviously a Christ-like figure--but political; "the god that failed" famously describes the demise of Communism. The personal, individual conscience, represented as religious, is clearly being absorbed into a wider, more dubious, ideological framework. Thelma, the American, sees immediately the suspect nature of Hamo's mission. To her, it even sounds "crypto-fascist" (374). She undermines Hamo's new self-image of friend to the common man, substituting it with an analogy from the other end of the political spectrum; she perceives him to be covertly fascist in his totalitarianism. The apparent transformation has proved illusory.
The impossibility of change is further underlined by Hamo's fortuitous meeting with Alexandra in Goa, where he is momentarily tempted by her "wonderful meagre street urchin's body" (371). In his dying moments, he recognizes that such a change of sexual identification would be impossible: "He had only time to think, it would never have done, women's bodies suck you in, I need the hard resistance of a youth. And he was gone" (377). This ending appears to suggest a final freedom from self-deception. Hamo recognizes that a woman could never be his object choice. However, this essentialism is undermined by the novel's emphasis on Alexandra's androgyny: Hamo fears not Alexandra's body but her emotional engagement; he loves her as a goddaughter already, and further intimacy would require the involvement with human beings that he has hitherto avoided. Hamo's death is thus ambiguous. While it refuses to close down the possibility of realigning sexual orientation, it entirely negates the possibility of moral development.
The self-deceptions that accompany Hamo's flash of intuition in extremis lend the final irony to Alexandra's parting gift of binoculars, which she whimsically imbues with the allegorical significance of Frodo's ring: "you'll be able to see things more clearly wherever you go" (89). Ironically, the glasses contribute to the death of a boy to whom Hamo has given them in an attempt to salve his beleaguered conscience. Equally ironic is Alexandra's talk of clear vision when her own worldview is a mere collage of all her favorite reading. She finally tires of this second-handedness: "And for what she read, how much for all her two one in English, did she care? Ten, twenty books, and those all in the English tradition. Her life was running away, being in absurd plots like this Swami's one, and in Oliver. But there must be some centre more than the chance muddle of people" (383). While this seems a renunciation of literature, the impact of fiction covertly finds expression in Alexandra's search for "some centre"; she hopes in life for the impossible coherence of fiction. A similar paradox emerges in her realization that "A story is a story is a story, even a good one" (386), which, expressed in a reworking of Gertrude Stein's famous tautology, contradicts her apparent rejection of literature. But she is not the only character in the novel to view their "reality" through literature's magic glasses: the novel, indeed, opens with the superimposition of Bleak House over contemporary reality: "Gas lighting, he found himself thinking, would have been more appropriate. The Church Hall. The Institute. Good Faces seeking earnestly as the Wonders of the Great World Around Us, God's purpose clear whether in desert or jungle, flickered for a moment and then clicked into place on the white-sheet screen.… To sentimentalize about fog when the one thing, above all, that the Church today was doing, leading indeed, was in the dispersal of fog in racial questions, in the fight against poverty and hunger and bad housing!" (9).
Literacy allows the Vicar to convert the scene of Ned and Alexandra's mime into a Victorian representation of amazed parishioners watching the world before them, their imagined astonishment matching the bafflement of the present-day audience. Furthermore, it is literacy which he nostalgically valorizes in an archetypally liberal manner, the middle-class sentimentality of which is shown by Perry's disparaging allusion to the "Hoggart sacred hotpot" (47). The "laboriously … lovingly" executed search for meaning is being negated by Ned's mime because "meaning is secondary" (19), and the Vicar, trapped in the Forsterian dichotomy of meaning and muddle, regards the battle for "meaning" as won; muddle only arises out of social questions, "poverty and hunger and bad housing." He makes a division between the social and the aesthetic, an essentially liberal dichotomy that the novel rejects: there is no aesthetic position in the novel that is not also ideological. Ned may deny meanings, but the content, battery hens, is clearly political. To Alexandra, the mime is only "a question of structures" (38), but structures without content are shown by the novel to be impossible.
If form and content coincide, the obvious question is what content there is in this novel's freewheeling structure. Wilson described it as "a farcical horror novel," suggesting a significant disunity between the novel's farcical style and its horrific content.[5] One instance of horror being played for laughs is the death of the Indian boy to whom Hamo gives the binoculars. The boy uses them to watch the naked hippies on the beach, where, ironically, Elinor is performing her spiritual exercises in an attempt to transcend the body: "Soon a man would come and enter her. Meanwhile she breathed heavily with desire, her limbs, her arms, her legs moved shamelessly with lustful greed. Her eyes were closed against her own ravishing … Elinor, advanced in her prayana, was called from the crashing of the body as it hit the rocks" (349-50). The comic misunderstandings achieve an effect other than the ironic qualification of good intentions that James Gindin suggests.[6] Rather, Wilson is following an established camp tradition: Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson (1911) uses a mass suicide to travesty the conventions of courtly love, while Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate (1954) attributes the death of a newborn baby to a glimpse of its father. This purposely tasteless comedy is a direct affront to middle-class mores, represented in Mitford's novel by the Boreleys, in Zuleika Dobson by the college establishment, and in Wilson's novel by Alexandra's mother. The "farcical horror novel" is clearly not a new one, and here represents a further dig at Wilson's own readership.
Hamo's pederastic travelogue is like Humbert Humbert's tour of America with Lolita in tow. If Charlotte Haze stands for the bourgeois values against which Humbert's illegal, parodically courtly affair is defined, she is another Boreley, whose middlebrow reading habits match those of Alexandra's mother. Against the weak sentimentality of middle-class love is pitted the sophisticated, worldly, and wordy specificity of Humbert's desires: "hip girth, twenty-nine inches; thigh girth (just below the gluteal sulcus) seventeen; calf girth and neck circumference, eleven; chest circumference, twenty-seven; upper arm girth, eight; waist, twenty-three; stature, fifty-seven inches; weight, seventy-eight pounds; figure, linear; intelligence quotient, 121; veriform appendix present, thank God."[7] Hamo, likewise, is on a quest for quasi-clinical perfection, and the statistics of his "Fairest Youth" are repeated until they become a joke: "Chest 30, hips 35. The measurements and lineaments of Hamo's ideal are sufficiently well known" (177).
Nonetheless, the analogy with Nabokov highlights this novel's departure from the specifically English concerns of Wilson's earlier fiction. Just as Lolita may be sanitized by an allegorical reading, in As if by Magic, the responsibilities of the privileged to the deprived, the West to the East, are represented by Hamo's attempts to seduce the natives without any emotional cost.[8] The internationally renowned plant geneticist bears these responsibilities professionally, as well as personally, while, microcosmically, Alexandra's hippie opt-out ironically implicates her in the same colonial problematic as her forebears. When her fellow communards steal goats belonging to native Moroccans, the nonsense rhetoric of the alternative lifestyle is invoked. The hippies' new world can exist only at the expense of less "civilised" peoples, whose cultures their liberated behavior insults. The "Kingdom of Greed" is scarcely an appropriate epithet for the peasants whose livelihood has been lost, and "Robin Hoods" to describe the thieves is no more accurate.
Although it aspires to the status of a new way of living, Alexandra's system is trapped in old models of East/West relations and the time-honored tradition of English misfits making good in the "colonies" at the expense of indigenous populations. The narrative makes clear the parallels between old and new imperialism, and attacks the languages that the new lifestyle creates in order to legitimize its project; the meaningless jargon of "life energies" is juxtaposed with the banal, brutal "transporting, killing and skinning" of the goats. The Kingdoms of Love and Greed bear no relation to the actions of white intruders depriving peasants of their livelihoods, and the borrowing of quasi-Christian terminology demonstrates their conceptual reliance on past models, and has ironic echoes of missionary colonization.
The derivative nature of the hippie project is shown up by Rodrigo, whose own unknowing commitment to old-style imperialism is evident when Alexandra likens him to characters "on tele--Somerset Maugham or Noel Coward" (198). Rodrigo, however, is able to undermine the contemporary "sacred books" of the self-seeking new colonists: "when a long thin Vercingetorix-whiskered English wandering bird squatted to crap within Alexandra's range as he continued the saga of his migrations, Rodrigo explained with mock admiration, 'How splendidly you nail the old Pauline lie that people neither shit nor piss nor fuck'" (197). Despite the correlation between Rodrigo's colonial mindset and that which he mocks, he shows the grotesquerie of the new catchphrases by liberalizing them.
Alexandra's experience of the interaction between East and West is a smaller-scale version of Hamo's travels. His project is undermined not only by unforeseen countereffects, but by its ideological appropriation. An American senator is quick to exploit the rhetorical possibilities of Hamo's failure as an example of the futility of philanthropy toward the Asian, who won't be helped and who, in any case, "has his own magic … does he need ours?" (130). Like Zoe's claim that Leslie gave up teaching because it dictated a single lifestyle, the Senator's speech criticizes the imposition of projects that replace native beliefs, but these "primitive" systems are only validated by reference to "great thinkers … of the West" (130). Furthermore, the Senator's apparent liberalism is compromised by its association with a right-wing American "ethic" that is "individualistic, acquisitive, aggressive and prudential" (130), an ideology that exploits liberalism as a means of evading the responsibilities of privileged nations. Giving an "imaginary show of protest," the Senator underscores the rhetorical nature of liberalism; it is a persuasive device rather than a freestanding ideological position. Despite the questionable morality of imposing Western science on different cultures, it is clear that a show of liberalism, when aligned to the world of Realpolitik, lends itself to unambiguously bad faith
Colonialism is not only represented by the agricultural projects, but is also characterized as sexual exploitation. The Jonkheer's party brings together the major colonial powers, England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, and represents them as "Uncles," in their phony paternalist relationships with pubescent boys, on the pretext that this exploitation/patronage will improve their prospects, turning them into "engineers, doctors, ad men, even parsons" (182). The connection between the apparently gratuitous horror of the episode and the closing of the British Empire is made as Hamo travels down to the party with another Brit and his Javan "hamper": "Hamo had been too conscious of the hamper behind, who, awakened from a healthy boyish, if faintly dribbling slumber, was now tickling the back of his driver-uncle's neck with a peacock feather. To a historian of English culture this combination of footer shorts and peacocks--emblems of the two rival factions of the Edwardian puerile muse--might have given erudite delight. It had passed Hamo by" (176).
This pedophiliac unpleasantness is clearly being linked to the British Empire, and sets up an uneasy aestheticization of the scene with which the reader is invited to identify, since the narrator alerts us to the scene's symbolic content. One implication of this is that moral censure would be redundant since our own culture, in the narrow artistic sense as well as the historical, rests on the same infantilizing and simultaneously exploitative impulses. The episode expresses the new colonialism as a sexual, male impulse, represented not only by the allusion to homosocial Edwardianism but by the childish double-entendres with which the European hosts conflate the political, the economic, and the prurient: "Our aims are simple. We offer Asia expansion and, more gentle than our ancestors, peaceful penetration" (173). This professed separation of the louche, indulgent present and the aggression of the colonial past is belied by allusions to Marquis de Sade's One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. Lacey describes their destination to Hamo: "But anyhow the place is like a bloody fortress. And it gets cut off by floods from time to time. Not regular monsoon time either, some tidal freak of the river. One hundred and twenty days of it last time, I believe" (175). Later, Hamo worries about "the Jonkheer's fertile ferocity at the end of another one hundred and twenty days" (176).
The one hundred and twenty days of freak weather comically plays with the creation of atmosphere, the emphasis being on an ominous "unnaturalness" of the environment. The "natural" is, however, an ambiguous value because the hero is a geneticist and thus "against" nature. Equivalence is drawn between Hamo's professional agenda and the gruesome designs of the uncles, the implication being that crop modification, "progress," is a kind of statutory rape. These allusions turn the episode into farce, denying the possible realism of Hamo's earlier sexual conquests, and yet they simultaneously underline the horrific implications of 1960s decadence and Alexandra and Hamo's liberated quests. Furthermore, the references to Sodom place a time limit on this kind of pleasure, relating the sixties to a kind of dangerous decadence, and at the same time extending this analogy to Britain's colonial past.
The episode's potentially farcical elements are developed in Hamo's next fruitless attempt at sexual conquest when he masquerades as Doctor Malcolm in a bid to seduce a houseboy. Hamo finds that he can create a convincing character with his impersonation of "Doctor Malcolm, Secretary and Representative of the London University Examination Board" (259). In this section the narrative voice changes from third-person reportage to a more indirect style, a transition which enhances the comic immediacy of the scene by inviting identification with Hamo and his improvisations by effacing the distinctions between Hamo's rapid thoughts and the pompously expressed equivocations of "Doctor Malcolm" (cf. 259-60). Hamo goes on successfully to mimic what he thinks the "real" Doctor Malcolm might be, but the impersonated man is now only "the other Doctor Malcolm"; Hamo's version is equally valid. Meanwhile Hamo has created a composite of his own "indispensable" attributes and the likely characteristics of the other, Langmuir-Malcolm, and is not only convincing to other characters, but to himself. He fears "some dreadful take-over by his new and administrative personality" (260), and his use of the mercantile take-over suggests that his fears are well founded. The scene demonstrates comically the dubiety of easy assumptions of individuality in a neocolonial context; identity is not a given, but is created and fixed by language alone.
Exposure of Hamo only occurs when he assumes a second fake identity, and, as Roger Sudbury, finds himself in a gathering of people who know him by various combinations of his three identities. Meanwhile, Erroll Watton has become Charlie Keaton, and through Watton-Keaton's film of Ceylon [Sri Lanka], the novel's episodic, travelogue qualities are parodied. Like Erroll's show, the novel is possibly "not so interesting for everyone" (279); meaningless to some and only tentatively interpreted by others. Erroll's movie, and, by implication, the novel, is only a British view of Ceylon and thus implicated in the same colonial legacy as that which confronts Hamo in his performances as himself and Doctor Malcolm. His hoped-for neutrality as Sudbury, the tourist, is also compromised: "the distinguished British scientist who has enriched our economy with the hybrid rice Magic is visiting us to see the results of his work in our plentiful rice harvest.… And then to make matters worse along come you, Mr Sudbury, and other gentlemen from England who are asking us to preserve most carefully the elephant and the buffalo who will trample down that same harvest" (272-73). Personal identity and characteristics are shown to be fluid and interchangeable, but nationality and national history are unavoidable. Hamo absurdly occupies three different identities in the pursuit of sexual fulfillment, but is forced to confront at every turn the repercussions of Britain's past.
While Hamo's quest for quasi-colonial sexual conquest and the nature of his public, professional self are clearly connected, science and its applications are shown to be not just a moral issue, but also an economic one. The serious financial interests of Hamo's supposedly disinterested science are represented by the Rapson Institute and the megalomaniac Sir James Langmuir. Sir James Langmuir is, as Ned says, "a Superman" (83), an aptly sinister reference to the Nietzschean Übermensch. His crude social Darwinism is clear in his eulogy for Hamo: "the senseless death of this brilliant scientist should serve as a warning to us all, that we can take no risks, no easy sentimental indulgence in making sure that the unstable, the weak and the diseased strains in the human race as in the rest of the natural world should be eliminated" (410). The "saving of our civilization" (410) is dependent on the weeding out of the "hopeless classes" with the scientific rigor applied to plant genetics, because "Weakness means muddle" (410). The faith in a problem-solving ideology that will eliminate "muddle" is associated with fascist, fanaticist social-cleansing exercises.
These same people are drawn to the occult magic of the Austrian Swami who, "at least three-quarters charlatan" (406), nevertheless draws Sir James into his circle. Sir James's implied Nazism is made explicit by the Swami, who is horrified by the political manipulation of his nonsensical doctrines. Typically, Wilson's parody dissolves the Swami's horror into near-absurdity: "His mind went back to his youth, to his own great master, Stefan Georg, to the days long before he had learnt of the Eastern or occult wisdoms, when he tramped with other Wandervögeln youth from lovely Salzburg up into the Schwarzwälder, reciting the Master's poems. Stefan Georg, too, had taken the Nazis to be harmless followers, useful because of their power in the material world, and then, when they monstrously tried to use him, the old man, the great Master, had withdrawn, out of the Germany he so loved, into the Swiss Alps" (417). "Tramping" into the Black Forest with other "Wandervögeln" youth, the retreat is infinitely less dignified when we realize that vögeln means fucking and that Schwarzwälder usually pertains to the gateau. The more serious the issue in this novel, the less serious its treatment: not even the retreat from Nazism is played straight. Here, the Swami realizes that he will have to follow the example of "the great Master" and renounce the privileges of life with Sir James. Ironically, maintaining integrity means following leads set by others (indeed, one of the Swami's disciples still sports "the short-cut boyish hair of her existential youth" (331); and in this case the integrity is typically and totally undercut by catchphrases that sound right, but aren't. Elinor says that magic appeals to only two types, "the power-hungry and the neurotic" (367): the weak and the fascist.
The power of Langmuir's wealth has allowed him to build the Ozymandian Langmuir House, "an incredibly tall glass and concrete office thing," described by Alexandra as "a boring slab" (394). Her reaction to Langmuir House marks her renunciation of 1960s magic. Formerly a student at a new university, another such "glass and concrete thing," her horror at the "gross mediocrity of the design" (394) reveals an unprecedented aesthetic nostalgia: "'Whole squares and streets have gone. Beautiful ones.' It was the one promise she had made to herself, with her new-found wish to cultivate a visual sense--to enjoy London" (394). The notion of "cultivating" a visual sense once again links her to her mother and her detested "squirrel's hoard of beautiful nuts (the pictures, the porcelain, the mirrors, the tables)" (44). Alexandra at the end of the novel will, we fear, adopt her mother's poses.
When Alexandra brings her baby home at the end of the novel, she is still being reminded of literary references, but is finally able to reject their power. She renounces the sexual radicalism of Howards End, whereby Helen Schlegel raises her illegitimate child alone. Alexandra may raise Oliver alone, but chooses not to: "We've had enough of Forster's harvest predictions. Things may have turned sour on all of us, but we must not heap it all on him. He needs a father" (426). Alexandra, we are told, makes this announcement "as though she were making a shopping list," a telling analogy because just as Helen Schlegel's private decision to bring up her child fatherless is tied to Forster's liberal optimism, Alexandra's dilemma is symptomatic of less promising times. Forster shows the materialistic Wilcoxes finally superseded by the intellectual, humanistic Schlegels in the same way as the villainous millionaire Sir James is forced to leave his fortune to the more sympathetic Alexandra. Nevertheless, by making the conventional decision to provide her son with a father, and by equating this with shopping, she reveals that the conformist, capitalist ethic of Sir James has evidently not been defeated, only modified by private philanthropy. The project which she undertakes is an ironic contrast to Hamo's final quixotic gesture; hers is philanthropy on a muted scale, and only minimally detrimental to her own fortunes: "she had no intention of being poor, or that Oliver should be, she had a wealthy mother, she said, and a grandmother with considerable savings, and a great-grandmother with some capital, all of whom when they died would leave her their money. And, in any case, she was young and quite clever and could work" (422). This highlights just how bourgeois Alexandra has become; pragmatic and acquisitive, she combines her scheme to help "ordinary people" with a conservative ethic of self-help, both for herself and for her prospective tenants; no "cadgers" or hippie dropouts will be allowed to occupy her properties (423).
Again, her ideas for the city are conservative and nostalgic. Above all, she has changed from someone whose "sense of her own power disgusted her" (415) into someone who recognizes the power that money gives her. The epilogue "Alexandra Comes Home" is the coming home of the novel from the global to the parochial; the focus has shifted from the whole world to Alexandra's little corner of London in an ironic comment on the disillusionment of the optimistic globalism predicted by the 1960s. Alexandra's power is, in any case, to be short-lived, depending purely on material resources that her project will inevitably exhaust, at which point the "bullies" will inevitably return to ascendancy. Her triumph is only a limited one, the conclusion anticipating a climate of "realism" that endorses unlimited accretion of wealth as the only possibly transformative magic. Although Wilson said in the late sixties that he hoped "that the younger generation will succeed in their sexual revolution," he conceded that the "two determinisms--Marx and Freud" of his own generation made him feel that revolutions "not founded upon economic change" could never work, and that "you can't change sex."[9]
This, however, is not the whole story, for Alexandra's rejection of magic is ironically counteracted by the mechanics of the plot that lead her to this point. The ending of the novel is more than contrived; it is exaggeratedly so. Alexandra's prophetic pronouncement on Langmuir House attracts attention with its unexpected vehemence: "I'd like to pull every stone of it down" (394). This, of course, is exactly what she does, so that the conclusion of the novel takes on a quality of wish-fulfillment, with the wicked fairy-tale giant defeated. Discussing the reunion of Hamo and Alexandra in Goa, Lorna Sage writes that this scene "glances teasingly at the possibility of a splendidly travestied conventional happy ending."[10] Instead of this marriage, we have the other nineteenth-century source of female fulfillment: financial independence; and the Victorian convention of the "unexpected" inheritance provides as magical a resolution to the novel as any.
Alexandra's final claim that "no magic spells could solve her problems" (426) is a half-truth, for it is the magic of a very self-conscious fiction that has provided the answers at the end of her story. The banality of her statement is finally representative of an end to optimism: only the magic of fiction is still playfully in operation. A. S. Byatt has suggested that the final pages of the novel expose this fictionality: "When Alexandra declares 'I know I am a fictive device' we are aware that we are out of the world of the realist novel and its norms and in the familiar world of the experimental novel, which proclaims its own artifice and comments on its own procedures."[11] Although it is highly contentious that we were ever in "the world of the realist novel" with As if by Magic, Byatt's observation that the novel "proclaims its own artifice" is overstated. When Rodrigo notes that the conventional character of the millionairess is an "old gag," Alexandra differentiates herself from the literary convention: "Yes, I'm quite aware, Roddy, that I'm a fictive device. But I intend to make something real of the enormity" (423, my emphasis). Alexandra does not, in fact, know that she is a "fictive device," for she is making a clear distinction between herself and fictional representations; she will make something "real" of it. There is obviously a joke here, because the reader recognizes that Alexandra is fictional, but Alexandra herself is not privy to this joke because she is still (though only just) within the text. The novel is poised between magic and exposure, between closed fiction and overt self-consciousness.
In conclusion, this global novel represents through the interlocked lives of its protagonists the interlinking of the failed utopias of the late twentieth century: the products of first-world civilization such as genetic engineering and liberal capitalist politics are linked to third-world "primitive" solutions of religion and occult mysticism. The demonstrated inescapability of the past is used, not to promote some conservative agenda, but as a means of exposing the irrationality and muddle which lies beneath the search for liberal magic solutions. Fiction is the only legitimate locus for such conjuring tricks, while the endless use of parody and pastiche rejects even the authority of narration. Written in a climate of increasing pessimism about the possibilities of social revolution, the only solutions--and tentative ones at that--are fictive.
Footnotes
1. Angus Wilson, interview with Michael Millgate, Paris Review 17 (Autumn-Winter 1957): 95.
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2. Margaret Drabble gives a detailed account of the novel's reception in her biography of Wilson (London: Minerva, 1996) 441-46.
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3. Angus Wilson, As if by Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992) 420. All subsequent page references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
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4. Qtd. in Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970) 152.
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5. Interview with Robert Robinson, The Book Programme, BBC, 2 March 1976.
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6. Gindin writes that "Irony emphasizes man's lack of knowledge and assurance, his need to live and act in a world where he never fully knows the causes or consequences of his actions." Angus Wilson, Harvest of a Quiet Eye (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971) 277.
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7. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978) 106-7.
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8. Nabokov complains of his book being read as "Old Europe debauching young America," or "Young American debauching Old Europe." "On a Book Entitled Lolita," Lolita 304.
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9. Angus Wilson, "Sexual Revolution," Listener 80 (10 October 1968): 460.
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10. Lorna Sage, "Taking Risks," Twentieth Century Literature 29 (Summer 1983): 193.
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11. A. S. Byatt, "People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to 'Realism' and 'Experiment' in English Postwar Fiction," The Contemporary English Novel, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London: Edward Arnold, 1979) 24.
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