had wanted it to be, but as if through some volition of its own, had to be on this
ancient quay. Fowles perceived her as an outcast who represented a reproach to
the Victorian Age and that he began to fall in love with her (Fowles, 1998:13-14).
Fowles averred that such an imaginal process was something much more than
fantasy, that there was a curious spiral rhythm as the mind approaches repeatedly a
point of concern, repeats itself, goes back, destroys the time sequence entirely and
the fragments of the mosaic form a kaleidoscopic pattern so that a new image takes
shape (Fowles, 1998:xvii).
Similarly, Fowles’ The Magus (1966), which also originated from an
experienced during a very trivial visit to a villa on a Greek island where “... nothing
in the least unnatural happened” but in his mind, a sort of synchronicity occurred
and “... he kept arriving at the place again and again “... something wanted to
happen there, something that had not happened to me at the time” and he reflects:
... someone showed me a recent photograph of the villa, which is
now deserted; and it was just a deserted villa. I ts mysterious
significance to me fifteen years ago remains mysterious (Fowles,
1998:14).
Here Fowles is articulating the personal and direct experience not only of
landscape and place, and as Keneally articulated in his interview, that intimate
connection which is, for the writer, so professionally generative and, for the reader,
so personally regenerative and often, for both, synchronistic. Of course, Fowles,
like Keneally, Malouf and McCullough, has an excellent understanding of the
technical processes employed by the writer, such as research and the conventions
of grammar and syntax but often, like them, uses terminology analogous to that
which one would use to describe a shaman. For example, he says natural born
writers are “... possessed, and in the old magical sense, by their own imagination”
long before they ever begin to write and examines “... the inevitably split nature of
the writer - the way in which he or she is both the I who writes and the I who is
written about, the self who is both within and without the fiction” (Fowles,
1998:14). I n fact he says quite directly of the writer’s technique “ ... Novelists are
like conjurors ... and the last thing a conjuror or magus wants is for his shamanistic
tricks, his particular magic to be rumbled” (Fowles, 1998:xvii). More to the point,
he has said that his writing has always been a semi-religious occupation, something
that he cannot regard as a craft or occupation because he knows that:
... when I am writing well that I am writing with more than the
sum of my acquired knowledge, skill and experience; with