Negotiating the ‘Paranoiac Structure’ of Human Knowledge: Fowles's The Magus and Lacan

Abstract

In this article, a reading is offered of John Fowles's novel, The Magus, in an attempt to show that the conception of human ‘knowledge’ put forward in the narrative is an instantiation and development of Lacan's claim that human knowledge is ‘paranoiac’ or delusional. Far from amounting to the claim that humans can and should do without it, though, Fowles, like Lacan, demonstrates in the unfolding story of his main character and narrator, Nicholas Urfe, that there is a veritable exigency for (or what Foucault has called a ‘will to’) ‘truth’ on the part of the human subject (what Lacan intimates, more appropriately, to be a will to ‘illusion’), even to the point of clinging to a presumed residual layer of ‘knowledge’ when everything around one has been systematically discredited as far as its veracity is concerned. In this way, I would like to show, one can learn a great deal from both Lacan's claims concerning human knowledge as ‘paranoiac’ and Fowles's insights concerning the epistemic demands of ‘healthy’ people, which may perhaps be said to bear a certain resemblance to the delusions of psychosis. In the end, both Lacan and Fowles offer different versions of an ambivalent insight, that ‘paranoiac’ expectations should be tempered with more modest claims regarding knowledge — what may be called ‘learned ignorance’.