The Magus (62 page)

‘The subject has preyed sexually and emotionally on a number of young women. His method, according to Doctor Maxwell, is to stress and exhibit his loneliness and unhappiness -in short, to play the little boy in search of the lost mother. He thereby arouses repressed maternal instincts in his victims which he then proceeds to exploit with the semi-incestuous ruthlessness of this type.

‘In the usual way the subject identifies God with the father-figure, aggressively rejecting any belief in Him.

‘He has careerwise continually placed himself in situations of isolation. His solution of his fundamental separation anxiety requires him to cast himself as the rebel and outsider. His unconscious intention in seeking this isolation is to find a justification for his preying on women and also for his withdrawal from any community orientated in directions hostile to his fundamental needs of self-gratification.

‘The subject’s family, caste, and national background have not helped in the resolution of his problems. He comes of a military family, in which there were a large number of taboos resulting from a strongly authoritarian paternal regime. His caste in his own country, that of the professional middle-class, Zwiemann’s
technohourgeoisie,
is of course marked by an obsessional adherence to such regimes. In a remark to Doctor Maxwell the subject reported that “All through my adolescence I had to lead two lives.” This is a good layman’s description of environment-motivated and finally consciously induced para-schizophrenia – “madness as lubricant”, in Karen Horney’s famous phrase.

‘On leaving university the subject put himself in the one environment he would not be able to tolerate – that of an expensive private school, the social transmitter of all those paternalistic and authoritarian traits the subject hates. Predictably he then felt himself forced both out of the school and out of his country, and adopted the role of expatriate, though he insured himself against any valid adjustment by once again choosing an environment – the school on Phraxos – which was certain to provide him with the required elements of hostility. His work there is academically barely adequate and his relationship with his colleagues and students poor.

‘To sum up, he is behaviourally the victim of a repetition-compulsion that he has failed to understand. In every environment he looks for those elements that allow him to feel isolated, that allow him to justify his withdrawal from meaningful social responsibilities and relationships and his consequent regression into the infantile state of frustrated self-gratification. At present this autistic regression takes the form mentioned above, of affaires with young women. Although previous attempts at an artistic resolution have apparently failed, we may predict that further such attempts will be made and that there will be the normal cultural life-pattern of the type: excessive respect for iconoclastic
avant-garde
art, contempt for tradition, paranosic sympathy with fellow-rebels and non-con-formers in conflict with frequent and depressive and persecutory phases in personal and work relationships.

‘As Doctor Conchis has observed in his
The Midcentury Predicament:
“The rebel with no specific gift for rebellion is destined to become the drone; and even this metaphor is inexact, since the drone has at least a small chance of fecundating the queen, whereas the human rebel-drone is deprived even of that small chance and may finally see himself as totally sterile, lacking not only the brilliant life-success of the queens but even the humble satisfactions of the workers in the human hive. Such a personality is reduced to mere wax, a mere receiver of impressions ; and this condition is the very negation of the basic drive in him – to rebel. It is no wonder that in middle age many such failed rebels, rebels turned selfconscious drones, aware of their susceptibility to intellectual vogues, adopt a mask of cynicism that cannot hide their more or less paranoiac sense of having been betrayed by life.”’

While she had been speaking the others at the table listened in their various ways, some looking at her, others sunk in contemplation of the table. Lily was one of the most attentive. The ‘students’ scribbled notes. I spent all my time staring at the woman, who read, and never once looked at me. I felt full of spleen, of hatred of all of them. There was some truth in what she was saying. But I knew nothing could justify such a public analysis, even if it were true; just as nothing could justify Lily’s behaviour – because most of the ‘material’ this analysis was based on must have come from her. I stared at her, but she would not look up. I knew who had written the report. There were too many echoes of Conchis. I was not misled by the new mask. He was still the master of ceremonies, the man behind it all; at web-centre.

The American woman sipped water from a glass. There was silence; evidently the report was not finished. She began to read on.

‘There are two appendices, or footnotes. One comes from Professor Ciardi, and is as follows:

‘I dissent from the view that the subject is without significance outside the matter of our experiment. In my view one may anticipate in twenty years’ time a period of considerable and today almost unimaginable prosperity in the West. I repeat my assertion that the threat of a nuclear catastrophe will have a healthy effect on Western Europe and America. It will firstly stimulate economic production; it will secondly ensure that there is peace; it will thirdly provide a constant sense of real danger behind every moment of living, which was in my opinion missing before the last war and so contributed to it. Although this threat of war may do something to counteract the otherwise dominating role that the female sex must play in a peacetime society dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, I predict that breast-fixated men like the subject will become the norm. We are entering an amoral and permissive era in which self-gratification in the form of high wages and a wide range of consumer goods obtained and obtainable against a background of apparently imminent universal doom will be available, if not to all, then to an increasingly large majority. In such an age the characteristic personality type must inevitably become auto-erotic and, clinically, autopsychotic. Such a person will be for economic reasons isolated, as for personal ones the subject is today, from direct contact with the evils of human life, such as starvation, poverty, inadequate living conditions, and the rest. Western
homo sapiens
will become
homo solitarius.
Though I have little sympathy as a fellow human being for the subject, his predicament interests me as a social psychologist, since he has developed precisely as I would expect a man of moderate intelligence but little analytical power, and virtually no science, to develop in our age. If nothing else he proves the total inadequacy of the confused value judgments and pseudo-statements of art to equip modern man for his evolutionary role.’

The woman laid down the paper and picked up another.

‘This second note comes from Doctor Maxwell, who of course has had the closest personal contact with the subject. She says:

‘In my view the subject’s selfishness and social inadequacy have been determined by his past, and any report which we communicate to him should make it clear that his personality deficiencies are due to circumstances outside his command. The subject may not understand that we are making clinical descriptions, and not, at least in my own case, with any association of moral blame. If anything our attitude should be one of pity towards a personality that has to cover its deficiencies under so many conscious and unconscious lies. We must always remember that the subject has been launched into the world with no training in self-analysis and self-orientation; and that almost all the education he has received is positively harmful to him. He was, so to speak, born short-sighted by nature and has been further blinded by his environments. It is small wonder that he cannot find his way.’

The American woman sat down. The old man in the white beard nodded, as if pleased with what had been said. He looked at me, then at Lily.

‘I think, Doctor Maxwell, that it would be fair to the subject if you repeated what you said to me last night in connection with him.’

Lily bowed her head, then stood up and spoke to the others. She glanced at me briefly, as if I was a diagram on a blackboard. ‘During my relationship with the subject I experienced a certain degree of counter-transference. I have analysed this with the help of Doctor Marcus and we think that this emotional attachment can be broken into two components. One originated in a physical attraction for him, artificially exaggerated by the role I had to play. The second component was empathetic in nature. The subject’s self-pity is projected so strongly on his environment that one becomes contaminated by it. I thought this was of interest in view of Professor Ciardi’s comment.’

The old man nodded. ‘Thank you.’ She sat down. He looked up at me. ‘All this may seem cruel to you. But we wish to hide nothing.’ He looked at Lily. ‘As regards the first component of your attachment, sexual attraction, would you describe to the subject and to us your present feelings?’

‘I consider that the subject would make a very inadequate husband except as a sexual partner.’ Ice-cold; she looked at me, then back to the old man. I had a dreadful, lancing memory of her standing against me; the night, the rain, the slow caress.

Dr Marcus intervened. ‘He has basic marriage-destructive drives?’

‘Yes.’

‘Specifically?’

‘Infidelity. Selfishness. Inconsiderateness in everyday routines. Possibly, homosexual tendencies.’

The old man: ‘Would the situation be altered if he had analysis?’

‘In my opinion, no.’

The old man turned. ‘Maurice?’

Conchis spoke, staring at me. ‘I think we are all agreed that he has been an admirable subject for our purposes, but he has masochistic traits that will get pleasure even out of our discussion of his faults. In my opinion our further interest in him is now both harmful to him and unnecessary.’

The old man looked up at me. ‘Under narcosis it was discovered that you are still strongly attached to Doctor Maxwell. Some of us have also been concerned about the effect that the loss of the young Australian girl, for which, I must also tell you. you feel deeply guilty in your unconscious, and now the second loss of the mythical figure you know as “Julie”, may have on you. I refer to the possibility of suicide. Our conclusion has been this: that your attachment to self-gratification is too deep to make any other than a hysterical attempt at suicide likely. And against this we advise you to guard.’

I gave a sarcastic bow of thanks. Dignity, keep some remnant of dignity.

‘Now … does anyone wish to say anything more?’ He looked both ways down the table. They all shook their heads. ‘Very well. We have come to the end of our experiment.’ He gestured for the ‘board’ to stand, which they did. The ‘audience’ remained sitting. He looked at me. ‘We have not concealed our real opinion of you; and since this is a trial we have of course been acting as witnesses against ourselves. You are, I remind you once again, the judge, and the time has now come for you to judge us. We have, first of all, selected a
pharnmkos.
A scapegoat.’

He looked to his left. Lily took off her glasses, stepped round the table and came and stood at the foot of the dais in front of me, with a bowed head; the white woollen dress, a penitential. Even then I was so stupid that I saw some fantastic new development; a mock wedding, some absurd happy ending … and I thought grimly what I would do if they dared try that on.

‘She is your prisoner, but you cannot do what you like with her, because the code of medical justice under which we exist specifies a precise type of punishment for the crime of destroying all power of forgiveness in the subject of our experiments.’ He turned round to Adam, who stood near the archway. ‘The apparatus.’

Adam called something. The other people behind the table stood to one side; in a compact group, facing the ‘students’, with the old man at their head. Four black-uniformed men came in. They quickly moved the sedan-coffin and two of the tables, so that the centre of the room was left free. The third table was lifted in front of me, beside Lily. Then two of the men left and returned carrying a heavy wooden frame, like a door frame, on bracketed legs. Six or seven feet up, at the top of the uprights, were iron rings. Lily turned and walked to where they set it, some halfway down the room. She stood in front of it and held up her arms. Adam handcuffed her wrists to the rings, so that she was crucified against it, with her back to me. Then a kind of stiffened leather helmet, with a down-projecting back piece that covered the nape of her neck, was put on her head; a protector.

It was a flogging frame.

Adam then left; returned in two seconds.

I could not see what he was holding at first, but he swung it loose as he came towards me. And I understood the incredible last trick they were playing.

It was a stiff black handle ending in a long skein of knotted lashes. Adam unravelled two or three that were tangled, then laid the foul thing on the table, handle towards me. Then he went back to Lily -everything was carefully planned to be in this sequence – and pulled down the zip in the back of her dress to her waist. He even unhooked the bra, then folded it and the dress carefully aside, so that her bare back was fully exposed. I could see the pink lines on her skin where the strap had crossed.

I was the Eumenides, the merciless Furies.

My hands began to sweat. Once again I was plunged hopelessly out of my depth. Always with Conchis one went down, and it seemed one could go no farther; but at the end another way went even lower.

The Smuts-like old man came forward again and stood in front of me.

‘You see the scapegoat and you see the instrument of punishment. You are now both judge and executioner. We are all here haters of unnecessary suffering; as you must try to understand when you come to think over these events. But we are all agreed that there must be a point in our experiment when you, the subject, have absolute freedom to choose whether to inflict pain on us – and a pain abhorrent to all of us – in your turn. We have chosen Doctor Maxwell because she best symbolizes what we are to you. Now we ask you to do as the Roman emperors did and to raise or lower your right thumb. If you lower it, you will be released and free to carry out the punishment as severely and brutally as you wish, up to ten strokes. That is sufficient to ensure the most atrocious suffering, and permanent disfigurement. If you raise your thumb in the sign of mercy, you will, apart from one last short process of disintoxication, be free of us for evermore. You will equally be free if you choose to punish, which will also demonstrate the satisfactory completion of your disintoxication. Now I ask one last thing of you: that you think carefully, very carefully indeed, before you choose.’