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Games and Godgames in The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman

In his classic anthropological work, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga remarks that anthropology and its sister sciences have stressed too little the importance of play and game in human culture. According to Huizinga, Homo ludens, the playing man, deserves at least equal place beside Homo sapiens in the anthropological nomenclature (1). From the profusion of games, contests, and play activities in his works of fiction, John Fowles underscores Huizinga's assertion that "in the absence of the play-spirit civilization is impossible" (101). Fowles's interest in the evolutionary struggles and competitions of men and women has led him to investigate in both his essays and his fiction many of the competitive activities in which men and women participate, from childlike play to adult contests for high stakes. His claim in The Aristos is that "Games are far more important to us, in far deeper ways, than we like to admit" (158). Fowles inherits his interest in the game from one of his historical mentors, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. In The Aristos Fowles describes Heraclitus as a man who preferred to unravel riddles and to play with children rather than to associate with his intellectual peers. Heraclitus' writings are perplexing riddles themselves. However, Fowles has studied and derived from them many of his own ideas in The Aristos