The Magus

Originally published in 1965 (and revised in 1977), The Magus exemplifies Postmodern literature through its metafictional themes and ambiguous storytelling. Postmodernism arose in the years leading to and following World War II. One of the distinctive aesthetic experiments of Postmodernism is a narrative that draws attention to its artifice. Postmodernist playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht and Eugene Ionesco often broke the illusory, invisible wall between actors and audience (known as “the fourth wall”) by making the players acknowledge theatergoers. In The Magus, Conchis’s ongoing masques remind readers constantly that the novel they are reading is also a performance.

The innovations of Postmodernism were in part a continuing reaction to the constraints of the Victorian novel, which favored neat endings and clear themes. More pertinently, the Postmodernist novel grew from the age’s existential horror following the events of World War II. In a world where notions of God, morality, and order had been so thoroughly tested, traditional narratives about the inherent goodness of human beings would not suffice. Thus, many writers believed that the narrative mind needed to reinvent itself to more accurately portray the human condition in the 20th century. In The Magus, this reinvention takes the form of narrative instability to convey a universe which is fundamentally arbitrary.