74 pages • 2-hour read
The Magus
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Background
Literary Context: The Postmodernist, Metafictional Novel
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.
Another Postmodern innovation is that the book ends on an open note, creating a sense of ambiguity instead of finality. While the book was criticized by readers for its lack of clarity at the time of its publication, it remains Fowles’s most popular work, as he notes in the Foreword to the 1977 revised edition.
Philosophical Context: Existentialist and Gnostic Thought
The novel draws on existentialist and gnostic thought, using the character of Conchis as a conduit for interrogating free will and ethical choice. Broadly speaking, gnosticism ponders the question of the place and role of human beings in existence. Dating from the 1st century CE, gnostic philosophy discusses the nature of God, creation, and humanity; however, in contemporary times, gnostic thought tries to understand reality in terms of Jungian psychology and hermeneutics (the study of scripture and other texts). Jungian psychology arose from Carl Jung’s theory of the human psyche in which the temporary self focuses on objective reality, bound by the senses. However, the true self is part of a collective, supreme consciousness, which lies beyond material reality. In The Magus, Conchis refers to this true self when he describes Henrik’s ecstasy, stating that whether Henrik found God or not, “he had the Holy Spirit” (315). The holy spirit is a metaphor for the true self which Henrik glimpsed, a self beyond doubt and anxiety.
While gnostic and Jungian philosophy offer hope to humanity in the form of collective experience and an ideal reality, existential thought tends to focus on the individual endeavor. Philosophers of the 19th- and 20th-century, like Fredreick Nietzsche and Jean Paul Sartre, prioritized the human experience, denying the presence of a superseding reality or essence. The world being arbitrary, there is no pre-existing meaning to it, except that which is assigned by human beings. The Magus subscribes to this school of thought in part, since it establishes that religions and beliefs are constructs created by human beings to make sense of an absurd world. However, the novel diverges from existentialism in conflating human freedom or eleutheria with transcendence. Further, the narrative also critiques the nihilistic, self-centered aspects of existentialism.
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