The Dialectics of Debasement in The Magus
Commentators and readers alike have praised The Magus as a fascinating and powerful novel of great audacity, richness, and intellectual depth. I am sure that many, like myself, have also found it to be an eminently teachable work that rarely fails to intrigue and to challenge those who study it. Yet The Magus profoundly disturbs many college students; it often affects these young readers in unexpected and unsettling ways. Although praising the novel as a compelling and absorbing work, students frequently express an uneasy concern about various problems: the meaning of Nicholas Urfe's bizarre experience, the extent to which he learns and changes, the unresolved ending, the motives and morality of those who conduct the godgame. One detects a sense of desperate urgency as these readers struggle to address such problems and to solve the book's mysteries. At the same time, surprisingly, students resist Fowles's assertion that the individual reader has the right as well as the obligation to decipher the events narrated. They typically view his advice on interpreting The Magus as an evasion, a "cop-out": "Its meaning is whatever reaction it provokes in the reader, and so far as I am concerned