Tuesday, April 25, 2006

I'm Sort of Alive

Just mired in shiite.

So I invest 656 pages of reading into The Magus. And it's gorgeous, earth-shattering prose. But is there an effing ending? No. Pretty bold for a book that purports to have The Answers. Urgh.

Look at what the poor publishers had to post on their website to address this disappointment:

Translating the Last Lines of The Magus
We receive lots of e-mail at this site, much of it asking questions about John Fowles and his work. One question in particular keeps popping up again and again:

"What does the quotation at the end of The Magus mean?"

So, in order to save time (for both those asking the question and us), here's the scoop:

cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet
The opening lines of an anonymous Latin lyric titled The Vigil of Venus (3rd century A.D.), it translates to:

"Tomorrow let him love, who has never loved; he who has loved, let him love tomorrow."
An alternate translation, submitted by Professor Andrey Kravtsov of New Mexico State University, is:

"Let those love now who've never loved; let those who've loved, love yet again."
It seems fairly clear that Fowles is indicating, through the quote, his preferred resolution to the story as it pertains to Nicholas and Alison. Although ultimately, as Fowles has noted, it is up to the reader to come up with his or her own interpretation.

In fact, Fowles himself is not averse to ownership of multiple interpretations of the ending (a quality he subsequently demonstrated, literally, in The French Lieutenant's Woman). The following anecdote is telling:

In response to a gentle letter from a New York lawyer, dying of cancer in a hospital, who said he very much wanted the couple to be reunited, Fowles wrote back, "Yes, they were." On the same day he got a "horrid" letter from an American woman who angrily demanded, "Why can't you say what you mean, and for God's sake, what happened in the end?" Fowles replied curtly: "They never saw each other again."*

*From The French Lieutenant's Woman's Man: Novelist John Fowles by Richard B. Stolley.

4 comments:

Heidi said...

So are you still loaning me the book? LOL!

Christina said...

This brings to mind, "and they loved with a love that was more than a love." Edgar Allen Poe, Annabelle Lee. But, only because it has the word love in it a number of times. hmmmm

Kidsis said...

It was just garsh-darn frustrating, you know? Truly not what I expected after being captivated by every previous page.

It didn't feel enigmatic and poetic like Lost in Translation. It just ENDED. Prematurely. Like a bad night in bed, or as if Annie had actually shot Paul and killed Misery herself.

Apropos of nothing (maybe the eternal wait?), I have some cool pix from the wedding I need to post sometime this week. Christina did good work.

Hey, I met a great guy last night. Another damn actor. But not from this country.

Lynda said...

I like a story with an end. I think that would annoy me.