Magic As Vocation

I'm a few hundred pages into Susanna Clark's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; bit early to be writing my review. But the opening is a soft-pedal philosophical satire, or allegory, distinct from what follows. Yet a kind of keynote to what follows. Not a key to the plot but to the tongue-in-cheek (but not parodic) aesthetic of the overall subcreation. Why turn Jane Austen into J.K. Rowling? Indeed, gentle reader, why?

Reviewers - Henry Farrell, for example - have already tried their hands at expressing what is new and admirable about this. See John Clute for more qualified praise than Henry offers. (Bits of plot spoilage, too - be warned.) I'll say what I have to say about the opening.

The setting is late 18th Century England. Once upon a time, there was real magic, but no more. Hence such comedy as the York Society Of Magicians:

They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic - nor ever done any one the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble on a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one's head. But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire.

Then John Secundus appears, who "wished to know, he said, why modern magicians were unable to work the magic they wrote about. In short, he wished to know why there was no more magic done in England." The society is discomfited.

The President of the York society (whose name was Dr. Foxcastle) turned to John Secundus and explained that the question was a wrong one. "It presupposes that magicians have some sort of duty to do magic - which is clearly nonsense. You would not, I imagine, suggest that it is the task of botanists to devise more flowers? Or that astronomers should labour to rearrange the stars? Magicians, Mr. Segundus, study magic which was done long ago. Why should anyone expect more?"

Also, magic is socially disagreeable. "It was the bosom companion of unshaven faces, gypsies, house-breakers ; the frequenter of dingy rooms with dirty yellow curtains. A gentleman might study the history of magic (nothing could be nobler) but he could not do any." A debate breaks out, as debates will. A few members are roused from their historicist slumbers to Secundus' defense. One - Honeyfoot - is soon explaining to Secundus about the Learned Society of Magicians of Manchester, a failed clutch of magical positivist hedge wizards.

It was a society of quite recent foundation ... and its members were clergymen of the poorer sort, respectable ex-tradesmen, apothecaries, lawyers, retired mill owners who had got up a little Latin and so forth, such people as might be termed half-gentlemen. I believe Dr. Foxcastle was glad when they disbanded - he does not think that people of that sort have any business becoming magicians. And yet, you know, there were several clever men among them. they began, as you did, with the aim of bringing back practical magic to the world. They were practical men and wished to aply the principles of reason and science to magic as they had done to the manufacturing arts. They called it 'Rational Thaumaturgy'. when it did not work they became discouraged. Well, they cannot be blamed for that. But they let their disillusionment lead them into all sorts of difficulties. They began to think that there was not now nor ever had been magic in the world. They said that the Aureate magicians were all deceivers or were themselves deceived. And that the Raven King was an invention of the northern English to keep themselves from the tyranny of the South (being north-country men themselves they had some sympathy with that.) Oh, their arguments were very ingenious - I forget how they explained fairies.

If only Wax Weber had written "Magic as Vocation" [Zauber als Beruf], on the process through which the activity of enchantment has gradually become disenchanted. But Weber is a bit too 20th Century. (These Manchester types are more Hume than Vienna Circle.) But it is certainly the case that Clarke is allegorizing philosophy. With Norrell as Bentham, Jonathan Strange as Coleridge, and speculative philosophy as magic, J.S. Mill has written a fine preface to Carke's novel:

There are two men, recently deceased, to whom their country is indebted not only for the greater part of the important ideas which have been thrown into circulation among its thinking men in their time, but for a revolution in its general modes of thought and investigation. These men, dissimilar in almost all else, agreed in being closet-students - secluded in a peculiar degree, by circumstances and character, from the business and intercourse of the world: and both were, through a large portion of their lives, regarded by those who took the lead in opinion (when they happened to hear of them) with feelings akin to contempt. But they were destined to renew a lesson given to mankind by every age, and always disregarded - to show that speculative philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which most influences them, and in the long run overbears every other influence save those which it must itself obey.

In Clarke we have this familiar counterpoint between the suspicion that philosophy is the most useless thing - unable to stir a leaf - and the conviction that it must be most potent - a thing to upend the world. And we have a neat triangle of intellectual personality types: rationalist, romantic and historicist. Also, unfolding out of this, we have a sort of implicit third man argument. If there were a true philosophy it would have to be like a kind of magic. Well, suppose there were magic. What would be so magical about it?

One of the funny features of fantasy - Tolkien is the classic case - is the illogical felt implication that somehow, if there were elves and dwarves and magic rings and wizards and dragons, then rose-tinted Feudalism would make sense.

Of course, quite apart from the antecedent not coming true any time soon, the consequent wouldn't follow. Here, Isaiah Berlin may be closer to it. I'll modify a passage from the opening of "Two Concepts of Liberty" ever so very slightly:

Where ends are agreed, the only questions left are those of means, and these are not political but magical, that is to say, capable of being settled by wizards or wands, like battles between enchanters or necromancers. That is why those who put their faith in some immense, world-transforming thaumaturgy, like the final triumph of white magic or victory over the Dark One, must believe that all political and moral problems can thereby be turned into magical ones.

The urge to easeful sinking into some apparent solution to all life's deep problems unites the fabulist and the technocrat.

One brand of literary fantasy exists to deny this fallacy. China Miéville is an example. His descriptions of labor disputes between magical beings, or - in Iron Council - all the hideously mutilated veterans of magical war are well done. War is Hell, and some wizard blasting you with eldritch energy out of Hell - rather than shooting you with a Hellfire missile - wouldn't make it less hellish. In a weird way, J. K. Rowling is an example as well.

So you can make your fantasy theme: magic would really change everything. Or you can make it: magic really wouldn't change anything. ("He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.") But the former theme can seem naive. Regarding the latter, it is hard to maintain disenchantment about enchantment (like poor Denethor wrestling with the images in his palantir, trying to bend this device to his ends, only to be bent to other ends entirely.) Matt Cheney has rather a cutting comment about Miéville's latest:

I could have lived with about half as many battles, because the book began to feel more like a scenario for a roleplaying game than a novel: one seemingly impossible battle ("Good dice roll!") leads to an even more seemingly impossible battle ("Your weapons aren't effective against noncorporeal entities, but luckily coming down the hill...") leads to another and another and....

Miéville's politically sophisticated instincts truly are at war with his apparently very strong narrative impulse in favor of the Stephen King special-effect finale. (This is why Miéville is first and foremost a world-maker. But I've said as much before.)

Susanna Clarke 's attempt to  infuse the form of the Jane Austen novel - of all things - with magic promises to be a particularly delicate balancing act. Austen powers, as Clute puns. Magic as manners. I'll stop here because I haven't read the silly thing yet.

The point I am making is that the conceit of the novel - its play on the fantasy form: the gently satiric frustration of the fantasy about fantasy that it simplifies ethical and political life - is apparently adequately expressed by page 4. Yet there are almost 800 pages to go. And volumes to follow.

Will our author simply start repeating herself? Will she frustrate us - as she apparently does Clute - by dawdling in drawing rooms when she should be shooing her characters out of doors, where they can engage in epic battles? Will the characters, once out of doors, make the drawing room look so small we will wonder what business we ever had in it?

I don't know. I haven't read the book.

Comments

[ben wolfson]

I can only assume that when you have read it we'll be in for a real monster of a post, then. (I started it last night and am enjoying it a good deal.)

[ben wolfson]

One of the books of magic referenced in a footnote is called "Tractatus Magico-Linguisticus".

[Doug]

(Obscure spoiler)

The characters do indeed go outdoors and engage in epic battles, but sometimes those are entirely beside the point. At one point, if memory serves, a significant European city is moved ten miles in a subordinate clause and only mentioned again once afterward, in a footnote that notes it was not moved back despite promises to the contrary.

Clarke follows the paths set by her characters and their conflicts, and not any external progression of small to large. Indeed, (did you think anyone could post on this book without using the word indeed?), some of the seemingly smallest events in the book are among its most momentous.

[Doug]

(Obscure spoiler)

The characters do indeed go outdoors and engage in epic battles, but sometimes those are entirely beside the point. At one point, if memory serves, a significant European city is moved ten miles in a subordinate clause and only mentioned again once afterward, in a footnote that notes it was not moved back despite promises to the contrary.

Clarke follows the paths set by her characters and their conflicts, and not any external progression of small to large. Indeed, (did you think anyone could post on this book without using the word indeed?), some of the seemingly smallest events in the book are among its most momentous.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

"Yet there are almost 800 pages to go. And volumes to follow."

Wrong wrong wrong. Allow me to presume on my small acquaintanceship with Susanna Clarke in order to tell you that John Clute's assertion that Jonathan Strange was planned as the beginning of a series was entirely pulled out of John Clute's ass. There is no such plan. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a complete work.

Susanna has more recently said she might write a different novel with the same background, but it would not be about the same people. And yet people keep repeating Clute's entirely erroneous assertion that the book is the start of a planned-out series a la Jordan, Martin, Donaldson, etc. It's not, and it never was.

[sell my house fast]

irrespective of the geographical boundaries. The American Dream refuses to diminish in sheen and size despite the lingering subprime dark clouds. However