Book Report August 2024
Susanna Clarke, ETA Hoffmann, William James
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke, 2004
One of the most brilliant premises in fiction: what if there was only one wizard left in England and he was an old fuddy-duddy with no imagination or ambition for how magic might be used? The year is 1806 and no magic has been done for 200 years. The last magician, Dr. Martin Pale, died in Shakespeare’s day and even he was far diminished from the magicians who flourished during the 300-year reign of The Raven King in the medieval period. But change is in the air. A reclusive Yorkshire aristocrat, Gilbert Norrell, has spent his life acquiring and studying every magical text in the country and has quietly rediscovered and reworked many of his predecessors spells. Alone in his estate he has revived magic in England. He’s induced to reveal his accomplishments to the world and travels to London to begin a grand revival of English magic.
Norrell is an instant celebrity, invited to all the poshest parties and salons, but his aura and accomplishments are no match for what a powerful bore he is. Other party guests cannot bear listening to his long-winded explanations of magical theory and he refuses as a general rule to perform any magic as entertainment. It becomes clear that his “grand revival” doesn’t involve training other adepts or some act of magical heroism but rather to receive government contracts for practical charms like flood protection and road maintenance. Nonetheless the reemergence of magic ignites the imaginations of his countrymen, who begin reasoning that if a bookish dud like Norrell can do it so too might they. One such man is Jonathan Strange, an ironic gentleman who has bounced from one hobby to another without ever applying himself. Faced by the criticism that he’s unserious and flighty by the woman he hopes to marry, he declares that he has finally found his vocation—he will study magic. Cut to a year later and he has advanced with remarkable speed, mastering all sorts of spells without the aid of books or theory. Where Norrell’s mastery comes hard-won from years of study, Strange has an easy, intuitive grasp of magic that’s untutored, joyous, and wild.
I have to cut my synopsis short here. Strange & Norrell is a long book with a tremendous amount of plot. There are run-ins with wicked fairies, Strange’s participation in the Napoleonic wars, and an extensive cast of vivid secondary characters. Given the historical setting, Clarke writes in a light pastiche of novels of that time. Clarke’s prose is so controlled, her words so well chosen and her sentences so correctly constructed, that the illusion never falters. It’s easy to forget that this book is from 2004 and not 1834. It’s an engrossing read that ate up entire mornings because I simply could not put it down.
An aside: I have a bugaboo with alt-history stories because I usually can’t get past the idea that the world is different in some fundamental way yet all the same people populate it. Take Star Trek for instance: it has the “Mirror Universe” where the Federation is evil and everyone has goatees. Yet all of our main characters exist within it. It doesn’t make sense. A universe where the Federation is behaving so differently is a universe where different people live and die, where people go different places and meet different people and have different children. After hundreds of years of this sort of divergence, everyone alive should be different people with different life stories. I can’t accept that Mirror Kira is commander of Mirror Deep Space Nine because I can’t accept that Kira could ever be born in the Mirror Universe in the first place. Anyway, I was initially feeling similarly about Strange & Norrell because it includes real historical figures like Napoleon and Tsar Alexander. But I changed my mind because I came to like the implicit claim that Napoleon in particular is such a transcendent historical personality that he was destined to emerge no matter the circumstances. Wellington, on the other hand, is more questionable since my understanding is that he’s now considered a replacement-level historical figure (to Clarke’s credit she writes Wellington as a buffoon).
Something I’ve been considering lately is how to write a story that takes place over a long stretch of time. Strange & Norrell’s narrative encompasses about a decade—not a lifetime but a while. A tremendous amount of the book shows the characters’ lives simply unfolding. In between chapters where “things happen” there are many chapters are just sort of “here’s what they’re up to right now.” A great deal of why it works can just be chalked up to Clarke’s skill as a writer—the book is truly a joy to read whether or not much is going on—but it’s also a simultaneously illuminating and obvious reminder that a sufficiently real character can hold a reader’s attention just by quietly living their life.
The Golden Pot and Other Tales of the Uncanny, ETA Hoffman, 1809-1821 (2023)
Oh hey here’s another literary titan I’d just never heard of until recently. Hoffmann, born in 1776, was one of the leading figures of German Romanticism and was a pioneer of stories that mix elements of horror, science fiction, and the fantastic with realism. Also a prolific composer, music plays a central role in many of his stories, which provides something of a throughline to this recently released collection. Written when they were, Hoffmann’s stories stand on a border between an older world and our own. Though they contain elements familiar to us from modern fantasy or sci-fi, those features are inflected very differently and mean different things, providing a window into how things like madness, sorcery, and other realms were conceived of before they became taken-for-granted elements of an established genre.
In the title story, the student Anselmus falls out of his staid life in Dresden after taking a job transcribing arcane texts for a reclusive antiquarian, the Archivarius Lindhorst. As Anselmus is drawn into the Archivarius’ occult world, he hallucinates(?) an elderberry tree full of emerald snakes that sing like crystal bells. Lindhorst’s house unfolds into non-Euclidean space, with rooms filled with exotic flora and fauna. In this dreamlike environment, impossible events and physical transformations are treated matter-of-factly, as when some characters, after speaking to a messenger from the Archivarius, “saw that the grave little man was actually a gray parrot.” Entranced by the Archivarius’ wonders, Anselmus neglects his previous life and his girlfriend, drawn as he is to more exotic sources of fascination, which is another recurring motif. The story piles on backstory and lore in such quantities and reaches such an apogee of metaphysical peril that it almost morphs into satire, but in that case the question would become what exactly it’s satirizing.
Two of the stories, “The Automaton” and “The Sandman,” concern clockwork figures that, in the first case, seem to possess knowledge beyond the possible or, in the latter, are so lifelike as to be indistinguishable from real people. I found these stories to be some of the most satisfying because Hoffmann uses them as opportunities to digress into meditations on what human beings are and what machines are not. I hate ChatGPT and the other current incarnations of AI so much—here’s hoping they’re about to all go bust—I find the prospect of computer-generated writing and images so vulgar and dispiriting—I now think the entire tech sector is so profoundly anti-human in its vision of progress—that I simply must quote this passage from “The Automaton,” over-long as it is:
"I have a profound aversion," said Ludwig, "to all these figures that not only emulate the human mien, but also mimic human comportment, these veritable statues of living death or a still life. From early childhood I fled in tears when I was taken to a wax museum, and to this day I cannot enter such a display without being gripped by an uncanny feeling of dread. I'm inclined to cry out, in Macbeth's words, 'Thou hast no speculation in those eyes / Which thou dost glare with!' when I perceive all the vacant, dead, glassy looks of wax sovereigns, famous heroes and infamous murderers, and villains directed at me. I am convinced that the vast majority of people feel much the same way, if not to the same degree of repulsion, since most people tend to whisper in wax museums; you seldom hear a loudly uttered word. Such decorum is not the consequence of reverence for the lofty personages depicted, but rather the effect of the uncanny, the grisly, that compels a stunned pianissimo from the spectator. The movements of lifeless figures that mimic the human have an altogether sinister effect on me, and I am absolutely convinced that the lingering memory of your wondrous, quick-witted Turk with his rolling eyes, turning head, and lifted arms, like some necromantic monster, would hound me in sleepless nights."
"Is it only the breath blowing from the mouth that animates a wind instrument? Is it only the agile, supple fingers plucking notes from a string instrument that grip us with their mighty magic, stirring up in us such unknown, ineffable feelings linked to no earthly source, that arouse in us inklings of a distant spirit realm, awakening our higher being? Is it not, rather the human spirit that just uses these physical devices to bring forth resounding notes from our deepest depths to the perceptible reality of life, so as to make them audible to the ears of others, and thereby elicit a wondrous hint of eternity from each note, like sparkling rays of light in the harmonic echo chamber of the spirit? To seek to manipulate valves, coil springs, levers, cylinders, and whatever else may comprise a mechanical device to make it sound musical constitutes, to my mind, a foolish and futile effort to make the medium itself spurt out that secret something that only the inner strength of the human spirit can bring to life and modulate by an absolute mastery of every movement…
The effort of mechanics to imitate more and more closely the effect produced by human organs in eliciting musical notes, or by mechanical means to substitute for the same, constitutes for me a declared war against the human spirit, the power of which shines forth all the more brilliantly the more seemingly oppositional forces are wielded against it. It is for this very reason that the most accomplished mechanical musical device is the most reprehensible to me."
Like any story collection, the quality here is variable. There are a couple that I found rather dull. One, “Kreisleriana,” is part of a larger sequence of writing following one of Hoffmann’s literary alter egos, the Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler; placed in this collection without the context of other Kreisler material it’s quite baffling. It’s not necessarily a bad story but was ill-chosen for this volume. Overall though, these stories are very enjoyable. Hoffmann’s writing is lush and properly ornate and he plays with structure in fascinating and surprising ways. In Hoffmann’s work we can begin to see the outlines of now-common genres before any expectations or conventions had begun to bound their limits.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James, 1902
Trained as a psychologist, William James delivered a series of twenty lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901-1902 on the nature of personal experiences of the divine. The personal aspect of his project is its defining feature. He says at the outset that his exploration will not consider institutionalized religion as far as possible, on the logic that all organized religion exists at second-hand from the divine inspiration, which was shared directly only between the religious founder and their god. Similarly, he makes no examination and takes no position on any doctrine of religion that extends beyond earthly horizons; late in the book he notes that he has neglected any discussion of the immortality of the soul. Instead, James has collected an astonishing array of testimony from ordinary individuals describing their connection to God and their sense of being held by a higher power in a world everywhere imbued with meaning.
James conducts a systematic investigation that could easily bog down in naming and subdividing but he is a lively narrator, often funny and wry, always armed with a surprising analogy, and attentive to the subtle nuances between the various accounts he cites, which in lesser hands could descend into an undifferentiated mass. He is strikingly open-minded about everything he presents, neither condemning the oddest beliefs nor tipping the scale in favor of another.
It is James’ opinion that one’s religious experience is heavily shaded by one’s disposition and that different sorts of religious doctrine will appeal based on whether one is, broadly speaking, fundamentally an optimist or a melancholic. Discussing the optimistic slant, which he terms “the religion of healthy mindedness,” he dwells at length on “mind-cure,” one of the various spiritualisms that took America by storm in the late 19th century. It was a fairly basic and familiar doctrine that positive thinking has real effects in the world, little different from contemporary notions like manifesting as popularized by The Secret, or, for that matter, from Frazer’s conception of sympathetic magic in The Golden Bough (which James namechecks).
One aspect of American culture I’ve always found vexing is its relentless positivity—how did it become ingrained in us that it’s poor etiquette to so much as acknowledge something negative in the world? In mind-cure, James locates part of its origin, remarking:
The mind-cure principles are beginning so to pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand. One hears of the ‘Gospel of Relaxation,’ of the ‘Don’t Worry Movement,’ of people who repeat to themselves, ‘Youth, health, vigor!’ when dressing in the morning, as their motto for the day. Complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households; and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad form to speak of disagreeable sensations, or to make much of the ordinary inconveniences and ailments of life.
Discussing the religious experiences of those with a less sunny outlook on life, James relies heavily on Tolstoy’s account of his conversion, which followed a years-long bout of melancholia in which he was unable to find any meaning in the world. For these types, faith is hard to achieve but, in James’ estimation, of a deeper quality than for those to whom it comes easily. He unpacks the qualities that constitute saintliness and arrives at mystical experiences, which he finds fascinating from a psychological perspective. Far from dismissing mysticism as pathology, James is alive to the possibility that mystical experience constitutes an altered form of consciousness that makes equally valid claims to truth as our day-to-day experience. In noting that nitrous oxide can induce similar states of supposed mystical revelation, James writes the following, which I find quite lovely:
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded… Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.
James is adamant that at its core, faith springs from feeling not thought. A faith built on intellectual principles will crumble, he says. I found this funny because my faith, such as it is, is of precisely an intellectual kind. I have never had a religious experience per se but I was genuinely changed reading Aquinas’ modification of Aristotle’s Divine Mover—one of his five proofs of God which goes that ultimately all causation must refer back to a self-caused cause in order to save us from an infinite regress, and some call that ultimate cause God (my copy of the Summa is at my mom’s house so I can’t quote it right now). I have some other idiosyncratic beliefs, namely that the source of consciousness will never be found in the brain and instead does originate in a divine spark called the soul. But I also believe that the soul is not immortal and is sustained by the body it resides in. Like a candle, when the substance is used up, the flame goes out. I’m sure someone else has come up with this idea—is it a literal heresy? Sound off in the comments!
Anyway, James is great. I don’t love some of the material at the end when he starts trying to judge the value of religious feeling using the principles of pragmatism, a sort of offshoot of empiricism he adhered to, juxtaposing it as he does with German Idealism (my heart is with the idealists), but it’s a testament to his warm and generous approach to his subject that I felt comfortable sharing my personal beliefs.
