a little magic in the night
Nov. 1st, 2008 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacHalloween came and went, rather wetly. Having found ourselves out of the treat-seeking lanes last year, we didn't set out a pumpkin this year. We did leave the porch light on. The neighbor girls did come by. We did have some candy for them.
A couple people on my flist have pinged a recent article about Richard Dawkins. He was once a brilliant scientist: his book on Darwinian evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, explains how it works and actually makes more sense, even if you view it as the creation of God, than an intelligently directed design would. But lately, in a grand demonstration of what happens when you leave your field of competence, he's been making a damn fool of himself with ignorant statements about religion. Now in the same vein he's tackling fantasy literature: "The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking."
Ironically, the magical system presented in the Harry Potter books is very much a "science thinking" form of magic. Or more accurately an "engineering thinking" form. You learn the rules, you press a figurative button, and the desired result automatically occurs, unless there's a glitch in the system, in which case you can diagnose and fix it.
To my mind as a connoisseur of fantasy, that is a primary drawback of the Harry Potter books. I prefer magic that's, well, magical: elusive and hard to understand. It should work like charisma works. How can one salesperson persuade many people to buy the product while another, working from the same script, can't? They just have the knack. That's magic. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and you don't know why.
Alternately, there's the weird and creepy magic system offered in some books by Diana Wynne Jones, in which nothing supernatural occurs. Magic just eerily gives a strong tweak to the laws of probability, and possible but strange things begin to happen with disturbingly unusual frequency.
In Tolkien, magic is all around, but the focus is never on spell-casting, and the supernatural is always the background and the circumstances, never the subject of the story. The Ring's power, for instance, is a given. What counts is not using it, or even refraining from using it, to plot ends: what counts is the characters' individual reactions to it.
Same is true of most of my other favorite fantasies. Gormenghast has no overt magic at all: it's just a very strange place. In Watership Down, given the conceit of sapient rabbits, the only supernatural is Fiver's gift of prophecy, whose only plot purpose is to give the story a little nudge on occasion. Primarily it's about mythologizing: the book's punchline occurs when it turns out that the heroes' adventures are being incorporated into the rabbit folk myths of El-ahrairah.
Or look at Le Guin's Earthsea. Now that is about spellcasting: the hero is a wizard whose job it is to go around casting spells. Except that the theme is his reluctance to do so: his awareness of the ecological balance so easily disturbed. And when the spells don't work, it's not a job for a wand-wielding grease monkey, but a more subtle approach.
Magic, handled properly in literature, is not a science but an art. And it requires artistic thinking, which is not the same as what Dawkins derides as mythical thinking. It's as vital to our lives as scientific thinking is, and where scientific thinking tells us about the physical world, artistic thinking tells us about art.
A couple people on my flist have pinged a recent article about Richard Dawkins. He was once a brilliant scientist: his book on Darwinian evolution, The Blind Watchmaker, explains how it works and actually makes more sense, even if you view it as the creation of God, than an intelligently directed design would. But lately, in a grand demonstration of what happens when you leave your field of competence, he's been making a damn fool of himself with ignorant statements about religion. Now in the same vein he's tackling fantasy literature: "The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking."
Ironically, the magical system presented in the Harry Potter books is very much a "science thinking" form of magic. Or more accurately an "engineering thinking" form. You learn the rules, you press a figurative button, and the desired result automatically occurs, unless there's a glitch in the system, in which case you can diagnose and fix it.
To my mind as a connoisseur of fantasy, that is a primary drawback of the Harry Potter books. I prefer magic that's, well, magical: elusive and hard to understand. It should work like charisma works. How can one salesperson persuade many people to buy the product while another, working from the same script, can't? They just have the knack. That's magic. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and you don't know why.
Alternately, there's the weird and creepy magic system offered in some books by Diana Wynne Jones, in which nothing supernatural occurs. Magic just eerily gives a strong tweak to the laws of probability, and possible but strange things begin to happen with disturbingly unusual frequency.
In Tolkien, magic is all around, but the focus is never on spell-casting, and the supernatural is always the background and the circumstances, never the subject of the story. The Ring's power, for instance, is a given. What counts is not using it, or even refraining from using it, to plot ends: what counts is the characters' individual reactions to it.
Same is true of most of my other favorite fantasies. Gormenghast has no overt magic at all: it's just a very strange place. In Watership Down, given the conceit of sapient rabbits, the only supernatural is Fiver's gift of prophecy, whose only plot purpose is to give the story a little nudge on occasion. Primarily it's about mythologizing: the book's punchline occurs when it turns out that the heroes' adventures are being incorporated into the rabbit folk myths of El-ahrairah.
Or look at Le Guin's Earthsea. Now that is about spellcasting: the hero is a wizard whose job it is to go around casting spells. Except that the theme is his reluctance to do so: his awareness of the ecological balance so easily disturbed. And when the spells don't work, it's not a job for a wand-wielding grease monkey, but a more subtle approach.
Magic, handled properly in literature, is not a science but an art. And it requires artistic thinking, which is not the same as what Dawkins derides as mythical thinking. It's as vital to our lives as scientific thinking is, and where scientific thinking tells us about the physical world, artistic thinking tells us about art.
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-04 05:15 pm (UTC)Watership Down, single best post-Tolkien quest fantasy.
Fire and Hemlock, best of many good books by Diana Wynne Jones.
Favorite real old-time fantasy writer: Lord Dunsany.
Favorite living writer: Ursula K. Le Guin.
Favorite living under age 70: Patricia A. McKillip.
Favorite living under age 50: Neil Gaiman.
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Date: 2008-11-04 05:34 pm (UTC)I missed Diana Wynne Jones growing up, somehow, but I've wanted to try her and I didn't want to read Howl's Moving Castle (though my daughter read it and very much enjoyed it)--so I will try Fire and Hemlock.
I loved Watership Down, and the one Patricia McKillip book I read (The Forgotten Beasts of Eld), was one I really loved. I have yet to read Neil Gaiman! But I intend to. And I need to reread the Earthsea books. When I read them as a teenager, I liked the first two but somehow ended up putting down the third--I recall being too scared by it. Maybe now I'd be able to handle it better.
I adored Tolkien through high school and college, and still think LOTR is one of the most gripping, most real, and most moving fantasy tales ever. (Even though I left that ambivalent comment in
As for Lord Dunsany, bits and pieces of The King of Elfland's Daughter left a big impression on me, but I have no overall impression of the story. I should go back and reread that, too.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-06 09:30 am (UTC)If you haven't read Tolkien's tiny fairy tale Smith of Wootton Major, I would highly recommend it. It is the perfect fairy-story. And if you found the Silmarillion a little daunting, perhaps?, try Unfinished Tales: that's the book with all the juicy additions that LOTR readers want.
Better even than Dunsany's novels, I like his early short stories. There are a number of reprint collections of these floating around. Possibly easiest to find is one called In the Land of Time. Stories like "The Sword of Welleran" and "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" are what sword-and-sorcery would later try to be, but usually failed at. All-time favorite Dunsany, though, isn't S&S at all: "Kith of the Elf-Folk".
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Date: 2008-11-06 11:36 am (UTC)