Notes on Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” (2004)

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It seems clear to me that Clarke’s Strange & Norrell is a major work of 21st-century Fantasy, which, since I’m presently writing a ‘History of Fantasy’, means I’m going to have to account for it, to find a place for it in my larger narrative. To locate it, in other words, in a tradition of Fantasy writing that is, broadly speaking, unlike it: lots and lots of Tolkien-derivative medevialised heroic fantasy-adventure-quest-war tomes, wizards-elves-dwarfs-and-orcs D&D-campaigns-written-out-as-prose. Some of these are better than others, of course, but a great many are — not: extruded commercial product, rubbish prose, Pelions of cliché piled on Ossas of cliché. Or, in some cases, promising first volumes of trilogies that have gotten away from their authors and danced crazily off into wastelands of dozens of volumes of endless worldbuilding and horror-vacui magic-systems and mary-sue wish-fulfilment characters. Bad fanfic that has worked its way into the public domain (I don’t say so to diss fanfic, which can be excellent — but it also can, we all know, be very bad).

Strange & Norrell is not like that, not just in terms of quality, but in terms of focus and approach. It is a lovingly pastiched Regency or Early Victorian novel, disposed into three volumes (though sold as one 1000-page book), telling in leisurely, detailed fashion the story of two English gentleman-magicians, bookish, pedantic, middle-aged introvert Norrell and more adventurous, outgoing, younger and more dashing Strange. Both aim to ‘restore’ English magic — for in the world of the novel, what was once a major part of English life has fallen into desuetude, a matter of merely antiquarian interest. Bibliophile stay-at-home Norrell comes from that book-learning tradition, although he also possesses a large natural innate magical ability. Strange is more intuitive, more self-taught, and though he does consult (and by the end of the story, has written) books, the contrast in characters between the two titular deuteragonists is a large part of the charm of the novel.

Once, long ago, John Uskglass, ‘the Raven King’, ruled three kingdoms, one of which stretched across northern England (the other two were in Fairyland and in Hell). Back then, magic was common, and fairy interventions (mischievous, destructive, rarely helpful) in human affairs widespread. Now Uskglass has abandoned this world — or so it seems — and a disenchanted bourgeois materialist Church-of-England modernity is the logic of the novel’s world: disenchanted in the Weberian sense of the word. Norrell, by dint of intensive study amongst books of lost magical lore (combined with his innate talent) has restarted magic as a practical, rather than just a theoretical, business. He comes to London to offer his services to the realm during the darkest days of the Napoleonic war. Strange comes later (it’s characteristic of Clarke’s approach as a writer that she holds off introducing this title character until we’re more than 200 pages in): his gift more spontaneous, although he does become Norrell’s apprentice, or assistant, for a while to learn what he can. More adventurous and outgoing than his friend, Strange accepts the governmental commission to travel to Ibera and assist the Duke of Wellington with his campaign against the French.

Various recurring characters and subplots thread the larger story of Strange and Norrell’s coming together and falling out. In one plot-strand, Sir Walter Pole begs Norrell to use his magic to bring his fiancé — young, beautiful, untimely-dead — back to life. Norrell does this by striking a deal with a powerful fairy, known only as ‘the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair’ (basically, this character is David Bowie from Labyrinth). Lady Pole will be reanimated if Norrell agrees that she live half her life as a human and the remaining half in the fairy realm. Thinking this would at least give Lady Pole several decades of human living — and judging this to be better than death — Norrell agrees. But the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair has tricked him. The half-and-half deal runs concurrently, not consecutively. Lady Pole lives her days in London, but every night she is compelled to journey to fairyland, where she must dance at endless balls in the Gentleman’s fairy-mansion of Lost Hope. She does not enjoy this. During waking hours she grows listless, despairing, half-dead, unable (because of enchantment) to tell her living companions what she goes through.

In another plot-strand, the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair takes a liking to Sir Walter’s butler, Stephen Black. He compliments Black on his physical beauty and demeanour and promises to make him King of England. Black, though always courteous, is increasingly ill-at-ease in the Gentleman’s company. He declines the offer, but must accept the many extravagant gifts the Gentleman bestows upon him, which clutter his servant’s quarters.

The overall story is very leisurely in its development and is hospitable to many digressions and inset-tales, plenty of these latter appearing in the — often very lengthy — footnotes. Some foot-of-the-page notes are brief, but others run on for many thousands of words, leaving the main text a thin dribble of larger font across the top of the page. But this is OK. The footnotes contain some of the most charming and ingenious stories of enchantment and mishap, of fairy-adventure and uncanny living. And the larger structure of the whole is episodic: a series of magic spells and their consequences.

Although there’s much magic in the novel — the book is in large part about magic — there is no single magic ‘system’ that applies. Some spells are simply executed: for example, a book is placed in front of a mirror and the physical object swapped with its reflection, just like that. Other spells require convoluted and bizarre performances. Late in the novel the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair desires to find out ‘Stephen Black’s real name — for Stephen, a man of African heritage, was sold into slavery at an early age before ending up in England (as a servant, not a slave, though the Gentleman can’t understand the distinction). To that end the Gentleman needs to enact a complex spell: he must locate certain planks from a ship, now sunken, plus a particular pearl necklace, and also a certain garment and finally he must find the magical essence of a particular kiss. None of this is easy: the planks have been salvaged and are now part of a poor man’s house (the Gentleman burns this down, killing the occupant, and takes the ashes). To get the necklace he strangles the French Revolutionary official who happens to be trying it on. The garment has been repurposed as the counterpane for an old woman’s bed, which the Gentleman takes, leaving her to freeze to death. The kiss is the most troublesome of all: it had been taken by a man hanged several years earlier, but it had been transferred from him to all the women he kissed before dying, requiring the Gentleman to kill each of them to draw enough of the kiss’s essence together.

Not all the magic is as ruthless in its operation as this. Indeed, a major moral theme of the novel is the question of using magic to harm. In what is probably the most famous line from the novel, the Duke of Wellington, at war in Iberia, asks Strange how deadly his powers are:

“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.

Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.” [JS&MN, 389]

I’ll come back to this. Indeed, Strange himself comes back to it — after Napoleon’s defeat, exile on Elba and return, Strange rejoins the army at Waterloo. Trapped in the farmhouse at Quatre-Bras he observes the carnage around him: ‘“there must come a time when the musket balls and cannon shot is run out,” he thought. “And if we all die, every one of us, who will they say has won?”’ A cuirassier gallops at him, raising his sabre to strike Strange down, and ‘Strange raised his other hand to smash horse and horseman out of existence. Then he froze. “And can a magician kill a man by magic?” the Duke had asked. And he had answered, “A magician might, but a gentleman never could.” [JS&MN, 577]

But for now, I’m interested in Uskglass. Norrell and Strange become friends, of a kind, although the former would rather stay home a read a book than do anything else (I’m with him on this) where Strange is not only younger and better looking but more sociable and engaged. They fall out over the nature of magic itself. Strange believes, as he says in the article he publishes, that ‘it is John Uskglass’s magic that we do’ [532] and that the future of magic in England depends upon allying with fairyland and recuperating Uskglass. To Norrell this idea is obnoxious. He concedes that Uskglass may have originated magic, but Norrell’s vision is of a reformed, clarified, fairy-purged magical future. As Strange puts it, in the book he writes (The History and Practice of English Magic, John Murray, London, 1816): ‘it is the contention of Mr Norrell of Hanover-square that everything belonging to John Uskglass must be shaken out of modern magic, as one would shake moths and dust out of an old coat. What does he imagine he will have left? If you get rid of John Uskglass you will be left holding the empty air.’

Who, what, is Uskglass? Not the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair, though the novel teases us with the thought that he might be (Uskglass himself appears briefly, I would say, as a stranger in vol 3 of the novel). His name combines Usk + Glass: the first portion of the surname deriving from the Old Norse œskja, ‘to wish’ (there are similar œsk- and æsk- words in Icelandic and Old German; the Old English wȳsċan and Modern English ask are cognates). This name, then, means: ‘John Mirror-wish’. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is replete with looking-glasses and mirrors. Lady Pole is oppressed by the mirror in her room. Strange vistas are sometimes glimpsed in mundane looking-glasses. Strange uses magic to travel from place to place via mirrors. Mirrors are what a more modern Fantasy might call ‘portals’. Wishing-glasses.

Mirror are, as Lacan says, sites of simultaneous recognition and misrecognition. We look at ourselves in a looking-glass and recognise ourselves, although what we are seeing is not ourselves but an inverted image of ourselves, a spectre of which we are re-cogniscant. The full Lacan entails the ontological instability of establishing this misrecognition as the basis of our sense of self. Clarke’s apparently expansive and episodic text actually does a series of tightly-controlled and interesting things with doubling, mirroring, reflection (and self-reflection). It’s a book with two similar but dissimilar characters named on its title page. Various characters have their paired antagonists, animas, shadows. England is at war with France (Dickens, one of Clarke’s inspirations, does something similar in terms of uncanny doubling, of resurrection and strange afterlives, in his England-France novel A Tale of Two Cities). Our world is mirrored by fairyland and, perhaps most importantly, modernity — which is where we live — is mirrored by and shadowed by elder times.

Broadly the dynamic here is: magic is the pre-modern logic that has, largely, been superseded and has passed away into history, a matter of dryasdust antiquarian researching (until Norrell resurrects it). The Regency world of Strange & Norrell is, in Weber’s sense, disenchanted; or more precisely is a disenchanted world into which enchantment is, marginally, variously, sometimes dangerously and disruptively, reinserting itself.

This relates the novel directly to the larger thesis of my History of Fantasy: namely that Fantasy as such is all about reenchanting our disenchanted world, about the pluses and minuses of living nowadays by what Charles Taylor calls ‘buffered consciousness’. It’s more comfortable to live in a world not interpenetrated with supernatural forces, ghosts and demons, sinister elves in the wild-wood just beyond the edge of town, magic in the water and so on. ‘We’ don’t have to worry about being possessed by devils or our children being snatched by fairies and replaced with changelings. But we have lost something too — the wonder, the glamour, the thrill of living in such a place. We yearn, perhaps, for that. And Fantasy addresses that yearning, in (this is Alan Jacobs argument, which I am shamelessly stealing) a ‘safe’ form. JS&MN gives us the charm and appeal of its ‘modern’ Regency world, and also gives us myriad moments of enchantment, wonder and terror. The world of the latter increasingly encroaches upon the former. Our buffered selves are again rendered porous.

The distinction comes from Charles Taylor’s big book A Secular Age (2007), and I’m thinking in particular of an excellent essay by Alan Jacobs called ‘Fantasy and the Buffered Self’ [The New Atlantis 41 (2014), 3–18] that unpacks some of the implications of Taylor’s idea. Really the whole essay is worth reading, but I’m going to pull out a few bits. Here’s Taylor on the porous/buffered distinction:

Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.

And here is Jacobs’ persuasive gloss on the idea:

To put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.

The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).

I quote this at length because it seems to me so interesting. Jacobs’ thesis is that a kind of yearning back to porosity, and its attendant enchantments, is behind the great contemporary vogue for Fantasy:

Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.

In this sense Strange & Norrell is, as it were, ‘about’ modernity as such. John Aubrey once wrote that ‘the divine art of printing and gunpowder have frightened away Robin Goodfellow and the Fayries.’

Belle Waring argues along these lines:

But the moment Clarke has chosen to begin her novel of hidden histories is significant because it marks almost precisely the moment we, today, identify as the beginning of modernity, or the emergence of a world we can imagine inhabiting. 1800 is the veil behind which everything before disappears into the truly unknowable. Before 1800 there is impenetrable religious dogma and the war of all against all. After it, there’s Jane Austen and the specialization of labour. It is the moment of the birth of the modern novel, economics, nationalism, industrialization, childhood and the rule of law. [Waring ‘The Claims of History’, Crooked Timber (Nov 29 2005)]

I might peg the changes she identifies as starting a little earlier than 1800, but there certainly were changes, and the novel is ‘about’ that. But rather than zeroing-in on industrialisation or economics, I’m proposing something deeper-buried, though something still a shaping influence, something still present in English modernity: the Reformation. What the respectable, bourgeois, reformed English Protestantism of Clarke’s Regency world sees when it looks in the mirror is: the glamorous, romantic, dangerous antique Catholicism it once was. That’s what ‘magic’ is in this book: a kind of Catholicism — which Norrell wishes to reform, to rid of supernatural and priestly and enchanted gubbins (a thumbnail definition of the Protestant Reformation as such) and which Strange wishes to restore in something like its original form. Both men are gentlemen, but Norrell is a bourgeois gentleman — which is to say, a Protestant — and Strange, though also notionally CofE, is a touch more aristocratic, a smidgeon more cavalier (or Cavalier), more sympathetic to the old ways.

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I say so because it articulates my thesis about ‘Fantasy’ as such, and so positions Strange & Norrell in its broader tradition. Let me say a bit about that. My larger argument, that Fantasy as a mode is a response to Weberian disenchantment, contains within it a more specific argument about the origins of generic Fantasy — in the nineteenth-century and after, in Victorian medievalism and Arthurian literature, in the romances of William Morris, in Wagner’s opera and then in the burst of fantastical writing that followed the shocked disillusionment with modernity occasioned by the First World War (Dunsany, Eddison, Mirrlees, Graves, Jones) — feeding through into the writing of Tolkien and Lewis, who read and were influenced by all this, and who then enjoyed a success and reach that jump-started the Fantasy boom of the last sixty years or so. This makes Fantasy a late Romantic or more precisely a late post-Romantic cultural phenomenon.

‘We’ tend to think of commercial Fantasy nowadays as something written in imitation of Tolkein, or in Grimdarkian opposition to, Tolkien (which amounts to the same thing), in the sense that we locate many of the continuing tropes and fittings of Fantasy out of The Lord of the Rings, and are carrying these on, or interrogating or reworking them, when we write Fantasy today. The continuing popularity of Tolkien, in book and film (and video game) reinforces this. Indeed, one worry I have, in writing my History of Fantasy, is that my own fanboy relationship to Tolkien, reading him over and over as a kid (and continuing so to do as an adult), means I will be liable to over-emphasise his importance to the mode. But that would, in fairness, be hard to do. Of course there is ‘more’ to Fantasy than Tolkien. Strange & Norrell, for one, looks like a very unTolkien-y sort of Fantasy novel.

My thoughts on all this were helped immensely by reading Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (2015). Williamson argues that what we tend to think of as Fantasy nowadays is actually the creation of Lin Carter’s ‘Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series’ (1965–1974), a string of sword & sorcery books published to cash-in on the then-new vogue for Tolkien. The initial slate of titles, with original publication dates and Ballantyne release dates added, was as follows:

1. The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien ([1937] August 1965)
2. The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien ([1954] October 1965)
3. The Two Towers, J. R. R. Tolkien ([1954] October 1965)
4. The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien ([1955] December 1965)
5. The Tolkien Reader, (September 1966)
6. The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison ([1922] April 1967)
7. Mistress of Mistresses, E. R. Eddison ([1935] August 1967)
8. A Fish Dinner in Memison, E. R. Eddison ([1941] February 1968)
9. The Road Goes Ever On, J. R. R. Tolkien and Donald Swann ([1967) October 1968)
10. Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake ([1946] October 1968)
11. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake ([1950] October 1968)
12. Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake ([1959] October 1968)
13. A Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay ([1920) November 1968)
14. The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle ([1968] February 1969)
15. A Fine and Private Place, Peter S. Beagle ([1960] February 1969)
16. Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham, J. R. R. Tolkien ([1960, 1949] March 1969)
17. Tolkien: A Look Behind “The Lord of the Rings”, Lin Carter (March 1969)
18. The Mezentian Gate, E. R. Eddison ([1958] April 1969)

Very Tolkien-heavy, as you can see. This was actually the list before Lin Carter was hired as editor; it went on, under him, to add another 65 titles (including more Tolkien).

In The Evolution of Modern Fantasy Williamson persuasively argues that Carter did for the fantasy canon what Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler had done with their ‘Great Books’ series, effectively codifying a list of canonical ‘great’ works that ended up ‘homogenizing’ what we think of as Fantasy (‘a sort of timeless Platonic Form, involving magic and invented preindustrial worlds’ is how he puts it). One consequence of this, Williamson suggests, is a comprehensive misreading of earlier works of Fantasy that comes from ‘viewing pre-genre fantasy through a postgenre lens’. Pre-Ballantine, Williamson thinks, Fantasy actually drew on the traditions of Romantic antiquarianism.

One of the remarkable things about Clarke’s Strange and Norrell is the success with which she looks back, past this Tolkienian heroic mode of Fantasy, to the earlier ‘antiquarian’ mode. Williamson has interesting things to say about the antiquarian movement, which included some actual scholars and antiquarians but also pseudo-antiquarians like James Macpherson/Ossian, in effect inventing a new way of writing stories: an elegiac, archaic style, the discovery of the past in the present, ballads and other things embedded in the main body of the work as expressive revenants of a notionally older culture, lots of footnotes and appended essays on context. Williamson argues that these were adopted as methods to enhance verisimilitude by what he calls ‘literary fantasists’ like Morris and Tolkien. Why does Williamson think that the modern genre, post-Ballantine Fantasy, has turned its back on this older tradition? He argues it shows a genre ‘in retreat from the revolutionary intentions of many of the Romantics.’ I’m not sure about that explanation, to be honest. But it strikes me as the right context to read Clarke. For myself, I read Strange and Norrell as not just an intensely English but an intensely Protestant book. If we take, as this study does, Fantasy (both Williamson’s older tradition and the post-Tolkien Lin Carter welter of material) as really being about enchantment, or more specifically about re-enchantment— the deployment of magic not so much as a pseudo-scientific system but more as an affect, a vibe, a hairs-standing-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck-ness: of charm in the strong sense, of glamour, of transcendence and wonder.

Another way of saying this would be to say: it’s not just that modern Fantasy is post-Romantic (in the sense of being post-Grimms’-tales, post Gothic, post Coleridge’s Mariner and Kubla Khan: though these things do all feed through into the modern mode) but more specifically that Fantasy is post-Walter-Scott. People talk about Strange & Norrell as Jane Austen-esque, and it clearly is. But it is also, in many ways, a very Walter-Scott-ish piece of writing.

So: Scott. The fact that nobody really reads Scott any more can disguise just how huge he once was, just how central a shaping influence he had on the 19th-century novel. As I have said before, everybody read Scott back then. He was the first global superstar of the novel. It’s the Rule 34 of 19th-century literary studies: Everybody read Scott, no exceptions. Henry Crabb Robinson was always reading Scott; going through all the novels and, when he finished Castle Dangerous (1831), immediately starting again with Waverley (1815) in an endless loop. Dickens’s great dream, when he began writing fiction, was to do what Scott did. According to the old story, which may be apocryphal, though one hopes not, the Russian ambassador to the Court of Saint James assumed Scotland had been named after Scott, to honour her most famous son. Tolkien certainly read Scott, because everyone of his generation with any interest in literature read Scott — and, as I shall go on to argue, you can see that fact, imprinted on Tolkien’s own writing.

I still think the best reading of Scott is Lukács’s in The Historical Novel (1937 in Russian, 1962 in English translation). For Lukács Walter Scott is the paradigmatic historical novelist, not because he was the first person to write a historical novel (he wasn’t), nor because he was in his day very popular and influential (he was, but that’s not what interests Lukács). Rather he identifies in Scott’s Waverley novels a dramatisation of the dynamic of history as such.

The typical Scott novel goes like this: there’s a protagonist not in himself notable or important, a (fictional) individual living at a time of historical flux, and he meets various (real, historical) characters in the course of his peregrinations. Generally this individual — let’s call him ‘Waverley’, after the protagonist of Scott’s first and series-naming novel — is torn between supporting the old and supporting the new. The old is the romantic, thrilling, charismatic, often Catholic but outmoded and unviable past; the new is the practical, bourgeois, usually Protestant, in many ways unappealing but viable and inevitable present-future. In Waverley this dyad is: the romantic, doomed Catholic Jacobites on the one hand and the Protestant Hanoverian succession on the other, the latter fated to win. Waverley ‘wavers’ between the two, hence his name: drawn first to the cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie, he ends the novel a respectable Hanoverian-supporting laird. And, with variations and tweaks, that’s the basic Scott paradigm for all his novels.

What Lukács thinks important about this is that Scott (though he wrote decades before Marx) intuitively grasped that history is a dialectical process by which older social-cultural theses come into conflict with antithetical present-day forces and are sublated into a synthetic future. That, in other words, Scott is writing about the dynamic of history itself, and his stories and characters are there to illustrate that dynamic. Scott’s historical periods are always in flux, always illustrative of process, rather than being static period backdrops. ‘Through the plot of the historical novel,’ says Lukács, ‘at whose centre stands the hero, a neutral ground is sought and found upon which the extreme, opposing social forces can be brought into a human relation with one another.’ Where Shakespeare’s histories (say) focused on figures of world-historical importance like kings and caesars, Scott’s protagonists were ordinary people, removed from the centres of historical power. But in Scott’s novels, the big names of history ‘can never be central figures of the action. The important leading figure, who embodies an historical movement, necessarily does so at a certain level of abstraction. Scott, by first showing the complex and involved character of popular life itself, creates this being which the leading figure then has to generalize and concentrate in an historical deed.’ Accordingly ‘the struggles and antagonisms of history are best represented by “mediocre” heroes who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent social trends and historical forces.’ In this context, ‘it matters little whether individual details, individual facts are historically correct or not … Detail is only a means of achieving historical faithfulness, for making concretely clear the historical necessity of a concrete situation.’ At the same, time, Lukács insists that historical fiction written entirely ‘from below’, dealing only with proletarian experience without any middle class or aristocratic characters, cannot capture the totality of historical experience as such. And here we are.

Imagine a novel about history — although a made-up history, of an imaginary land — that focuses on a time of crux, a time of war and peril, when history as such is turning. A novel that focuses not on the mighty kings and princes or their antagonists, but upon a middling-character, a Waverley figure drawn to the dead past (the world of the elves) yet destined to commit to the more respectable, less glamorous world of bourgeois modernity.

So, yes: Lord of the Rings is a very Scottian novel. I’ve been rereading Scott lately and am often put in mind of Tolkien’s fictional praxis: the discursive style, the inset ballads and poems, the way a texture of lived-experience is created, but most of all the central shape — a middling character who leaves his comfortable English home, in part motivated by imaginative curiosity about more romantic, older modes of life, and who gets caught up in the Great Events of the Day, which turn out to be the hinge upon which History itself turns. The narrative in both Waverley and LotR is a there-and-back-again journey, through a landscape peopled with various different tribes (in Scott: English, Borderers, Lowland Scots, Highlanders) and different idioms and, in some cases, languages; the descriptions of mountains and battles, above all the elegiac sense of an old world passing away. This is to talk in general terms, but there are also some fingerprint specifics: it seems clear to me that Tolkien’s Black Riders owe much to the terrifying Swartz-reiters from Quentin Durward (1823), and that the episode of the Fellowship crossing, or trying to cross, the snow-peaked mountain called Caradhras is Tolkien remembering and reworking a very similar episode from Scott’s Anne of Geierstein (1829). Click on those two links if you want to see the argument laid out in more detail, with, as they say, receipts.

But I’m more interested here in the larger case. Tolkien was a respectable Catholic English gentleman of the twentieth-century. He enjoyed the benefits of modern denistry and central heating and pipe-tobacco, he drove a Morris Cowley and yearned for a typewriter in which the keys permitted him to type-out Elvish script. At the same time, Tolkien’s imagination was captivated by a world that had departed: a feudal warrior culture, a pre-modern logic, a time of magic and glamour, of in a word enchantment. Tolkien’s novel, with its respectable unmagical bourgeois hobbits moving through a more ancient enchanted world that is passing away. Another way of framing Lukacs’ argument about Scott would be to bring-in Henry Sumner Maine’s ‘from status to contract’ argument as a way of thinking through what Scott’s novels, and the nineteenth-century novel as such, are doing. Dickens, himself wholly schooled by Scott, moves across his career from the former — Oliver Twist is defined by his status, not his circumstances; ostensibly a penniless orphan he in fact has innate nobility, and is recognised as such by all around — to the latter: in a clear sense that’s what Bleak House is ‘about’, the nightmare hypertrophy of ‘the contract’ as constitutive of who we are in society and life. Tolkien is also interested in the feudal logic of ‘status’ and the modern world of binding contracts. In one sense the writing on the One Ring constitutes a kind of terrible contract, one that binds the wearer (the ring is a band, a word that derives from the same etymological source as bind).

Insofar as Tolkien and his peculiar fascinations have shaped subsequent imitative or reactive writers of Fantasy, these fascinations continue to inform the mode, even today. By its nature Fantasy looks back to an enchanted past of one kind or another, and navigates the gap between that ancient glamour and modern Weberian disenchantment. Quite often the as-it-were structural violence of this state of affairs is parleyed, with a kind of dead-eyed literalism, into in-story violence, sometimes egregiously so. Tolkien is not violent in the manner you’ll find at the other end of that link. And Clarke is very much not writing in that grisly, bone-crunching mode.

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:3:

Still, Strange & Norrell is, amongst other things, a war story. But it’s a war story of a very particular kind. We could compare Naomi Novik’s popular series of Napoleonic fantasy novels: starting with Temeraire (2006; titled His Majesty’s Dragon in the US) and followed by Throne of Jade (2006), Black Powder War (2006), Empire of Ivory (2007), Victory of Eagles (2008), Tongues of Serpents (2010), Crucible of Gold (2012), Blood of Tyrants (2013) and League of Dragons (2016). Novik is evidently not a writer who has suffered the kind of writer’s block that has afflicted Clarke. The early nineteenth-century of these novels is just like the actual early nineteenth-century, rather oddly so, considering the fact that in this world dragons are real. They come from various parts of the world. The titular Temeraire is a Chinese dragon although born in Britain and raised by a British officer. This premise enables Novik to write Napoleonic battle scenes that include air-forces, crewed dragons swooping through the sky, steered by pilots whilst sharp-shooters hang from leather straps and try to aim their rifles. The dragons can also, being dragons, spit fire from their mouths. Exciting stuff!

The other officers shuddered all around and nodded; few things were as deadly to a ship as uncontrolled fire upon her deck. ‘I was on the Goliath myself,’ Laurence went on. ‘We were not half a mile distant from the Orient when she went up, like a torch; we had shot out her deck-guns and mostly cleared her sharpshooters from the tops, so the dragon could strafe her at will.’ He fell silent, remembering; the sails all ablaze and trailing thick plumes of black smoke; the great orange-and-black beast diving down and pouring still more fire from its jaws upon them, its wings fanning the flames; the terrible roaring that was only drowned out at last by the explosion. He had been in Rome once as a boy, and there seen in the Vatican a painting of Hell by Michelangelo, with dragons roasting the damned souls with fire; it had been very like. [Novik, Temeraire (2006), 40–41]

But the premise of the series is that both the British and the French have dragons. Because obviously, if one side had dragons and the other didn’t, the side with dragons would win. (Indeed one of the points of the later novels is that a dragon plague from North America puts many of the British dragons out of commission, which enables Napoleon to press his advantage and invade Britain, pushing the English army back to Scotland).

This is not the set-up in Strange & Norrell. There is a revival of magic in England but not in France. ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, it was said, was scouring France to find a magician of his own — but with no success’ [S&N, 135]. Why should this be? (I mean, I have what I think is the answer to this question: it has to do with the fact that France, having expelled or massacred all its Protestants, is a Catholic nation, and England is not.) But doesn’t the fact that the British Army can draw upon a powerful magician tip the scales comprehensively on their side? Abbreviate the war?

It seems not. The first act of what we can call ‘military magic’ is performed by Norrell. He conjures a magical armada that blockades the French fleet at Brest, ‘arriving in a single instant out of an empty sea. The ships were all ships of the line, heavily armed, two- and three-decked warships.’ [S&N, 128] The French fleet is immobilised for a week and a half until some enterprising French officers row-out and discover the truth:

They could see how the sunlight shone through [the ships] and made them colourless until they were just a faint sparkle upon the water. “Glass,” said the Admiral. It was clever Perroquet who hit upon the truth. “No my Admiral, it is the rain. They are made of rain.”

As the rain fell from the heavens it the drops were made to flow together to form solid masses — pillars and beams and sheets, which someone had shaped to the likeness of a hundred ships … Being ships of rain they made no sound at all — no creaking of timber, no slap of sail in the wind, no call of sailor to his mate. Several times groups of smooth-faced men of rain came to the ship’s rail to gaze out at the wooden ship and its crew of flesh-and-blood men, but what the rain-sailors were thinking no one could tell. [133]

These rain-sailors are marvellous creations, but the fact remains: what material benefit, in terms of Britain’s war-aims, does this magic trick do? Clarke tells us that Norrell was widely celebrated in England:

Everyone it seemed was delighted with what Mr Norrell had done. A large part of the French Navy had been tricked into remaining in port for eleven days and during that time the British had been at liberty to sail about the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel just as it pleased, and a great many things had been accomplished. [135]

Big whoop-de-doo, I guess. I mean, come on: eleven days is nothing in a war lasting many years, especially for ships that might manage 4 knots on a good day. Still, it’s a cool trick.

So what can an English magician actually do? Strange, in Portugal and Spain with Wellington, performs various things: he renders rough and difficult roads smooth and passable; he terrifies enemy troops with conjured apparitions of dragons and angels in the sky; he brings dead French soldiers and Italian mercenaries back to life to interrogate them for useful military intelligence, and various other things.

What are the limits of his powers? Well, in Iberia he shifts the course of an entire river, to put Wellington’s army on the advantageous bank. And before Waterloo, informed that Napoleon is threatening Brussels, he waves his hand and moves the entire city to the wilds of North America. The entire city! He later returns Brussels to its rightful situation, but this is a gesture to give one pause. If Strange can do so prodigious a thing, then why is there a war at all? This is greater potency than whole flocks of Novikian dragons. Why doesn’t Strange simply move the entire French army to Siberia, or Australia, or the moon? Well, the latter would kill them all, and we have seen that Strange is too much of a gentleman to relish the prospect of killing. But why not put the whole army to sleep, as in Sleeping Beauty? Make it so that Napoleon can only speak gibberish and so not communicate his orders? Turn all the French cannons to nougat and cannonballs to candy-floss? Why not simply cast a wish ‘the war ends now in English victory’?

It is as if magic, in this novel, is a marvellous phantom, capable of effecting the world in some ways, but mostly simply providing display, simulacra of things, rain-ships crewed by blank-faced rain sailors. Did Strange actually move the city of Brussels, physically transport it lock, stock and Belgian barrell to Indiana (or wherever)? Or did he only provide the appearance of doing so — a vacancy instead of a city and, for the inhabitants, a desert beyond the city limits through which Native American warriors ride? The archetype of magic, by this reading, would be the moment when Strange, in Norrell’s library, puts a book on a table in front of a mirror and then swaps physical object and reflection about. It is a novel of wishing-glasses, that ends, fittingly, with Strange and Norrell both trapped in some kind of mirror dimension, dark, and trying to magic their way to freedom. Clarke plans a sequel, but debilitated by long illness, she has not (two decades later) yet written it.

Late in the novel, Norrell conjures an invisible wall at the Kent coast ‘to protect the cliffs from erosion, people’s houses from storm, livestock from being swept away’. Lascelles, one of Norris’s associates, objects that, being invisible, nobody will know about it.

“Could you not have placed beacons at regular intervals to remind people that the magic wall is there? Burning flames hovering mysteriously over the face of the waters? Pillars shaped out of sea-water? Something of that sort?”

“Oh!” said Mr Norrell. “To be sure! I could create the magic illusions you mention. They are not at all difficult to do, but you must understand that they would be purely ornamental. They would not strengthen the magic in any particular way whatsoever. They would have no practical effect.”

“Their effects,” said Lascelles, severely, “would be to stand as a constant reminder to every onlooker of the works of the great Mr Norrell …”

“Indeed?” said Mr Norrell. He promised that in future he would always bear in mind the necessity of doing magic to excite the public imagination. [S&N, 885]

The novel tells us that magic has material benefits — not wars won, but a few animals saved from falling off the Dover cliffs — but it also tells us that what matters is not this, but the PR. The image of magic that impresses people, the phantasm of magic, rather than the ‘actuality’. If, as I am arguing, the kernel of all this is the doctrinal dispute at the core of the Reformation — that the Catholic priest (Catholic mass being a more performative, more theatrical and splendid occasion than a low-church Protestant churchgoing) does ‘actual’ magic when he transubstantiates bread and wine into flesh and blood. The Protestant vicar or pastor goes through the same performance, but it is just performance: the bread symbolises rather than literalises Christ’s body and so on. The Catholic doctrine says that Christ, body and blood, is a real presence in the eucharist. The senior magician in Clarke’s novel is a ‘no-real’ individual.

Paula Brown, in this article, argues that the magic of Strange & Norrell is ‘gnostic’

The vision of the novel is part of a Romantic version of Gnosticism that locates the divine within the human, a faith, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it, that “through me, God acts; through me, speaks” … I interpret Susanna Clarke’s novel as advancing a type of Gnostic mysticism that exposes the limitations of orthodoxy and of institutionalized spirituality. This Gnosticism is expressed in three ways: as an intuition of the divine source within the self; in a Manichean worldview, pitting a corrupt, natural world against a pure, unfallen world; and finally in the representation of an antagonistic trinity rather than the unified trinity of the Orthodox Church. [Paula Brown, ‘Gnostic Magic in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23:2 (2012), 239- 259]

I don’t agree. It doesn’t strike me as especially trinitarian novel — it’s much more interested in twos, in pairings and mirror-images than in threes — and I really don’t see that it advances a Blakean vision of the divine within the human, ‘through me God acts’. God hardly appears. It is, rather, a novel about the way social norms, the fronts we all put on, conventions and expectations, get disturbed, put out of true, vexed and miracled by the impossible. Strange’s wife, visiting Lady Pole, often sees the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair at Sir Walter Pole’s house, assuming he is merely a cohabitant, perhaps a servant. She realises only belatedly that nobody else (Lady Pole aside) can see him.

The sense that there is somebody else about, one person more than you can count, has always struck me as an acme of uncanny. T S Eliot read in an account of Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition ‘that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.’ He worked this into The Waste Land:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you? [Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), 359–65]

Later Eliot, after his conversion to Christianity, was minded to see this spectral figure as Jesus; but the spookiness here strikes me as less pious. On the fault line of Catholicism and Protestantism in England, the original performances of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus encompassed just such a moment. Here’s Charles Nicholl:

Marlowe’s Dr Faustus was an Elizabethan spine-chiller. People came for thrills, and early productions pulled out all the stops to provide them. ‘Shagge-hayred devills’ ran ‘roaring over the stage with squibs in their mouthes’. Drummers thundered backstage. Stage-hands hung aloft to ‘make artificiall lightning in their heavens’. At times the play seemed to generate a power more than dramatic. At one performance in Shoreditch the wooden walls of the theatre suddenly ‘crackt’ and ‘frighted the audience.’ At another, in Exeter, the players stopped dead in the middle of the conjuration scene, ‘for they were all perswaded there was one devell too many amongst them.’ They explained the situation to the audience, and said they ‘could go no further with this matter’. The audience promptly fled — ‘every man hastened to be first out of dores’ — and the players spent the night in unaccustomed prayer and meditation.

It seems to me relevant that this happened during a performance. The Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair is there but not there, glimpsed in mirrors or out of the corner of the eye; and he is a performer (again: I think of David Bowie in Labyrinth), someone who lives for courtly show, for dancing and balls and dressing-up and generally acting his role.

There’s also something at work in the novel to do with writing and printing. Norrell’s bibliomania, and the many inset texts (including, I think, the footnotes: but I mean things like the article Strange writes for The Edinburgh Review, which occupied a chapter entire) point up that this is a bookish book: our pleasure in reading a book that is often a book about books, is the pleasure of seeing reality mirrored in words, John Uksglass, on the other hand, is illiterate:

The Raven King had been brought up in a fairy house where there was no writing. He had [before coming to the human world] never seen writing before. His human servants shewed it to him and explained its purpose. But he was a young man, a very young man, perhaps no more than fourteen or fifteen years of age. He had already conquered kingdoms in two different worlds and he had all the magic that a magician could desire. He was full of arrogance and pride. He had no wish to read other men’s thoughts. What were other men’s thoughts compared to his own? So he refused to learn to read or write. [S&N, 398]

Daniel O’Keefe’s huge Marxist-historicist study Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic (1982) considers magic to be ‘real’, but also a function of discourse. His book opens with Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein considered language ‘a great mirror.’ It really does reflect what is there — especially what is there in society, in culture. When you begin studying something complicated, you can look at the phenomenon itself, or you can first look for its reflection in the great mirror. And we can see magic very clearly in the mirror of language. For magic is first of all a universal human idea, a concept so widespread and distinct that it is almost a “category of the human spirit,” like time, space and mass. [O’Keefe, 1]

His study opens with (fittingly) 13 ‘non-deductive’ postulates:

Postulate 1: Magic Is a Form of Social Action.

Postulate 2: Magic Social Action Consists of Symbolic Performances — and Linguistic Symbolism Is Central to Magic.

Postulate 3: Magical Symbolic Action Is Rigidly Scripted.

Postulate 4: Magical Scripts Achieve Their Social Effects Largely by Pre-Existing Or Prefigured Agreements.

Postulate 5: Magic Borrows Symbolism from Religion and Uses It to Argue with Religion in a Dialectic that Renews Religion.

Postulate 6: Logically, and in Some Observable Historical Sequences, Magic Derives from Religion Rather Than Vice Versa.

Postulate 7: Magic Is a Byproduct of the Projection of Society in Religion.

Postulate 8: Religion Is the Institution that Creates or Models Magic for Society.

9: Magic Tries to Protect the Self.

Postulate 10: Magic Helped Develop the Institution of the Individual.

Postulate 11: Magic, Especially Black Magic, Is An Index of Social Pressures on Selves and Individuals.

Postulate 12: Magic Persists as an Expression of Certain Aspects of Civilization.

Postulate 13: Magical Symbolism Travels Easily and Accumulates A History.

For O’Keefe, social structures and conventions like ‘the law’ and ‘money’ are iterations, in the first place, of magic. ‘Lawyers wear wigs; coins can cure disease when applied to the body.’ It’s not that money and therefore debt acquired first interpersonal potency and then magic (as it might be: people saying ‘this gold sovereign can be magically transformed into food, shelter, clothing — perhaps it has other magical properties too). No, O’Keefe is certain that money was first magic, and only afterwards become economic. In the words of Simon Shaffer, that ‘the power of money can be traced back to primitive magic poses quite a problem for contemporary economics from Keynes to Friedman.’ He quotes O’Keefe: ‘economic theory keeps having to revise itself because it keeps bumping into the magical properties of money which it prematurely excludes.’ ‘In coinage,’ O’Keefe claims, ‘states enter into a permanent alliance with individuals.’

This seems pertinent to a novel like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, insofar as it reproduces its Jane Austen inspiration: the key characters in the story are wealthy, and the origin or nature of functioning of their wealth is never deemed worth disclosing. It’s as if some people are just ‘naturally’ wealthy — and others, like former slave Stephen Black, are not. When I say ‘naturally’ there, I could with O’Keefe say ‘magically’: because, of course, in reality there’s nothing natural about it. Clarke engages this to some extent, in that Black, by the end of the book, kills the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair and departs for fairyland himself as the new owner of Lost-Hope. And there are some ‘street magicians’ who pretend to have magical powers, tell fortunes and practice prestidigitation, to earn money. But generally speaking wealth just is, in the novel; as it is in Mansfield Park or Pride and Prejudice. The vibe of the novel, its idiom, and we can be honest much of its charm, comes from this well-upholstered financial cushioning.

Likewise history. It is striking how little difference the introduction of magic makes to the historical timeline — not magic in the past, when a third of the kingdom was ruled by the Raven King (for English history has trundled along perfectly familiar lines to get to the way things were in ‘our’ history of the Regency period; and not magic in the novel’s presence, where all Strange and Norrell’s myriad magical interventions do not shift the lineaments of the Napoleonic wars one iota: the French driven from Iberia, Napoleon exiled to Elba, his return and defeat at Waterloo and so on. History, it seems, has real heft, real inertia, and magic, though it looks showy and impressive, is only a phantasmal addition to the inalterable course of events. But another way of putting this would be to say: history is magic, in an O’Keefian sense. It is history that does all the things that Strange and Norrell do in this book: lay roads, dispose navies and fight wars, make cities disappear and build cities in the wilderness and so on. Tony Tanner’s (pretty good, I think) book about Jane Austen summarises her fiction are articulating ‘a concern with the problem of how a true social order could be maintained’. This is also Clarke’s concern. Napoleon, we forget, was the product of the French Revolution, his authority pendant to the levelling, social-justice-y ambitions of that upheaval: the Code Napoléon is a more radical document than Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England after all. Norrell or Strange or both could have made the wish that distributed wealth equally amongst all citizenry, but they didn’t. That’s not what this novel is about.