Since I finished watching The Terror I've been thinking about "The Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to The Terror Pipeline" (cf. Tumblr user pudentilla). I came to the show because a number of people I followed for JSAMN posts were also posting about The Terror, and naturally I was like, dudes on ships looking very cold and rather gay, what is this. Of course, I liked it immediately, but the reason for the "pipeline" still seemed fuzzy.
I joined this conversation about Tuunbaq's role in the story--how The Terror would still be a great show without the demon bear, but his presence definitely adds a certain whatsit--but things didn't really crystallize for me until I was reading an article that discussed speculative fiction as a form of resistance to the Western, colonialist, capitalist, masculinist model of literature that is often unfortunately dubbed "realist" fiction.
It would be easy to write The Terror as a "realist" narrative about the doomed Franklin expedition. All you do is take out Tuunbaq. It would still be excellent. And yet Tuunbaq--the entity that turns the story into speculative fiction--is the force that overwhelms the entire Western, colonialist, capitalist, masculinist enterprise.
I was fascinated by the end of Mr. Hickey: on the one hand, he appears to reject his native culture in favor of reinventing himself as a wild cannibal shaman of the frozen north. On the other hand, everything about what Hickey wants/tries to do is colonialist, exploitative, and driven by the urge to dominate. He fantasizes that he's connecting with Tuunbaq, but he doesn't understand it at all. And then it eats his face.
That was the fantasy moment that made me think ohhhh, what a beautiful connection. Magic in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is always and forever the enemy of colonialist, capitalist, masculinist domination. Lots of other people have blogged about this (recently @fluentisonus, good stuff), and I won't rehash that in detail here. But in JSAMN, magic puts itself into the hands of a Black man, servants, women, people who reject conquest and domination as a way of living. It rescues and sustains those people (like Tuunbaq brings Silna a nice fat seal). But those who would use it to dominate others, it utterly crushes.
tl;dr: 1) The Terror isn't The Terror without Tuunbaq; 2) I rode the JSAMN to The Terror Pipeline and I think I get it now
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This is the first time it has clicked for me that very likely, Childermass sends Lady Pole to Starecross not to fulfil his promised favour to John Segundus, but because he knows that Segundus is as sensitive to magic as himself, and so is bound to notice that Lady Pole walks half in Faerie. Childermass knows that it'll be difficult for him to investigate this mystery himself once the lady is sent into seclusion, so he sends her to Segundus so that he will be tempted to continue to unravel the mystery on Childermass' behalf, although he won't know that's what he's doing. And also, I suspect, Childermass figures placing her with timid Mr Segundus means Childermass will get access to the lady if he wants it later. In that case, he has forgotten that while timid, John Segundus is not spineless.
By the way, how very lucky it is that just when a madhouse is needed, Mr Segundus has a vision that inspires him to open one at Starecross. What an incredible coincidence. Not Childermass' doing at all. Nope. He's never manipulated John Segundus in his life. Doesn't sound like him. Couldn't be.
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Strange Ideas About Magic
Random thought that just smacked me on the back of the head:
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is about neurodivergence, its different forms, how it can be utilised, and how acceptable it is in society (including who is allowed to exhibit traits of it), using magic as a metaphor.
(I’ll be talking about the books here – I don’t think that the TV show really captured this.)
Strange is almost a caricature of ADHD: fast-thinking; leaves everything to the last minute; very easily distracted; creative; extremely fast skills acquisition; hyperfixates then wanders off.
Norrell is full-on autist cliché: everything has to be neat and orderly, done in the correct fashion; he does not understand “normal people” (and doesn’t really want to) and his social skills are vestigial at best; precise, obsessive; given to infodumping; fearful of and resistant to change. When he finds someone he can actually talk to about his passions, he falls for them hard.
Magical experiences are described using synaesthesia a great deal, senses blending in ways that those who aren’t used to it find either exhilarating or distressing.
Fairies are described, essentially, as having a very intense set of neurodivergent traits, including their relationships with animals and objects, let alone their sensory differences from humanity, how less tethered they are to linear time, etc., though their lack of comprehension/ appreciation for normal/ human needs is taken to an extreme that appears cruel (and sometimes is deliberately, in the cases of some of the more powerful beings like The Gentleman With The Thistledown Hair).
The Raven King makes up his own language, for example, and I’ve lost count of how many ND people of my acquaintance (including me) have done that.
Even the book, with its many footnotes, uses a nested explanations/ off-shooting narrative/ presentation that is vastly reminiscent of the communication styles (and thought pathways) of many ND people (again, myself included)...
Then there’s the social acceptability factor: rich, white men are permitted the eccentricity of magical obsession and use of the skills that come with innate brain difference. They are given the time and space to study and perfect their use of said traits. Their personality differences are excused as eccentricity. Its potential is literally weaponised by the government and by e.g. Wellington (who advises that corralling a magician requires set goals, frequent check-ins, and supervision by/ support from “normal” people), though they struggle to think how to use magicians in peacetime. (I’m reminded here of e.g. wartime codebreakers (especially women) who found themselves unwanted by the establishment afterwards.)
It’s massively frowned on in working class people, women, and people of colour at the time of the novel. The fairies’ more intense level of divergence (and thereby superior strength and talent) is utilised by said rich, white men, but scorned as both uncomfortably exotic and too indulgent compared to what is acceptable in rich, white, academic men with milder presentation. Lady Pole’s experience is seen as hysteria. Steven Black has to mask daily, and both grow increasingly tired and misanthropic as a result. Working-class Childermass is talented, perceptive, and knowledgeable about magic, but never granted the title “magician”. Similarly, Vinculus, with all his genetic burden and talent, is not permitted the learning that might elevate him to respectability (and even then, that might only be possible post-Norrell). He is, as Childermass points out (seemingly unaware of the irony), the polar opposite of all the academic, unmagical gentlemen magicians. The tipping point between where being able to perceive reality differently is “useful” versus “a disability” is subtly woven into all sorts of parts of the book, including the various discussions about societal perceptions and treatments of “insanity”, etc. (Of particular interest is Strange’s decision to deliberately induce a form of psychosis in himself in order to alter his perceptions.)
Consider even the more “enlightened” attitudes of Strange and his pupils – Tom Levy, the more talented, non-noble, Jewish student is, on the surface, accepted despite (or because?) of the controversy of doing so, yet treated by the other students as a (usefully bright) servant. Strange (for the most part refreshingly gender-blind/ aware of the restrictions placed on women and firmly against that hypocrisy) frets that tedious social rules means that he cannot teach women without a female chaperone, yet takes the easier path of not going out of his way to find one.
And magical talent/ perception is given a different scope in the “modern”, “enlightened” times of the book in the early 19th century from how much more commonplace and acceptable it was across more social strata and genders in Mediaeval times.
I’ve been obsessed with these books since 2008, and only just seeing this parallel explicitly and consciously now is making my brain explode a bit.
Knowing my luck, I’m probably vastly behind other fandom takes on this, but I felt I just had to write it all out of my head. What are other people’s thoughts on this?
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