I recently had a conversation with someone who shares my enthusiasm for, though in fact far exceeds my knowledge of, the fiction of Alan Garner, best known for five early works of children’s books but also more recent adult fiction. Afterwards, I wondered what it was that I find so attractive in his work aside from the element of mere nostalgia for my own childhood reading.
I think the answer turns on a notion of enchantment,
which is, nevertheless tricky to articulate. Of course, enchantment stands in a
relation to disenchantment and reenchantment and so it is helpful to note these
too. Below, I summarise the idea drawn from Max Weber and present two
reconstructions as to how disenchantment might be thought to follow from the
rise of natural science. I then set out the contemporary philosopher John
McDowell’s argument that nature needs to be partially re-enchanted and
show how minimal this is.
I then turn to Alan Garner and sketch how his fiction may
seem to serve, pro tem, to re-enchant nature through the idea of signs
signifying a hidden realm but in fact the real achievement is to reenchant the
surface appearance of the mundane world through a disrupted sense of
intransitive meaning.
Disenchantment and reenchantment
In 1917, Max Weber said:
The fate of our times is characterized
by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment
of the world.’ (Entzauberung der Welt). Precisely the ultimate and most sublime
values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic
life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. (Weber 1946:
155)
Jason Crawford remarks about the translation:
Die Entzauberung der Welt: ‘the
unmagicking of the world.’ Weber in his later writings returned to this phrase again
and again. His first English translators tended to render it as ‘the elimination
of magic from the world,’ and this translation captures well enough (if not very
memorably) the plain sense of Weber’s formulation, with its narrow emphasis on magic
and its simple structure of negation.
But most English readers have come to know this phrase as ‘the disenchantment of
the world’ — and ‘disenchantment,’ as a translation of Entzauberung, is a
bit of a stretch. Since the 19th century, the English word ‘disenchantment’ has,
after all, signified not just an elimination of magic but a state of weariness,
of entrenched disappointment, of experience against innocence. (George Eliot puts
this meaning in play when in Daniel Deronda she diagnoses Gwendolen Harleth’s
‘general disenchantment with the world,’ as does Charles Dickens when in Nicholas
Nickleby he describes Mr. Lillyvick as ‘a crest-fallen, dispirited, disenchanted
man.’) And ‘enchantment,’ since the late 17th century, has likewise indicated not
just a magic incantation but a state of innocence against experience, of delighted
wonder, of rapture touched with eros. Both forms of the word come loaded with affective
freight. Much more than Entzauberung, they concern themselves with the experiences
of thinking, feeling persons. (Crawford https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-trouble-with-re-enchantment/)
Joshua Landy and Michael Saler confirm the dual meaning, compromising both unmagicking and disappointment, commenting, in the introduction to their edited
collection The Reenchantment of the World:
Weber was in excellent company
— Friedrich Nietzsche had preceded him in the 1880s, preceded in turn by the German
Romantics — and he had powerful reasons to perceive Western modernity in the way
he did. For while religious faith continued to exert its hold over the vast majority
of industrialized souls, its claims had become considerably more modest. It now
allowed secular law courts to adjudicate matters of morality; it permitted scientists
to explain away the miracles of nature; it dismissed as frauds those whom it had
formerly persecuted as heretics; and most of the time at least, it delegated cases
of possession to psychologists and psychiatrists. Stone by stone, the more baroque
buttresses on the cathedral of traditional belief were being carted away to the
museum of cultural history. (Landy and Saler 2009: 1)
But then in a footnote they add:
Weber may have drawn his phrase
from Schiller, whose poem ‘Die Gotter Griechenlands’ refers to ‘die entgotterte
Natur.’ In the late nineteenth century, disenchantment was often used synonymously
with pessimism, the latter term given currency by the vogue for the philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer (ibid: 277)
While it is commonly accepted that Weber’s comment reflects
something to do with the rise of a scientific world-view after the C17 so called
‘scientific revolution’ – or perhaps after the industrialisation of science in the
C18 – and the rejection of the metaphor of a book of nature, except as a self-conscious
metaphor, there is also a counter-current stressing the need for some sort of reenchantment.
Landy and Saler comment that Weber seemed to miss the fact that ‘each time religion
reluctantly withdrew from a particular area of experience, a new, thoroughly secular
strategy for reenchantment cheerfully emerged to fill the void’ (ibid: 1). Crawford
lists four books with the very same title (The Re-Enchantment of the World)
and many others concerning the reenchantment of other broad topics including nature
(Crawford https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-trouble-with-re-enchantment/).
So assuming that ‘disenchantment’ in this context carries
hints of both the ‘unmagicking’ of the world and a consequent entrenched disappointment,
but assuming that counter-currents exist to reenchant it, how is this experienced
and what, if anything, would reenchantment be? To what might one reasonably aspire?
And how might this help articulate the enduring appeal to me, at least, of Alan
Garner?
Modern science and disenchantment
I can think of two ways that the rise of a natural scientific
worldview – in contrast, for example, with Natural Theology (on behalf of which
Newton famously devoted most of his efforts) – might be thought to contribute to
disenchantment.
On one approach, the achievement of a scientific account of
very many natural phenomena is enough to disenchant nature. Keats’ accusation against
Newton of ‘unweaving the rainbow’ by setting out the physics of optics seems an
expression of this. Simply knowing the mechanics of rainbows removes their magic
or enchantment.
But this seems to go too quickly. After all, a suitably reductive
view of the other obvious option for rainbows, in which a creator deity invents
rainbows as a kind of cosmic billboard to record a promise, looks similarly banal.
It is not so much the nature of the explanation (of rainbows and other natural phenomena)
but one’s attitude to it. To some, the story of the rainbow as part of a divine
covenant resonates with enchantment. But equally, the fact that the action at a
distance of fundamental physics is a rainbow might well preserve its enchantment
for those with eyes to see.
In other words, the availability of an explanation does not
seem sufficient for disenchantment.
A more promising account of science’s role in disenchantment
is this. The very success of science promotes a further metaphysical accretion:
scientism. Science is thought to serve as the only metaphysical measure of what
is really real. As the philosopher Jerry Fodor argues: to be real – in this
scientistic picture – is either to be listed in natural science’s basic list of
properties and entities or to be reducible to things on that list. Taking ‘intentionality’,
meaning meaning or aboutness as his target (since this is the subject of his book), he says:
I suppose that
sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling
of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of
spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon their list.
But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep. It’s
hard to see, in face of this consideration, how one can be a Realist about intentionality
without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and
intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity
with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are neither intentional
nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. (Fodor
1987: 97)
Given the woeful record of philosophical reductionism, this
promises to remove much from the realm of the real. And thus, any of this thus
removed but which previously evoked enchantment will be found to be a sort of con
or mistake. As a matter of fact, much – though not the rainbow – which might have
thought to be enchanted will not make the grade of actually existing on Fodor’s
scientistic test. (Rainbows, being reducible to physics, will.)
John McDowell, perhaps the most influential recent opponent
of scientism, calls for a partial reenchantment of nature in response to
just this scientistic impulse.
What is at work here is a conception
of nature that can seem sheer common sense, though it was not always so; the conception
I mean was made available only by a hard-won achievement of human thought at a specific
time, the time of the rise of modern science. Modern science understands its subject
matter in a way that threatens, at least, to leave it disenchanted, as Weber put
the point in an image that has become a commonplace. The image marks a contrast
between two kinds of intelligibility: the kind that is sought by (as we call it)
natural science, and the kind we find in something when we place it in relation
to other occupations of ‘the logical space of reasons’, to repeat a suggested phrase
from Wilfrid Sellars. If we identify nature with what natural science aims to make
comprehensible, we threaten, at least, to empty it of meaning. By way of compensation,
so to speak, we see it as the home of a perhaps inexhaustible supply of intelligibility
of the other kind, the kind we find in a phenomenon when we see it as governed by
natural law. It was an achievement of modern thought when this second kind of intelligibility
was clearly marked off from the first. (McDowell 1994: 70-1)
McDowell is not here attacking scientific method. Scientific
method, and the self-conscious reflection which accompanies it, has, he thinks, been a genuine
achievement of the modern era. But at the same time, the assumption that the disenchantment
which has successfully underpinned scientific descriptions of the world also exhausts
its nature is ‘not the educated common sense it represents itself as being; it is
shallow metaphysics’ (McDowell 1998b: 182 cf McDowell 1994: 82).
If McDowell’s diagnosis is correct, the success of science
need not imply that only what is part of, or can be reduced to, natural science
is real. And that blocks the argument from scientism towards disenchantment – or
rather against enchantment – that I sketched above (the second deployment
of science). But what account of partial reenchantment does McDowell offer? Sadly,
it is limited help here.
For Kant, the ordinary empirical
world, which includes nature as the realm of law, is not external to the conceptual.
In view of the connection between the conceptual and the kind of intelligibility
that belongs to meaning, I have suggested that defending that Kantian thought requires
a partial re-enchantment of nature. (See Lecture IV, §§3, 4.) But it does not
require us to rehabilitate the idea that there is meaning in the fall of a sparrow
or the movement of the planets, as there is meaning in a text. It is a good
teaching of modernity that the realm of law is as such devoid of meaning; its constituent
elements are not linked to one another by the relations that constitute the space
of reasons. But if our thinking about the natural stops at an appreciation of that
point, we cannot properly comprehend the capacity of experience to take in even
the meaningless occurrences that constitute the realm of law. We cannot satisfactorily
splice spontaneity and receptivity together in our conception of experience, and
that means we cannot exploit the Kantian thought that the realm of law, not just
the realm of meaningful doings, is not external to the conceptual. The understanding-the
very capacity that we bring to bear on texts-must be involved in our taking in of
mere meaningless happenings. (McDowell 1994: 97 italics added)
In what follows, there will be no requirement for a close
understanding of this dense passage. But it is noticeable what a merely partial
reenchantment does not involve. It does not require reading nature as a book
of meanings, like a text. The world as described by natural sciences is still largely
one of meaningless occurrences. Thus, the underlying claim that McDowell’s partial
reenchantment requires is a kind of presupposition or necessary condition on experiencing
any kind of world at all, not an enchanted one. We have to think of nature
itself as ready-made for our conceptual capacities. The conceptual realm has, he
says, no outer boundary. The world is coextensive with thought. It is a further
aspect of this picture that it rejects scientism and thus undercuts the second argument
for disenchantment sketched above. But it does not itself offer a picture of what
reenchantment might be.
An a priori fictional route to
reenchantment / enchantment: a book of nature
If ‘disenchantment’ is an ‘unmagicking’ of the world and a
consequent disappointment with it, one obvious response to it, in fiction at least,
is to conjure up a world that contains magic. Fictionally to reenchant this
world requires that it is this world into which magic is injected.
This, however, is a common trope of imaginative fiction and popular in children’s
fiction, including Alan Garner’s.
One broad strategy is to postulate a hidden realm behind the
mundane surface of the world we normally experience. Hence, in a moment of revelation,
the protagonists can come upon this hidden realm. Thereafter, the ordinary world
can be taken refer to the hidden world. A bracelet is really a magical component
necessary for preserving the sleeping King Arthur’s knights. A rock wall is really
a gate to a hidden chamber. A length of railing is really a spear. In this way,
in the fiction, the world is, once again, a book of meanings.
If such a strategy works in fiction, it indicates what would
have to obtain in reality, were this the route to reenchantment. But while it makes
for very enjoyable children’s literature this route to reenchantment cannot really
work, except fleetingly, even in fiction. The problem of the mundane surface recurs
at the deeper level too.
Consider, as typical examples, Garner’s linked The Weird
Stone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath (Garner 1960 and 1963).
Both postulate a series of events happening in parallel with the mundane human world
and only occasionally making contact. Some of the characters in this other realm
have magical powers and some do not, but they all seem to have understandable motivations,
plans, projects and an ordinary mix of good and bad luck. So while the discovery
of the hidden realm reenchants the human world around Alderley Edge, the realm itself
appears naturalistic by its own lights. Cadellin, the wizard, seems able to rely
on his own powers to cast spells but his opponents have broadly similar abilities.
They have conflicting ambitions, much as rivalry plays out in the human world. Even
the limited ‘world-building’ in Garner’s short books begins to domesticate and and
make intelligible the hidden. So is this hidden realm enchanted or disenchanted?
Three thoughts:
First, because the realm has its own version of mechanics
and psychology – sufficient for the narrative to be explicable to a young reader
– it seems to inherit the same threat of disenchantment as to the human realm. There’s
no mystery within the realm about why and how the various characters are
acting. They are not thought of, by the characters who naturally inhabit that realm,
to be inexplicable. We are offered no explanation of the magical powers of wizards
or warlocks, but these are presented as proper to them. They are the standard
abilities of such people. On one view of things, the hidden realm is itself disenchanted.
Second, it might be that that the inevitable narrative gaps
or holes lead to necessary ignorance of how things work, or what may happen, and
this ignorance is itself enchanting. In other words, postulating a magical realm
that will never be susceptible to natural science’s ‘unweaving’ might seem enough
for enchantment. Ignorance is, however, a feature of the disenchanted real
world. Whatever the promise of the idea that physics is a complete explanation
of its subject matter, much of the world we inhabit cannot be explained in practice.
The specific features of the geology of a landscape may form a general pattern but
we lack any account of just why these particular features were formed as they were.
History, too, admits of some patterns but neither exact prediction nor retrodiction.
Ditto everyday psychology. And yet these everyday aspects of ignorance seem of no
help in enchanting this world.
Third, we might insist that it is just of the nature of this
hidden realm that it is enchanted. But on the picture so far available of what it
is for something to be enchanted, this would require the postulation of a further
reference in the hidden realm to some further realm initially hidden also to it.
And thus a regress begins.
Despite the fact that all four of the Alan Garner’s first
books postulate a hidden realm linked to signs of it in the mundane world, I do not think
that this is actually how his work hints at reenchantment. Or rather, it may do
this most obviously on a first reading, but it also does something else that is
more lastingly satisfying.
A different route: disrupted intransitive
meaning
In The Moon of Gomrath, one the children has to find
a magical herb to cure his sister of a form of possession (Garner 1963). As one
might expect, the herb has to be found on a mystical ‘old straight track’ and
by the light of the full moon. The boy identifies the location of the track
from an old family ledger containing parish records (ie a mundane resource) but
it is only (magically) revealed by the light of the moon.
Suddenly through the trees
and over the Beacon hill, a shimmering line had flowed, a mesh of silver
threads, each glistening, alive. Colin had seen something like it once before,
on a rare morning when the Sun had cut a path through the dewed invisible
carpet of spiders’ webs that covered the fields. That had been nothing to the
beauty he saw now. The track quivered under his feet and he gazed it as though
spellbound… (Garner 1963: 60)
The appearance of the ‘old straight track’ is part of the
magical hidden realm. But the description of it is likened to something else,
some part of the ordinary world though inspiring some sense of enchantment: a
sunbeam picking out spiders’ webs.
Immediately after a mystical discovery of the herb, the
narrative returns to the human landscape:
Over Wildboarclough the cone
of Shuttlingslow, stood apart from the long ridges, watchtower to the plane
which lay like a sea from Rivington Pike to the surge of Moel Fammaw…
The old straight track had vanished, but below shining tour the road from
Buxton began its winding drop into Macclesfield. Colin walked along the ridge
to the end of the cliff, and picked his way over the rough moorland down to the
road. It was midnight. The road was strange, cold, smooth and his feet after
the read-clumps and boulders of Shining Tor. Once the flush of excitement had
passed, and it had passed quickly with the climb from the Hill, he felt tired –
and increasingly ill at ease. The night was so still, and the roads so lonely
in the moonlight… Light steps. That was what you could hear: behind him. He
stopped and listened. Nothing. Looked. The road was empty. It must be an echo, thought
Colin, and he set off again. But now he was listening consciously, and soon he
began to sweat. (ibid: 61)
In passages such as this, Garner links the hidden realm
to the ordinary world, which is one of the things that makes this different
from say C.S. Lewis or Tolkien, even if the latter’s world is supposed to be
our own in some ancient time period. The road from Buxton to Macclesfield is a
real road and yet the close link to the ‘old straight track’ forces the reader
to think of it differently in this context.
What might an adult reader
think of the Buxton to Macclesfield road after reading this passage? Not,
I suggest, that there is any real chance that there is a genuine connection to
the ‘old straight track’ under Shining Tor. Nor even that such a connection is unlikely
as an empirical possibility but still some sort of possibility. In fact, given
all else we know about the world – and I mean ‘know’ not ‘think we know’ – it
is not any sort of possibility at all. On closing the book no scintilla of
doubt is raised about our ordinary ruling out of Garner’s world of magic. It is
not – it cannot be – real.
But the juxtaposition in a
work of fiction of the ‘real’ world and this make-believe can change one’s
attitude to the real, both in the fiction and outside it. Not one’s beliefs
about what is real and what is not, but a more basic orientation towards
the real. Even once the fiction has removed itself, the book closed, an echo
remains.
In the fiction, there is a
relation of meaning or reference between the ordinary realm and what the
fictional protagonists come to learn. I assume that no adult reader can begin
to reimport a sense of these fictional possibilities back into the actual world,
though perhaps children can. Disbelief, for adults, is never really
suspended. But a trace of something still left. What might this be?
Two familiar ideas will
help, one from Heidegger and one from Wittgenstein. I will start with the
latter.
The paradigmatic sense of ‘meaning’ is transitive. One
word means the same as another. ‘Neige’ means snow; ‘jejune’ means meagre or
scanty. In cases of ‘factive meaning’, an effect means its cause. In
some circumstances, smoke can mean fire. But for those au fait with the
meaning of ‘meaning’, another use of it can come to seem compelling: an
intransitive notion of meaning.
We can think of things as carrying or possessing meaning
even though it is not a meaning susceptible to paraphrase. Music is one such
example. (Musical notes might also be used as a code, but that’s not the sense of
meaning I have in mind.) To say that music has meaning in this way is to
connect it to ideas of saying something, of representing, of expression. And
yet it is a sense of meaning or representation that does not permit of translation
into some other medium.
The same strange illusion
which we are under when we seem to seek the something which a face expresses
whereas, in reality, we are giving ourselves up to the features before us –
that same illusion possesses us even more strongly if repeating a tune to ourselves
and letting it make its full impression on us, we say “This tune says something”,
and it is as though I had to find what it says. And yet I know that it doesn’t
say anything such that I might express in words or pictures what it says. And
if, recognizing this, I resign myself to saying “It just expresses a musical
thought”, this would mean no more than saying “It expresses itself”. – “But
surely when you play it you don’t play it anyhow, you play it in this
particular way, making a crescendo here, a diminuendo there, a caesura in this
place, etc.” – Precisely, and that’s all I can say about it, or may be all that
I can say about it. For in certain cases I can justify, explain the particular
expression with which I play it by a comparison, as when I say “At this point
of the theme, there is, as it were, a colon”, or “This is, as it were, the
answer to what came before”, etc. (This, by the way, shows what a
‘justification’ and an ‘explanation’ in aesthetics is like.) (Wittgenstein
1975: 166)
The second helpful idea is familiar in Heideggerian
phenomenology. When all goes well, elements of the world can become transparent
or invisible in their use or application as equipment. To a skilled carpenter
hammering nails, a correctly weighted, well designed, hammer ceases to be a noticeable
part of the environment.
Precisely when it is most
genuinely appropriated equipment becomes transparent. When hammering a nail, ‘The
hammering itself uncovers the specific “manipulability” of the hammer’…, but I
am not aware of any determinate characteristics of the hammer or of the nail.
All I am aware of is the task. (Dreyfus 1991: 65)
Attention passes through the hammer to the
nail and perhaps through this to the tsk of fastening something. The chemist turned philosopher of science Michael Polanyi describes this
as the ‘from-to’ structure of attention. In feeling the nap of a piece of
material, one attends from the sensations in the fingers to the
feel of the cloth. One is focally aware of the latter and only aware of the
former in a subsidiary manner. (Had one’s fingers been numb, one could not feel
the nap but it is the nap, not one’s finger sensations, to which one attends.) Paradigmatic
cases of this transparency concern what Heidegger calls handy tools. But the
attitude is more general. It is a taking of some parts of one’s environment for
granted in order to concentrate on one’s projects. Such transparency is only
destroyed in disruptions, such as the hammer ceasing to be rigid or the handle
becoming loose. Then it stands out against whatever else remains invisible.
These two ideas taken in conjunction suggest a way in
which fiction might reenchant the world. First, it is not that the hidden
meanings of Garner’s supernatural realm needs to be given any actual
possibility. It is enough that these purely fictional, imaginary and
unrealistic possibilities have been sketched because that alone is enough to
draw attention to the surface appearance of things. And then it is not that
this surface – the everyday look of ordinary things, such as the Buxton to
Macclesfield road – signals something behind it, as transitive meaning does.
Rather the meaning lies in the surface, as music seems to have meaning though
not one available to paraphrase.
On this picture, enchantment is a matter of responding to
the surface features of the world as though they have intransitive meaning. The
tricky content of this, such as it is, is akin to the tricky nature of using
‘meaning’ about music. It isn’t that we can say nothing meaning-laden about
musical phrases but that it is difficult work.
Postscript
One September, when Lois and I lived in Cubbington – a
cross between a free-standing village and the last stretch of Leamington Spa’s
suburbia, before it gives way to the surrounding proper countryside – we had
Lois’ Canadian cousin and his 10 year old son to stay.
One warm evening, we decided to drive for a pre-supper
pint at a country pub (The Red Lion) in a nearby hamlet (Hunningham). We drove
along tiny country roads but stopped short of the pub at a church gate so that
the cousin could digitally record its squeak for his film-soundtrack (foley)
work.
I suggested we could probably walk from there along
riverside footpaths to the pub, about a mile and a half away. We thus finished
the journey to the pub in the gloaming, on foot across fields, in a
strong but warm wind, suggesting a storm later, but not yet. Afterwards, we
hurried back to the car as the last light disappeared and the warm breeze
stiffened, implying rain. We were fine, but only just.
The 10 year old son, used to living in central Toronto,
found this a magical experience. He even enjoyed the boring period of sitting
by the fire (unnecessary, given the warmth of the evening), in the pub, while
we adults drank a pint. And we (the adults!) also found it a magical
experience, partly because of his experience. He could see some meaning
in it, perhaps through its contrast with his city-centre life. It resonated,
though perhaps only with itself. And because he could experience it this way,
so Lois and I could also look at our own familiar surroundings anew.
We saw through the everydayness to something enchanted.
References
Crawford, J. (2020) ‘The Trouble with Re-Enchantment’ Los
Angeles Review of Books https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-trouble-with-re-enchantment/
Dreyfus, H.L. (1990) Being-in-the-World: A Commentary
on Heidegger's Being in Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA MIT Press
Fodor, J. A. (1987) Psychosemantics:
the problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press
Garner, A. (1960) The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
London: William Collins Sons
Garner, A. (1963) The Moon of Gomrath London:
William Collins Sons
Landy, J. and Saler, M. (eds) (2009) The
re-enchantment of the world : secular magic in a rational age Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press
McDowell, J. (1994) Mind and World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
McDowell, J. (1998) Mind Value and Reality, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Weber, M. (1946) ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills,
Oxford: Oxford University Press 129–56
Wittgenstein, L. (1975) The Blue and the Brown Books,
Oxford: Blackwell
