Friday, 4 July 2025

Reenchanting nature: Alan Garner’s children’s fiction

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 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 re-enchant 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 of 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, 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 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, however, 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 signs 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 is a 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. 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, would be 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