Art as Magic

One of the things I’m looking forward to in 2014 is the final novel of Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy. The series follows Quentin Coldwater as he attends Brakebills, a school for young magicians in Upstate New York. In high school Quentin is the smartest of the smart kids, but he soon finds himself among equals and betters. The books are labeled as urban fantasy, and an easy description would be Harry Potter for adults. Brakebills is a college, and the characters face problems you would expect college students to run into.

A big difference from Harry Potter and Hogwarts is that the magic system Grossman creates is one of ridiculous complexity. Harry waves a wand, utters some Latin, and he defeats the troll. In Quentin’s world the students have to be geniuses just to take the admissions test, and the magic is based on multiple archaic languages (Latin, Greek, German, Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Chinese, to name a few), their grammars, and an accompanying set of hand movements, all of which must be adjusted for the “Circumstances” the magician casts in, of which there are five levels, each level itself containing different conditions like location on the earth, the season, the stars, distance to closest body of water, all of which have an effect how the spell is cast. Each spell can have thousands of permutations. So being born with the ability is not enough; you have to be smart, and more importantly, you have to work very hard at craft.

When I reread The Magicians over the summer, I couldn't help but think that Grossman was treating magic in the novel as an analog for writing, and, at a certain level, what was said was a sort of ars poetica. While doing my poetry MFA it became a running joke to label a poem we didn't understand as an ars poetica (a poem, really any piece of art, about writing poems, or creating art). It’s an easy out when faced with explicating a difficult poem. Lots of nebulous abstraction, incoherent imagery, complex syntax? Well, then it’s an ars poetica, because writing poetry is an abstract, incoherent, and complex process. It really isn't. It’s just hard work, lots of trying, lots of failure. To be good at it means doing the same thing as it takes to be good at anything else: practice.

So when Quentin and his classmates learn magic, I can’t help but think Grossman is also talking about the creation of art. Yes, you need some innate ability, but success comes down to hard work. (Also, I’m not saying I’m a genius. Quentin is way smarter than I could ever be.) Grossman comes from a literary family. His brother works on the production of video games and has written two novels. His father is Allen Grossman, a poet whose book, The Sighted Singer, traveled well the corridors of UC Davis, where I did my undergrad studies, and who also taught at Hopkins, though he retired before I showed up. Lev is also the a book critic for Time. 

The easiest connection between magic and art is the creation of something from nothing, pulling something from the ether and making it exist in the real world. But I was more drawn to the magic school itself, how the students were taught and how they interacted with each other. They drank like camels at an oasis, and while the link between alcoholism and artists has become somewhat of a cliche, drinking was almost as common as reading among the fellows in my cohort.  One of the other problems that Grossman forces his young magicians to face is the "What are you going to do with that degree" question after graduation. You may think (I did), "Come on. You can do magic. Do whatever you want." But Quentin and his friends experience something of a post graduate ennui that leads them into trouble and acts as a motivator that moves the narrative into the final act. Anyone with a fine arts degree (or even a PhD in the humanities) battles with the "what are you going to do with that" question. There are even books to help wayward graduates find their way outside of the academic institution. 

The most dramatic use of the metaphor of magic as art comes to the surface in a scene where Quentin and his classmates are a day away from graduating and the dean conducts a secret ceremony. They stand in the darkness of the equivalent of a crypt under the school grounds. The stodgy headmaster, Dean Fogg, passes around a bottle of bourbon, and before tattooing demons into their shoulders, gives a little speech about what it means to be a magician:

“I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain […] because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength.” The dean goes on to say that magicians use this inner pain and “burn it like fuel” in order to change the world they feel needs changing. 

Magicians, artists, feel the wrongs of the world, feel its beauty, feel its grit between their teeth, more keenly than others, and only they can do anything about it. This is what drives them. They have something to say. But first they must know their craft, practice and hone it, and only then will it have any effect on the world they wish to change. 

The Dream of 2009

In 2009 I started teaching an intro to creative writing class as part of my graduate student fellowship. The class itself meets an undergraduate writing requirement and it’s one of the more popular courses on campus, offering around twenty sections a semester that often fill to near capacity (17 students). Very few of the students enrolled have any intention of becoming writers. The syllabus is given to me by the department, but how I teach and grade is up to me. I’ve always enjoyed teaching the course, and still do as an adjunct, now teaching two sections.

After teaching my first semester in fall 2009, it struck me how similar many of my student’s fiction stories were. As a nation, we were in the deepest part of the recession, if not by the numbers, then at least emotionally. But this fact didn’t seem to affect the stories handed in weekly by my students. The young women often wrote about powerful women, whose character flaw was that they were too powerful. They had everything: high-rise apartments with the finest furniture (described in excruciating and boring detail), luxury cars (make, model, color, always given) that were law/med/business school presents. They had everything but love, blaming their success on their dating woes. Or they wrote about successful moms who feel unappreciated as they manage jobs and family while still sending their children to college. The young men in the class wrote stories featuring grizzled leading roles, who were often detectives or police officers, quick to fight, quicker to woo the ladies. Or their main characters were young business professionals battling their bosses, or worse, their fathers.  Not all the stories were written in these modes. I read a lot of genre fiction, stories about lost dogs, first loves, problems with college roommates (write what you know), but none of these were memorable.

Now, in spring 2011, the tone of the stories I’ve read is noticeably different. Still present the lost dogs and first loves, but gone are the tall, powerful business women, apartments with Central Park views, and Beamers in the garage. The students in my class now look to a more mysterious future full of uncertainty, and this plays significantly in their work. The most striking example of this came in a short story beautifully imagined, if a bit poorly rendered. (I find this to be the case quite often; the most imaginative of my students struggle with getting their ideas down in clear prose, those with a firm grasp of grammar and sentence structure would fail the course if I docked points for boringness.) The main character of this particular story was a young man who had graduated from college with a degree in chemistry, but worked as a service clerk. He suffers the ridicule of his friends and family, and finally leaves the world behind by turning himself into water molecules while taking a shower, becoming part of the water cycle. 

Most of my students that first semester were upperclassmen and had gone through all of high school and most of college during the economic boom, and didn’t have much exposure to economic downturn. I’m guessing that it was still abstract for them. The financial indices tumbling into the negative, while captivating for some us, were just numbers on the screen. (Their parents, I’m sure, were much more worried.) Plus, these were smart kids. They weren’t writers or poets, but many had successfully applied to med school or grad school, or had jobs lined up after graduation. They were going to be doctors or engineers. Now, though, we can’t go a week without reading about college grads having trouble finding jobs and moving back in with their parents. My students are still sharp. Through networking (a practice I was unfamiliar with in the academic environment before arriving here) many have found some type of employment. The underclassmen do seem more apprehensive. They don’t write about success, but rather being tricked or misled, and rarely write outside of their own experience, dwelling on the nostalgic moments of childhood.

I don’t want to say the shift in tone is solely due to economic downturn and recession, and I don’t have the Marxist chops or the economic knowledge to prove any type of cause and effect. I do believe that art responds to the culture and era in which it is produced. And these young people are writing at time when they likely won’t do as well as their parents, something that has never before now been true for any of us.