A. E. Decker

Issue 66, Fall 2021

Literary Learnings

In the Warp of the World: Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

What is magic?

There are many real-world answers to that question. The birth of a child is a kind of magic. A spider’s web. The way certain strains of music send shivers down spines. But I am speaking of magic as an author of fantasy fiction. In fantasy stories, the impossible becomes real. Animals talk. Motorcycles fly through the night sky. Tiny objects, such as rings, contain the power to doom the entire world. These stories also usually feature a class of people with the ability to harness these uncanny energies. Sorcerers. Magicians. Wizards.

Wizard. It’s a strong word that conjures (yes, I see what I did there!) an immediate image in most readers’ minds. They might picture J.K. Rowling’s Dumbledore, or T.H White’s Merlin, or Tolkien’s Gandalf. An older man, generally, with a beard and pointy hat, wearing long robes. A wise and venerable figure who stands apart from and slightly above humanity.

That “standing apart from humanity” aspect of these characters often troubles me when I read fantasy literature. The trope returns over and over again. Magic is depicted as something out of common folks’ reach, and those who can manipulate it are superior to those who cannot. Take again Harry Potter, where non-magical folk (that’s you and me, reader!) are referred to as “Muggles,” a word J. K. Rowling specifically chose to indicate bumbling foolishness. And in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, while the small, earthy hobbits may play a part in defeating evil, they’re not permitted to wield magic. That’s left to the grand people; the otherworldly elves, the heaven-sent wizards, and the king in disguise—all the characters who would never deign to be concerned about where their second breakfast is coming from.

All of this is a preamble as to why I find Susannah Clarke’s award-winning historical fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell a welcomely fresh twist on the interplay of magic and reality. The book takes place in England during the Napoleonic Wars. In this alternate history, magic has always been a part of the world. Everyone accepts its existence. In fact—and this is where Clarke’s delicious wit shines through—magic is humdrum. It is part of history; the stuff of musty old books and dull magazine articles written by a clique of fussy gentlemen. Far from being exalted, it is the kind of thing fussy scholars waste their time debating.

Everything changes when John Segundus, a member of the York Society of (purely theoretical) Magicians, asks his peers: why can magicians no longer perform magic? Although the simple question horrifies the staid society, it sets off a chain of events when the reclusive Gilbert Norrell announces that he is a “practicing” magician. After proving his claims by bringing the statues adorning York Minster Cathedral to life, he sets off to London in the hopes of having his talents recognized by high society.

Although a wizard, Norrell is as far from the likes of Dumbledore and Gandalf as it is possible to be. He is not grand or imposing, but rather prissy, secretive, and awkward. Instead of occupying a higher, envied plane of existence, Norrell struggles to be accepted by London’s elites, who regard his abilities as mere diversions without any practical use. His rival magician, the more personable if scatter-brained Jonathan Strange, encounters a similar attitude in the Duke of Wellington when Strange offers his help with the war effort. All of Strange’s initial suggestions of sorcery are rebuffed by the Duke. After Jonathan Strange actually spends time with the soldiers and comes to learn what they actually need, he is able to use his powers to aid them—not by flashy spells, but by the very jejune means of making smooth roads for traveling.

Jonthan Strange’s practical magic earns the Duke’s respect. But even while Jonathan Strange is marching with Wellington and Norrell is fussing about the government, darker and wilder magical forces are at play in the shape of an enigmatic Gentleman with Thistledown Hair. The Gentleman’s machinations go unnoticed because his victims are those society can ignore: women, vagrants, and servants. Lady Pole, Stephen Black, and Jonathan Strange’s own wife, Arabella, are only some of the people who suffer because, for all their power, Strange and Norrell simply think of magic as a tool to be used.

And here Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell twists again. After opening her book with a dry and scholarly view of magic, it is the wild, chaotic magic that triumphs in the end. Ironically, Strange and Norrell turn out not to be magic’s masters, but tools of magic themselves. The pair of them were all along merely part of a spell written by the greatest wizard of them all, the unseen Raven King, who at the story’s end returns magic to England for all to use—women, servants, and children alike. Magic is no longer written in dusty books available only to learned and leisured gentlemen. It is part of the air and earth and water. Like a spider’s web, or childbirth, or a strain of music. The wonder has returned, for any who care to look for it.

This, then, for me is the real joy of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I am a regular human person. In so many fantasy stories, wizards are depicted as a breed apart; a club I can never join. Magic, in those worlds, in something I can never aspire to attain. Susannah Clarke offers a counterpoint. Magic is all around us, she says in her book. It was not made solely for us humans, although we are a part of it. It is not something that singles you out because we are all immersed in it. A wizard in this worldview is not someone who turns turtles into buttons or makes stones fly. It is anyone who creates something from the wonder they witness all around them.

Thank you for reading. Lift your head. Look around. Take a walk.

Find the wonder and fly.

Issue 62, Fall 2020

Literary Learnings

The Right to be Happy: A Fearful Glance at Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins

Welcome to Literary Learnings, dear readers! Let me begin by stating that I do not advocate assassinating the president of the United States.

This is not a sentence I ever imagined using to open an essay, but the disclaimer seems necessary for any analysis of the musical Assassins, written in 1990 by composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim and librettist John Weidman. The authors of nearly every critique I’ve read on this work take care to make the same demurral. It’s especially important to say it now, during such a volatile election year, with the election itself coming up within a month of this essay being published.

I do not advocate assassinating the president of the United States. But I love Assassins.

You probably know who Stephen Sondheim is, even if you don’t recognize his name, or do not care for musical theater. There are likely few in America who haven’t heard “Tonight” or one of the other songs from West Side Story, for which he wrote the lyrics, or wouldn’t recognize “Send in the Clowns,” where he acted as both composer and lyricist. For those who love musical theater, Sondheim is acknowledged as the great master of the age, America’s greatest living composer. At the same time, it is unlikely that you would find the majority of his works being performed by your local community theater—prior to our present Covid-19 misery, I mean. Aside from being vocally extremely challenging, Sondheim’s works tend toward the cerebral, the cynical, and the dark.

How dark? Well, his arguable magnum opus is Sweeny Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a tale of vengeance, murder, and cannibalism. Other works include Passion, a gender-flipped Beauty and the Beast tale with an obsessed stalker for a heroine; Follies, which spins a tale of adultery and disillusionment, and Into the Woods, which begins as a slightly off-kilter retelling of several well-known fairytales and ends up killing Rapunzel, Jack the Giant-slayer’s mother, and a number of others in the second act.

Even among this lot, Assassins stand out as the black sheep of the family. Sure, Sweeny Todd’s leading man is a barber who slits men’s throats while his partner bakes their bodies into pies. Assassins’ protagonists are the people who attempted to kill or succeeded in killing the president of the United States.

It's disturbing. And hilarious. And then again, disturbing.

Frequently styled as a “musical revue” rather than a standard musical, Assassins lacks a straightforward plot. Instead, the action moves forward and back in time. The assassins, none of whom ever met in real life, congregate at a rundown carnival to converse, exhort, eat fried chicken (and occasionally shoot at the bucket it comes in), and air their grievances. There’s another character, the Balladeer, who acts as a counterpoint to the assassins. He observes them critically and sings about their motivations. Embodying the American Dream, he serves as a cheerful reminder of all that is good about this country and a rebuttal to all the assassins’ dark impulses.

Except, in many stagings of Assassins, the Balladeer turns into Lee Harvey Oswald at the end. Even in those productions that eschew this interpretation, the Balladeer is chased offstage and the assassins assume full control of the narrative. No matter the production, the assassins win. John Weidman’s script demands it.

Of course it does. Despite the fictional setting, the assassins were (or are—John Hinkley Jr., Lynette Fromme, and Sara Jane Moore are all still living) real people. Assassins plays with history, but it refuses to undo it. Uninterested in “what ifs,” it instead asks us to confront what is.

Does every American have the “right” to be happy, as is claimed in the show’s opening song? Is the American Dream real? Do we truly believe that everyone is equal and that we can all advance through our own merits, or is that a naïve fairytale? Perhaps more important, is the American Dream a promise? If we, as a country, have set forth the idea that all people are equally respected and given the same opportunities, do we owe anything to those the system has failed? Do the failures prove the American Dream a failure? How much can we blame people for being angry, when they come to believe they’ve been lied to all their lives? How much do we sympathize with their despair when they lash out?

Assassins raises all of these questions without answering any of them. The final verdict is left to the audience. If Assassins ended with a condemnation of the killers’ actions, it would be easy to dismiss it after the curtain fell. You could sleep easy in your bed, comforted by the thought that the good side, the “right” side had gotten the final word on the subject of America. But Assassins insists we attempt to understand these people. It forces us to look at them, even live briefly in their heads. It reminds us that they were all, every one, Americans. Perhaps it’s worth taking a look at the four men who succeeded in assassinating a president.

John Wilkes Booth. Successful actor, ladies’ man, and supreme racist in an era of racism. His brother Edwin, a superior actor who supported the Union, disowned him. In 1865, Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the hopes of reviving the flagging Confederate cause.

Charles J. Guiteau. Conman, would-be preacher, would-be lawyer, would-be writer. A man who could not find a willing partner in a free love commune. He gave a speech to five or so people on the sidewalk outside the Republican convention in 1880, and subsequently decided James A. Garfield owed his election to him. When Garfield didn’t make him consul to Paris as a reward, Guiteau shot him in the back at a train station in 1881.

Leon Czolgohsz. Son of Polish immigrants, Czolgohsz (pronounced CHOAL-gosh) was a steelworker who lost his job in the crash of 1893. Blacklisted for striking, he lost his faith in both his religion and the American Dream. Suffering from illness, he became impressed with anarchist Emma Goldman. He shot William McKinley in 1901, in imitation of the assassination of King Umberto I of Italy.

Lee Harvey Oswald. Product of a troubled childhood, Oswald dropped out of school to join the Marines at age seventeen. He defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, only to grow disaffected with socialism and return to America in 1962. He shot John F. Kennedy in 1963. His exact motivations remain a point of contention among scholars and history enthusiasts.

These four men's heinous acts changed the course of American history. And really, it was so simple. All it took, as Assassins’ centerpiece number “The Gun Song” proclaims, was the movement it took for a finger to pull a trigger. And although it’s been decades since we’ve seen a presidential assassination or a serious attempt at one, gun violence has become a serious issue in contemporary America. Not a day without some perfectly innocent citizen being killed by random gunfire in this country. Sometimes it isn’t random. Sometimes, people shoot others because they feel no one is listening to them. A gun, they feel, gives them a voice. Gives them power. Today’s shooters are the assassins’ successors.

This issue, I feel, is at the heart of Assassins’ power. A merely historical show could remain safely in the past. By remaining open-ended, by playing with time, Assassins forces us to confront issues with American society today. Racism. Unemployment. Poverty, hunger, injustice. Much as we might like to deny it, Booth, Guiteau, Czolgohsz, and Oswald were Americans. They chose the path of violence, hoping to be heard. For some people, it seems the only answer to dealing with a system that grants power to some while keeping others down.

But we do have a power, as American citizens. We have the right to protest, to petition, and above all, to vote to elect the person we wish to represent our interests. So, this November, exercise that power. Vote. Vote by mail, or vote in person. Make your voice heard. And if you can, help others to raise their voices, too, by working at the polls, or offering to drive those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to make it there—even if their opinions don’t match your own.

Let’s cease acting like America’s future is a sport that one team or the other is going to “win.” We are all Americans, regardless of our skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic we can imagine that may divide us. We are all Americans, whether we live in the North or South, in the country or the city. We are stronger together. We will learn more by listening to one another than shouting to drown one another out.

I hope together, we can build a country where everybody truly does have the chance to fulfill their dreams.

A.E. Decker

Issue 57, Summer 2019

Literary Learnings

Gregor Samsa awoke from restless dreams to discover he’d been transformed into a giant cockroach.

This opening line, from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, (Die Verwandlung) is one of the most famous in modern literature. Like all good beginnings, it raises a series of questions that compels us to read on, hoping to discover the answers: Why did this man transform into a cockroach? What will he do now? Will he regain his humanity?

The only problem is, Gregor Samsa didn’t actually turn into a cockroach.

Welcome to Literary Learnings, The Bethlehem Writers Roundtable’s newest feature, where a member of the BWG researches a favorite author or story and shares what they’ve learned with our readers, taking a literary, historical, or, occasionally, humorous perspective.

Since this is our “Ants at the Picnic” issue, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis seems a fitting story to begin our new series. It is probably the most famous work of literature to feature an insect. Bugs are not commonly the subject of novels or poetry—and why should they be, when the mere sight of them fills so many people with instant, visceral disgust?

The disgust is, of course, the entire point of The Metamorphosis, even if, as mentioned above Gregor Samsa does not awaken as a cockroach—or a beetle, or even an ant. For English speakers, part of the confusion over Greogor’s transformation can be blamed on translation. The Metamorphosis was written in German, and the exact words Kafka uses are “ungehuer Ungeziefer” which indicate something both monstrous and unclean. In English, we may as well say “a giant creepy-crawler” as “a giant cockroach.”

But linguistic subtleties aside, Kafka took pains to conceal the exact nature of Gregor’s transformation. Although, while working on the story, he used the word Wanze, or bug, to describe Gregor’s change, he specifically wrote to his publisher to prohibit any drawings of the transformed Gregor either on the front, or within the pages of the short novel. While many subsequent editions do feature some sort of beetle on their covers, the first edition portrayed a very human man, covering his face with his hands, recoiling from some horror he’d evidently just glimpsed through an open door.

The text itself only adds to the confusion. While Gregor does climb walls, and seems to possess some kind of shell or exoskeleton, he also, as the story progresses, begins speaking in squeaky tones more befitting a rodent than an insect. As his condition deteriorates, he suffers from animalistic compulsions to bite his sister and swing from the ceiling; behavior which also does not seem suited to an insect.

Gregor himself never gets a clear view of his altered body. And since The Metamorphosis is told from his point of view, we readers shares his bafflement and must suffer along with his struggles to adjust. It is the reactions of the other characters—his parents, sister, and the charwoman—that confirm that Gregor has outwardly changed from a provider and protector into something else. Otherwise, we might be left to wonder if the transformation was real, or a delusion of Gregor’s. Instead, Kafka traps us in Gregor’s, as he is trapped in his new body. We are forced to endure all the misunderstandings and indignities along with him, equally ignorant of why this has happened or what he has become. All that is certain is that he has become something too loathsome for even his nearest relations to tolerate.

Perhaps that is why, despite the fact that Kafka never explicitly reveals the nature of Gregor’s transformation, the mind turns so easily to “cockroach.” There is perhaps not a creature on earth humans despise more. The discovery of their presence in a house or an apartment is generally followed by a swift call to an exterminator. More chillingly, “cockroaches” are how we frequently describe unwanted members of our own race, be they immigrants or ex-convicts, or people of a different race or sexual orientation. Once a group has been labeled as something undesirable, even verminous, it becomes easier for society at large to overlook calls for justice on their behalf—or even look the other way as their rights, or even lives, are chipped away.

This, then, is the power of Kafka’s story. The Metamorphosis is a chronicle of the suffering of a man who has, through no fault of his own, been cast out not merely of society, but humanity. By locking us into Gregor’s perspective, Kafka gives us no mercy, no chance for escape, and, perhaps most cruelly, no explanation. We never do discover the answer to the question that the opening line begs: How did Gregor turn into a cockroach?

Perhaps Kafka doesn’t bother because the answer is too simple. Sadly, all we have to do is browse the internet for a couple hours to find many examples of people working to recast members of their own race as “others”--something filthy, undesirable, and worthy of persecution.

Like cockroaches.

Except Kafka never said cockroach.

And Gregor always remained human on the inside.

As anyone who’s read The Metamorphosis knows, Gregor does not get a happy ending. He allows himself to starve to death, and his family rejoices, feeling freed of the burden of his presence. All it seems that we, as readers, can do is silently seethe, hating Gregor’s family for their indifference and ingratitude.

But, there is something we can do. We can try to learn from Kafka’s tale. We can try to be better than Gregor’s family. When faced with someone who does not share our views, or has an unusual appearance or odd way of talking, we can try to look past the outward differences to see the person beneath. We can, each and every day, recognize each other’s humanity.

That’s the power of literature. Go forth and find it in this world.

Thank you for reading Literary Learnings. I hope you found it edifying. Think twice before squashing the next insect you see! A duck may be somebody’d brother, and an ant may be someone’s aunt.

Until next time, happy reading!