Unabstracted Magic

I think there is something special about The Malazan Book of the Fallen’s magic. It’s honestly hard to put it into words, but I think it is something to do with how inseparable the magic is both from the world and from the text itself. The magic doesn’t feel like a system, it isn’t just the physical effects that affect the world. No, the whole world is magical and can’t be neatly separated into a ‘system’ and a ‘place’, nor can the magic be disconnected from the prose itself. Magic is created in the metaphors, in the names, in the subtext, as a part of the prose. Much of the plot and magic occurs in that place in between the lines, and are as such part of the form of the text. It’s not neatly articulable because it’s a bundle of words, associations, implications and imagery. It is not abstract.

Abstraction in writing 🔗︎

An abstraction occurs when a part is lifted out from the whole. In computer programming, it can take the shape of lifting out the intention of a piece of code and hide the implementation details. In mathematics an abstraction is often made by focusing on just a subset of the rules that hold for an object, forgetting that the other rules exist. In language it happens all the time. The word ‘cat’ is an abstraction, it’s a word that has forgotten all the details that make up individual cats. On the other hand, if I show you my cat, you’ll see my cat. I haven’t lifted out any part of my cat and shown you only that (that would be gross!).

To illustrate how this applies to The Malazan Book of the Fallen, here is an excerpt from the first scene of the first chapter of the first book in the series [1]:(sidenote: If you want to read everything up to this part, the prologue is available for free here: https://steven-erikson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Excerpt-Gardens-of-the-Moon.pdf.

I’ve posted the complete scene here.

A Critical Dragon has done a similar reading of the same scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STor0-f0aQ0&t=1017 (the timestamp is important).¹ )

“Prod and pull,” the old woman was saying, “’tis the way of the Empress, as like the gods themselves.” She leaned to one side and spat, then brought a soiled cloth to her wrinkled lips. “Three husbands and two sons I saw off to war.” The fishergirl’s eyes shone as she watched the column of mounted soldiers thunder past, and she only half listened to the hag standing beside her.

First we are introduced to these two characters: an old woman and a young fishergirl, the latter in awe of the army and the former despising it.

[…]

“That was in the days of the Emperor,” the hag continued. “Hood roast the bastard’s soul on a spit. But look on, lass. [The Empress] scatters bones with the best of them.” […] “Scatters bones, I said. Bones of husbands, bones of sons, bones of wives and bones of daughters. All the same to her. All the same to the Empire.”

Here there is a heavy emphasis on bones, the shattering of bones. Remember that.

[…]

“Mark this truth, child, else the Cloak of Lies blinds you forever.” Rigga’s voice took on a droning cadence, and all at once the girl stiffened. Rigga, Riggalai the Seer, the wax-witch who trapped souls in candles and burned them. Souls devoured in flame—Rigga’s words carried the chilling tone of prophecy. “Mark this truth. I am the last to speak to you. You are the last to hear me. Thus are we linked, you and I, beyond all else.”

Assuming this is true — and we have good reason to believe the old woman, since the fishergirl has realized her identity as a wax-witch — these two are linked somehow. The fishergirl will never be spoken to again, and Rigga will never speak again. Now this could be because one will become mute and the other become deaf, but that seems a little bit too mundane for a prophecy, and what about that link?

[…]

[Rigga was grabbing the girl violently in the hair]

“Leave the pretty one alone, hag,” [the soldier] growled, and as he rode by he leaned in his saddle and swung an open, gauntleted hand. The iron scaled glove cracked against Rigga’s head, spinning her around. She toppled. The fishergirl screamed as Rigga landed heavily across her thighs. A thread of crimson spit spattered her face. Whimpering, the girl pushed herself back across the gravel, then used her feet to shove away Rigga’s body. She climbed to her knees. Something within Rigga’s prophecy seemed lodged in the girl’s head, heavy as a stone and hidden from light. She found she could not retrieve a single word the Seer had said. […] Carefully, she rolled the old woman over. […] The eyes stared sightlessly.

Ok there’s a lot that happened here. First off, Rigga seems to be dead which resolves one part of the prophecy. She won’t speak again. But there’s something off too, why can’t the fishergirl remember the prophecy?

[…]

Among the trampled vegetables lay five tallow candles. The girl managed a ragged lungful of dusty air. Wiping her nose, she looked to her own basket. “Never mind the candles,” she mumbled, in a thick, odd voice. “They’re gone, aren’t they, now? Just a scattering of bones. Never mind.” She crawled toward the bundles of twine that had fallen from the breached basket, and when she spoke again her voice was young, normal. “We need the twine. We’ll work all night and get one ready. Dadda’s waiting. […]""

She is using two different voices here, one “thick, odd” and one “young, normal”. In the former she is talking about the candles, in an odd way. She is using phrasing that Rigga used, and she seems to be familiar with the candles that aren’t hers, but Riggas. But then she switches back to her “normal” voice and talks about her own concerns. Maybe this has something to do with the prophecy?

“Here it comes, then,” the girl grated softly, in a voice that wasn’t her own. A soft-gloved hand fell on her shoulder. She ducked down, cowering. “Easy, girl,” said a man’s voice. “It’s over. Nothing to be done for her now.” […] “But he hit her,” the girl said, in a child’s voice. “And we have nets to tie, me and Dadda—”

Here is the switching of voices again, but this time more explicit, “a voice that wasn’t her own”. The other thing of note here is that someone is speaking to her so the prophecy can’t have been too literal.

[…] Now she saw a second man, shorter, also clothed in black. […] He spoke, his voice reed-thin. “Wasn’t much of a life [referring to Rigga],” he said, not turning to face her. “A minor talent, long since dried up of the Gift. […]” The fishergirl stumbled over to Rigga’s bag and picked up a candle. She straightened, her eyes suddenly hard, then deliberately spat on to the road. The shorter man’s head snapped toward her. Within the hood it seemed the shadows played alone. The girl shrank back a step. “It was a good life,” she whispered. “She had these candles, you see. Five of them. Five for—” “Necromancy,” the short man cut in.

The taller man, still at her side, said softly, “I see them, child. I understand what they mean.” The other man snorted. “The witch harbored five frail, weak souls. Nothing grand.” He cocked his head. “I can hear them now. Calling for her.” Tears filled the girl’s eyes. A wordless anguish seemed to well up from that black stone in her mind.

Again the switching back and forth is still present, reinforced not only through voices this time, but through physical description (“her eyes suddenly hard, then deliberately spat on the ground”) and emotion (her getting sad for the souls calling for Rigga). Ontop of that we get a concrete reference back to the prophecy through the “stone in her mind”.

Taken together we learn that Rigga has performed some form of magic, but we aren’t quite sure of the exact nature of it. We could say that Rigga has possessed the fishergirl, but that wouldn’t be the whole truth, perhaps not even accurate.

As can be seen by the number of […]’s, I have heavily selected the parts I quoted in order to highlight a particular instance of magic, but in doing so I’ve omitted parts that contribute to the scene and ties into the reader’s experience of the magic. The quote is isolated from the rest of the book, severed from the rest of the scene, so it has become more abstracted, and thus less fitting of an example. In a way this is probably true for many instances of magic in these books, making it hard to provide good, concrete examples that don’t undermine themselves in some way.

Regardless, I think this example illustrates my point fairly well. The magic is seldom explicitly told, it’s understood to have happened through association of words (“scattering of bones”, the “stone in her mind”) and through implicit information conveyed through dialogue and description. What did that magic do precisely? How did Rigga perform the prophecy? How far-reaching is it? What does it mean? We can’t answer those questions precisely, we can’t quite pin down the magic into a nice box, nor would I want to. Putting magic down into a neat, abstractable, categorizable box makes it more worldly. (sidenote: Magic for every-day use doesn’t have to entail worldliness, something which I think Maggie O’Farrell does very well with her book Hamnet. It takes place in a small English village during Shakespeare’s time where nothing noteworthy happens from a fantasy epic’s point of view, but she still manages to make the story have an unearthly quality to it.² ) By letting the magic roam free Erikson lets it retain its magic.

To illustrate this point even further, let us examine a Fantasy author that writes in a very different style: Brandon Sanderson, specifically the prologue to the first book of Stormlight Archive [2].(sidenote: Available for free here: https://www.tor.com/2010/06/10/prelude-to-the-stormlight-archive/

A Critical Dragon has done an excellent read of the Prelude (the chapter before the one studied here) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6719XqWD1s³ )

At the edge of the room, he passed rows of unwavering azure lights that bulged out where wall met floor. They held sapphires infused with Stormlight. Profane. How could the men of these lands use something so sacred for mere illumination?

[…]

“Well?” the guard said. “What are you waiting for?”

Szeth breathed in deeply, drawing forth the Stormlight. It streamed into him, siphoned from the twin sapphire lamps on the walls, sucked in as if by his deep inhalation. The Stormlight raged inside of him, and the hallway suddenly grew darker, falling into shade like a hilltop cut off from the sun by a transient cloud.

Szeth could feel the Light’s warmth, its fury, like a tempest that had been injected directly into his veins. The power of it was invigorating but dangerous. It pushed him to act. To move. To strike.

Holding his breath, he clung to the Stormlight. He could still feel it leaking out. Stormlight could be held for only a short time, a few minutes at most. It leaked away, the human body too porous a container. He had heard that the Voidbringers could hold it in perfectly.

The descriptions of Stormlight contain a lot of imagery, conjuring up an atmosphere around it, but there’s also some clear rules (“Stormlight could be held for only a short time”).

[…]

Afire with holy energy, Szeth turned to the guards. They could see that he was leaking Stormlight, wisps of it curling from his skin like luminescent smoke. The lead guard squinted, frowning. Szeth was sure the man had never seen anything like it before. As far as he knew, Szeth had killed every stonewalker who had ever seen what he could do.

“What . . . what are you?” The guard’s voice had lost its certainty. “Spirit or man?”

“What am I?” Szeth whispered, a bit of Light leaking from his lips as he looked past the man down the long hallway. “I’m . . . sorry.”

Szeth blinked, Lashing himself to that distant point down the hallway. Stormlight raged from him in a flash, chilling his skin, and the ground immediately stopped pulling him downward. Instead, he was pulled toward that distant point—it was as if, to him, that direction had suddenly become down.

This was a Basic Lashing, first of his three kinds of Lashings. It gave him the ability to manipulate what ever force, spren, or god it was that held men to the ground. With this Lashing, he could bind people or objects to different surfaces or in different directions.

Again, first we get some imagery describing what is happening, and then it is explained very clearly how it works. We even get to know how many Lashings Szeth can do.

[…]

Two corridors down, one to the side. He threw open the door of a storage room, then hesitated a moment—just long enough for a guard to round the corner and see him—before dashing into the room. Preparing for a Full Lashing, he raised his arm and commanded the Stormlight to pool there, causing the skin to burst alight with radiance. Then he flung his hand out toward the doorframe, spraying white luminescence across it like paint. He slammed the door just as the guards arrived.

The Stormlight held the door in the frame with the strength of a hundred arms. A Full Lashing bound objects together, holding them fast until the Stormlight ran out. It took longer to create—and drained Stormlight far more quickly—than a Basic Lashing. The door handle shook, and then the wood began to crack as the guards threw their weight against it, one man calling for an axe.

Szeth crossed the room in rapid strides, weaving around the shrouded furniture that had been stored here. It was of red cloth and deep expensive woods. He reached the far wall and—preparing himself for yet another blasphemy—he raised his Shardblade and slashed horizontally through the dark grey stone. The rock sliced easily; a Shardblade could cut any inanimate object. Two vertical slashes followed, then one across the bottom, cutting a large square block. He pressed his hand against it, willing Stormlight into the stone.

[…]

The spearmen in front didn’t wait for him to get close. They broke into a trot, lifting their short throwing spears. Szeth slammed his hand to the side, pushing Stormlight into the doorframe, using the third and final type of Lashing, a Reverse Lashing. This one worked differently from the other two. It did not make the doorframe emit Stormlight; indeed, it seemed to pull nearby light into it, giving it a strange penumbra.

The spearmen threw, and Szeth stood still, hand on the doorframe. A Reverse Lashing required his constant touch, but took comparatively little Stormlight. During one, anything that approached him—particularly lighter objects—was instead pulled toward the Lashing itself.

The spears veered in the air, splitting around him and slamming into the wooden frame.

The rest of the example follow the same pattern of description and explanation. One interesting observation is that there is a lot more names in this example compared to the Malazan one. Counting purely magic terms we have Stormlight, Lashings (and Basic, Full, and Reverse Lashing), and Shardblade. In the Malazan example there is Gift and Necromancy, but those are very vague and also words in non-Fantasy English. As hinted at in the introduction, names are a tool for abstraction. My cat is not an abstraction, but talking about my cat — or cats as a concept — is. In programming functions, classes, types are all referred to by name. The number of names suggest how many abstractions there are.

Abstractions aren’t bad by themselves, indeed they can be quite powerful. With the three Lashings established, Sanderson doesn’t need to describe basic details again. Instead he can build upon previous knowledge while making more complex fight scenes, as illustrated by these disjointed scenes from later in the prologue (ignore the who the Shardbearer is):

The Shardbearer struck. Szeth skipped to the side and Lashed himself to the ceiling as the Shardbearer’s Blade sliced into the wall. Feeling a thrill at the contest, Szeth dashed forward and attacked downward with an overhand blow, trying to hit the Shardbearer’s helm. The man ducked, going down on one knee, letting Szeth’s Blade cleave empty air.

[…]

He rounded the Shardbearer, then picked a moment and dashed forward. The Shardbearer swung again, but Szeth briefly Lashed himself to the ceiling for lift. He shot into the air, cresting over the swing, then immediately Lashed himself back to the floor.

[…]

It was time to be reckless. Szeth launched into the air, Lashing himself to the other end of the hallway and falling feet-first toward his adversary. The Shardbearer didn’t hesitate to swing, but Szeth Lashed himself down at an angle, dropping immediately. The Shardblade swished through the air above him.

Just like I don’t have to say “the beast in my home that likes head pats and food” when I’m referring to my cat, Sanderson doesn’t have to explain his systems every time someone uses it because it’s already clear to the reader how they work. This clarity doesn’t preclude that mysteries can be established. Indeed, despite this clarity there are still a lot of unanswered questions. What other Lashings exist beyond Szeth’s three? How are Shardblades created? What is a Void Bringer?

However, I don’t think Malazan’s magic and sense of wonder is created just because the author is leaving out explanations or hides things to reveal later. That would create mystery sure, but I think Malazan’s magic is more than that. Even the explanations are done indirectly, and details are left up to interpretation. One piece of magic is cast over a couple of pages. Similar to Hitchcock’s bomb, the reader’s imagination is better at making things magical than clear objective words on a page. Each time something fantastical happens — or just is, without any happening — there is magic inextricably linked to it, to those words conveying it. Severing those links by lifting out the magic from the text would be to cut through the magic, chaining it down to a single isolated interpretation and thereby crippling it.

Abstraction when reading 🔗︎

Abstraction can also occur on the reader side. I think it happens pretty often when we simplify a story in order to talk about it more easily. For example, with Malazan it’s hard to pick any rules and talk about them outside the books, but with Stormlight Archive it’s easier. What happens when we do?

• Stormlight is the fuel and is used by taking it into the body.
• A Basic Lashing “bind[s] people or objects to different surfaces or in different directions.”
• “A Full Lashing [binds] objects together, holding them fast until the Stormlight [runs] out”
• A Reverse Lashing requires constant touch to an object, it pulls things approaching the wielder towards the touched object.

Saying that the above is Stormlight Archive’s magic (sidenote: I’m deliberately ignoring the other rules that probably pop up throughout the series to make things simpler.⁴ ) is an act of abstraction, but also what Susan Sontag would call an act of interpretation. In her essay Against Interpretation she rallies against content in art [3]. Not the ✨content✨ that is endlessly produced as fuel for attention consuming surveillance machines, but rather the content of art. She attacks the idea that art has content, and that the content is the real part, the part that is important so the rest is just surface level aesthetics, the container that the content is delivered in. Here in the example above I have replaced the prose with a list of rules, taken completely out of context. The list ignores the prose, the context, how the author uses it to throughout the text and the experience of reading it, among other things.

Again, abstractions are powerful, they make it easier to remember, and easier to talk about things. It’s hard to talk about how a particular work uses magic without interpreting, but it is important to keep in mind that these kinds of abstractions and interpretations are not what the book is. The book is obviously not just presenting these rules in a list. The rules aren’t what is making the experience. The rules are not the magic. There is so much more, how the rules are first presented, how they are used later, how they tie in to the rest of the book, what words are used to describe it and so on. With that said studying such abstract rules can be interesting to do from the writer’s perspective, to use these rules as a framework for writing a story or thinking about potential stories within that framework.

Donna Haraway makes a similar critique against objectivity in science [4]. She says that science tend to erase the position from which knowledge has been created. We can see an instance of that that in the example above as it has no clear origin and it is assumed that the knowledge of the rules is applicable everywhere. Haraway calls this the God trick, positioning knowledge in a place no human can be at, which hides important information. For example, those rules aren’t from an omnipotent being,(sidenote: No, Brandon Sanderson doesn’t count.⁵ ) nor are they conclusive. They come from Szeth’s perspective and only describe the abilities he possesses. I think one reason she critiques this universalisation is that much of the knowledge produced by science comes from privileged groups in certain locations, and the God trick hides this fact. She calls for situated knowledges that embraces partiality and locality, knowledges that aren’t as abstracted.

Jennifer Wolch uses this concept in her essay Zoöpolis. In our society non-human animals are suffering massively. Non-humans are produced and killed in factories, their habitats have been and are being destroyed, and they are used in a myriad of ways for human purposes. Too often they are only considered for their utility. Wolch argues that one reason this can be is because of the great distance between humans and non-humans. Take meat production as an example. Once an animal is slaughtered and packaged, all the connections it had while living—the place it lived at, its friends (if it had any) and family, living conditions and so on—are severed. Instead it becomes just another product among millions identical. When cooked, all traces of its life are erased. The meat product has been lifted out of its context and become a concrete abstraction. It makes it easy to ignore the horrible life it might had to live for us to be able to eat it.

Wolch notes that many city dwellers interact with animals in very limited ways [5], mostly through abstractions. As we have seen, abstraction can remove magic, and cities have removed the magic of animals, turning them into concrete abstractions to watch from afar or buy from the meat counter at the supermarket. What she proposes is that we invite the animals back in and “in the process re-enchant the city”. This would “provide urban dwellers with the local, situated, everyday knowledge of animal life required to grasp animal standpoints or ways of being in the world, to interact with them accordingly in particular contexts, and to motivate political action necessary to protect their autonomy as subjects and their life spaces.”. By re-inviting the animals she aims to re-introduce magic to the cities and break this abstraction that has allowed us to regard them as non-subjects. The knowledge gained wouldn’t be univeralised and scientific, it wouldn’t be how cows have four stomachs or that spiders aren’t insects, but instead local and specific, the kind of knowledge that is created by being kin, enchanted knowledges, unabstracted knowledges.

Conclusion 🔗︎

Abstraction is a powerful tool. It makes it easier to talk about complex things, but it has its downsides. We need to remember that each time we make an abstraction we are hiding details, and that sometimes those details are important. Perhaps our society is relying too much on it, perhaps we should learn to let it go, and perhaps some magic will occur.

References 🔗︎

Related: Musing on magic in stories, Unabstracted Magic