Musing on magic in stories

I think these thoughts are in some way a response to sentiments expressed in this Existential Comics: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/537. Basically it argues that magic in stories (that follows deterministic rules) isn’t really magic, it is just different physics since it is just how that world works. I don’t want to refute it because it makes sense to me when talking about the world; if people learned to make things levitate it wouldn’t be supernatural because it is actually happening in our natural world.

I’m more uneasy with it when applied to stories. Stories of course have worlds, and the argument works for those, but stories are so much more than worlds. You can’t just lift out the world from the story without changing the story’s world. So much of the world is filtered through the story it is shown in.

In any case I still think magic exists, and not just as a different sets of laws of physics, but I’m also not yet sure what magic is. I don’t have a theory of magic, but I have some observations that can perhaps point the way to further discussion.

One idea is that magic is a quality of experience rather than a quality of a world. For example, Jacob Geller shows how much of the mystery, wonder, and magic of the seas were killed by science. Magical tales of legendary sea beasts were replaced by classification of species. The Kraken was transformed into just another species among many. The plain act of explaining and systematizing removed the magic, transformed the experience we had of the seas.

This is perhaps also why science and magic is opposed to each other in so many stories. At this point it has become a trope to present magic and science as two incompatible and often opposed systems, and I’ve seen people complain about it because they don’t see any reason why the magic and science can’t coexist and cooperate. This critique makes sense I think when the magic just additional laws of physics. Why would two parts of physics be incompatible with each other? It would be as if biologists and chemists refused to talk to each other. But if you see magic as consisting of wonder and mysteries and specifics, it almost has an ideological opposition towards science — which is unemotional and dissolves mysteries and transforms the specific in to the general. The existence of this trope makes sense through this lense I think.

One story that is full of magic of the non-scientific kind is the Malazan series. The way that the authors have achieved that I think lies in the fragmentary explanations, the specificity of descriptions, and the arbitrariness of the events unfolding.

Malazan is a fantasy series that is famous for how little it explains things. I’d argue that it explains quite a bit, but it is fragmentary and spread out. That makes it so at any point in reading the books the reader has a fragmentary (but ever increasing) understanding of what has happened so far. In a sense, this is Hitchcock’s bomb under the table adapted to wonder instead of suspense. A bomb that is shown to exist under the table while the characters on screen don’t show any sign of being aware of it creates suspense that lasts the entirety of the movie, whereas a bomb that suddenly goes off only creates surprise that only lasts the scene. Similarly, the breadcrumbs we get when reading Malazan creates a sense of wonder because it leaves so much room for our imagination to try and piece things together. Between the breadcrumbs we can build up theories and guesswork, an understanding of the world that is floating and uncertain, not quite sure what is our own fantasy going wild and what is there in the text.

This is helped by the fact that the text avoids generalizations. Often when it describes the magic and the world it talks in the specific, describing what is happening right now in concrete terms instead of abstract rules. Again, this is an invitation to the reader’s brain to let the imagination loose. This specificity makes it harder to systematize what has happened, and ties the events and the world closer to the text, the words on the page. (sidenote: I’ve written more about this in Unabstracted Magic.¹ )

This connection to the text ties into the arbitrariness of the magic. It often operates on a symbolic logic, a logic where two things that are described similarly are also connected in some way and where uttering something symbolically important can have real effects on the world. These don’t follow any rules beyond the narrative ones, what is symbolically important is decided by the author. Stories have authors, and authors aren’t bound by physical laws. The rules aren’t in the diegetic world, but in the function they serve in the narrative. For me at least, this brings out the hand of the author, but in a good way. Instead of reading an objective account of what happened, it often feels like I am taking part of legends passed down through generations of oral retellers.

We can also try to look at the magic from the inside, from the point of view of the characters. For many of the people not well-versed in magic, it of course feels mysterious and obtuse. It’s not clear what is happening when someone uses magic, and often it is scary. But even for skilled magicians I feel like they don’t have a good understanding of the magic or how the world works. This even goes for many of the most powerful beings in the world. Instead of a logical and mechanical understanding of magic, many know it well intuitively, sometimes they even sense the narrative importance of an event.

Thinking about specificity also lead my thoughts to Sousou no Frieren and its very game-inspired magic system. Like in many games, the spells are acquired by reading a magic book, they are atomized and do one specific thing only (like planting a flower bed or removing rust from a piece of iron). We rarely, if ever, see a general structure behind it. The only instance I can think of, and it happens off-screen, is when the humans adapted the demons’ killing and flying magic. That felt pretty science-y because the humans apparently analyzed and developed their own variants, with defense magic developed as a counter measure and flying not quite figured out yet. But the other spells seem very individual and specific, and it isn’t obvious that you can change them. By my argument above, these should feel more magical. I don’t really feel it though. Maybe it is because it isn’t especially mysterious.

Those are my thoughts on magic, at least for the present. What do you think? What makes a story feel magical to you?

Related posts: Sousou no Frieren uses tropes well, Unabstracted Magic, A Malazan halfway retrospective