20141016.0711

As part of my ongoing freelance work, I have been asked to write up Jodi Picoult's Leaving Time. I do not want to tread upon my own work--the write-up is ongoing--and I am reluctant to offer much in the way of spoilers--the book released only Tuesday. I feel that I can safely note, however, that the text treats the paranormal, and while it does so in a way that I have come to understand as authentic through prior long conversations with good friends (yes, I have them), I have to think that for many or most readers, the treatment will come off as an intrusion of the fantastic into a "realistic" narrative--and that leads me to consider the ragged boundary of fantasy literature.

I have argued before that fantasy literature is that literature which concerns itself explicitly with the practice of magic, and that magic is the enactment through ritual-assisted willpower of what is impossible in the readers' world. Phenomena described as "psychic" may well fall into that category n some worldviews. Such trappings as Tarot decks smack of ritual, of course, and precognition and communication with the supernatural can easily be seen as violating causality, temporal progression, and what is often seen as a firm wall separating the quick and the dead--let alone the mechanistic principles espoused by many of the more belligerent atheists who deny the existence of an afterlife.

To the last, I have little answer; I might point out the indeterminacy of π, for example, or the immateriality of i, asserting that even the hard sciences rely upon and accept as correct ideas they cannot verify, but that is as far as I can go. As to the rest, however, I can easily assert that what many view as religious practice, many others view as empty ritual attempting to enact the impossible. The miracles or similar occurrences that pervade faith narratives, often evoked or prompted by a ritualistic proceeding, come off to my mind in much the same way that depictions of psychic phenomena come off: reports or dramatizations of perceived experience. Yet some are decried as fantastic and fraudulent, while others are lauded as unaltered and unalterable Truth (and the capital is purposeful).

Where one ends and one begins is somewhat less than clear. It is not merely an issue of what is legitimated in prevailing popular consciousness, for that is far from consensus. Even within religions, there are disagreements among sects as to what happens in rituals, whether what is believed to happen within them actually happens--whether or not a thing is magic or simply an extension of what is real. And that lack of clarity means that what counts as "magic" cannot itself be clear, thus ensuring that the literature that treats it cannot have a clear boundary, either. The lack of boundary is not necessarily problematic--in truth, no art really is bounded--although it might serve to frustrate some analysis; the value of the boundary is in focusing attention, so that its lack suggests a diffusion often antithetical to inquiry.

It is a thing to consider.