Abstract
Despite huge sales and publicity on its issuance in 2004, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention. This article argues that much of this neglect proceeds from assumptions that the book is nostalgic for a sovereign magic, when in fact its historicity is a way of shaking up time itself. I argue Clarke is looking to the early nineteenth century as the earliest possible modernity, a time in which magic is intertwined with the world much as it would be today if magic arose now. Examining the sociable magician Norrell, the questionably resurgent medieval king John Uskglass and the African-descended manservant Stephen Black provide different models of what the interrelationship between magic and reality can be and serve to destabilize any sense of a sovereign past in the book. The book’s plural magical modernity’s counter any atavistic sovereignty. By taking the reading of Clarke’s novel beyond nostalgic sovereignty, one can understand how it participates in the twenty-first century revaluation of fantasy as politically progressive and epistemically radical.
Highlights
& Mr Norrell has received comparatively little sustained critical attention
Susanna Clarke’s 2004 novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has often been associated with pastiche
Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun argues that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell aims to bring “repressed voices” (Borowska-Szerszun 2015, p. 4) to light and swerves away from but rejects the sovereign and nostalgic proclivities of much of the existing fantasy canon, or at least the interpretation of that canon by certain critics
Summary
Susanna Clarke’s 2004 novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has often been associated with pastiche. What Hoiem analyzes as the way magic in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell at once slides in rather inconspicuously yet subverts hierarchical and establishment ideas of Englishness renders Clarke’s sense of the past far from cute or cloying, as pastiche might seem. If the lesson of Norrell is that print culture cannot fully master magic, Clarke is part, of this inability to master In this sense, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell might augur a unitarily nostalgic identity of pastiche and magic far less likely. Though Clarke’s 2020 novel Piranesi is in no way a sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it has a similar interweave between magical and real time and a sense that the magical and mundane are not sufficient in their own terms, that each needs to find solutions to its enigmas in the other (Clarke 2020). No figure exemplifies this more than the character at once most prominent in the narrative and easiest to underestimate: Mr Norrell
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