My schedule includes two academic presentations because I bent the rules slightly to talk about Strange & Norrell (not just an excuse to show Charles Vess’ glorious illustrations!) and a bit about Scots literary history as there is a special track for that. My topics:
SCOTLAND’S FIRST FLIGHT: 1507
In 1507 alchemist John Damian flew from the ramparts of Stirling Castle to demonstrate the efficacy of flight to King James IV. He plummeted to earth and broke his thigh bone. We might not know of this momentous failure were it not for the seething envy of poet William Dunbar. When an enemy’s ignominious defeat is not sufficient humiliation, the truly vengeful turns to poetry. Dunbar glories in Giovanni Damiano’s failure to launch, but recording his crash landing is not sufficient to exorcise the revulsion he feels at the alchemist’s unnatural magic–nor is it sufficient to dispel his apparent favour with the king, who remains fascinated with the modern science of alchemy. Unlike John Leslie’s more measured account in A Historie of Scotland, Dunbar portrays Damian’s flight as not only a failure, but as the logical end of a swindler and possibly even a murderer–and one of the ‘sonis of Sathanis seid’. Dunbar sees the birds who attack him as ‘Sanct Martynis fowle’ representing nature as an aspect of the divine. The poet, claiming also to be divinely inspired, must take their part against the ‘deviant con artist.’
Sat 10 Aug 10:30 – Meeting Academy M4
‘VAGUE NOTIONS OF MAGIC AND RUINS’: JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL AS FOLK GOTHIC
In Folk Gothic (2023), Dawn Keetley argues that the genre ‘unfurls stories outside of what Eileen Joy has dubbed the typical “human-centred, historicist frames of reference”. When non-human things and forces, the natural and built environments, move to the fore…Time and space become unloosed from human time and space’ (10). The clash between magic—historical and contemporary—in Clarke’s novel centres around this unloosening as English magic begins to return in the form of the uncanny Raven King. Keetley builds upon Chris Baldick’s influential definition of Gothic as ‘a fearful sense of inheritance in time’ (1993, xix) to innovate a genre haunted not just with the human past but the past of the land itself. The events of the novel are stirred into action largely by the dogged interest of John Segundus in ‘vague notions of magic and ruin’ attached to haunted places like the Shadow House (chapter 23) and Norrell’s own Hurtfew Abbey, its history entwined with the Raven King. The landscape of England is haunted by his absence, yet as the novel unfolds it is his presence, too, that permeates the hills and woods and paths. In Folk Gothic, Keetley sees ‘agency is immanent in the landscape and in folkloric “things” and in the uncanny power of interwoven inherited ritual and tradition’ (16). The overlap and interpenetration of fairy lands with the English landscape offer an excellent illustration of this concept. The uncovering of ritual by Johnathan Strange’s intuitive experiments, Gilbert Norrell’s obsessive research, and Stephen Black’s direct observation of the Gentleman with Thistle Down Hair is key to the return of English Magic. Childermass embodies the living tradition with his connection to the ‘liminal space of entanglement of human and non-human actors’ (39) linked by heritage to the Raven King’s realm.
Sat 10 Aug 14:30 – Dochart 2
Yes, I will only be there Saturday. I am not sure how ready I am for a big, crowded event. I am certainly ready to chat with folks, but suspect I will probably look shell-shocked most of the time. Just catch my attention and make me sit down somewhere. Full schedule live later today.
I may bring a deck with me. Please remember I am now unemployed, so consider at least buying me a tea if you want a reading. I shall endeavour to tame my thistledown hair though I am overdue for a haircut.
