Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘But the facts of life persist’: Magic, Experiment and the Problem of Representing the World Otherwise
- 2 ‘And what has all this to do with experimental writing?’: Words and Ghosts
- 3 A ‘subtle metamorphosis’: Sound, Mimesis and Transformation
- 4 ‘Here is where the magic is’: Telepathy and Experiment in Film
- 5 ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’: Eisenstein, Pound, Ectoplasm and the Politics of Animation
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - ‘But the facts of life persist’: Magic, Experiment and the Problem of Representing the World Otherwise
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors' Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘But the facts of life persist’: Magic, Experiment and the Problem of Representing the World Otherwise
- 2 ‘And what has all this to do with experimental writing?’: Words and Ghosts
- 3 A ‘subtle metamorphosis’: Sound, Mimesis and Transformation
- 4 ‘Here is where the magic is’: Telepathy and Experiment in Film
- 5 ‘Disney against the metaphysicals’: Eisenstein, Pound, Ectoplasm and the Politics of Animation
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘The very reason why magic is almost all bad is because when any of it becomes good it ceases to be magic.’
E. B. Tylor, ‘Magic’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1883‘The rights of experiment include the right to be unsatisfactory.’
Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 1938The engagement of experimental artistic practices with the contemporary occult in the first half of the twentieth century was not so much the result of personal credulity, or of a search for new forms per se, or a straightforward mimesis of the failure of language, but was instead an attempt to represent the world other than the way it was through a magical mimesis. As I have suggested in the Introduction, this is already to move away from some current accounts of what modernism does with the world. In other accounts, the varieties of modernist experiment are often formed into some kind of coherent category through the suggestion that what they all do is to re-present the world; the truth of the world is re-presented to the reader or viewer in such a way that the familiar world is made unfamiliar, and that that unfamiliarity breaks apart our tired, clichéd perceptions and refreshes our sense of the world. So, for example, in Ulysses, Declan Kiberd argues, Joyce releases ‘those elements of the marvellous latent in ordinary living, so that the familiar might astonish’ (Kiberd 2009: 11). Modernism, according to this account, gives us new eyes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism and MagicExperiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult, pp. 22 - 43Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012