Growing Up

"Tell me this: can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?"

It's rare that I'm compelled to physically expound upon a high-fantasy novel. Sure, I can talk up the George RR Martin books until the sun grows cold, but then they're not exactly high fantasy, nor does the thousands of pages lend itself to a haphazard reflection.

That said, it's few novels (short ones, even fewer) that will, and can, openly discuss the inherent paradox of magic in a coming of age story (Harry Potter has his own difficulties, though not on quite this scale); but, Lev Grossman's The Magicians does, and it does it well.

The opening quote speaks to this paradox inherent to magic and "growing up". Professor Fogg, philosopher, magician, professor and dean speaks to a group of his Magic University graduates:

"Sometimes I wonder if man was really meant to discover magic...It doesn't really make sense. It's a little too perfect...If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so....Words and thoughts don't change anything (my emphasis). Language and reality are kept strictly apart--reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn't care what you think or feel or say about it....You deal with it, and you get on with life."

This, is what growing up is about according to Augustine (who came to learn that words only signified objects in the world), and Freud (who went on to describe a belief in magic and other self-centered views as "magical thinking"), or Lacan (who argued that we learn to define our relationship to the world through the "other");

"The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded."

But somewhere in magic (in the works of Ursela Le Guin, we learn the true names of objects which have power over them; Robert Jordan find the hidden strings that control our worlds; Goodkind's characters just seem to draw from some unknown energy to bend the world) the boundary between word and thing ruptures, and language (and self) gets tangled up in the world it describes. This all prompts a serious question: can we, as readers, take seriously the project of "coming of age" in a world where the boundaries remain blurred?

I say remain, because in many works magic comes to an end--and often childhood at the same time (only by leaving Neverland can one grow up; the children return from Narnia, back to their non-magical lives); however, in The Magicians, magic and its accompanied "magical thinking" is something that follows the characters from education, to post-education (from the Academy, to the 'real' world).

Coming back to the question of seriousness, the answer is "yes".

I base this argument on one passage, toward the end of the novel:

"He'd started that little speech speaking normally and he ended it shouting. In a way fighting like this was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse."

Magical thinking (and the ability to work magic in science fiction) is an expression of one of the great anxieties of humanity--communication. An expression of the universal disinclination of normal adults to draw correlational lessons from their every-day-lives, coupled with the inclination to seek hyper-symbolic and meaningful connections among objects and events. It is an expression of the limitation of our cognitive powers, and our own skepticism of other minds. Magic does away with the need for skepticism, it allows us to make unto the world as we would imagine it, without the need or anxiety of understanding the other; and yet it expresses mankind's overconfidence, and impatience, in the omnipotence of his desires and his ideas. High magic, without the knowledge of low magic (of speech, and patience, and a courage for understanding), destroys that which magic was originally meant to rebuild.

It is only in a tragic twist that in accepting (or realizing) the magic of the every-day, the mundane, of our non-magical capabilities (our magically mundane act of speaking, for one), does the protagonist "come of age".