Strange and Wilde

I've been listening to a couple of Oscar Wilde books (Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories and The Picture of Dorian Gray, both originally published in 1891), and I've noticed a striking similarity of tone between it and Susanna Clarke's book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell.

On the surface, it's as obvious as the curiously formal manner of speech between all the characters - a sort of English delicacy and indirectness. Everyone wears a tie and carries a stick and has servants who keep track of ones' shirt fronts, collar studs and stickpins. I found it slightly odd because Oscar Wilde was presumably writing about his own period (late-19th century England), while Clarke writes about a period roughly a hundred years before. One would think that the social landscape would have changed a bit more.

But there's a deeper resemblance that I like very much, and that's in the categorization of magical objects. When Wilde lists Gray's manias in order, he talks about the necromantic associations of many things, such as his categorization of jewels: "...the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her colour. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids." This list goes on and on, but is echoed by the spells that Clarke uses, most notably the spell that Jonathan Strange uses to protect King George from the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. "Place the moon at his eyes and her whiteness shall devour the false sights the deceiver has placed there. / Place a swarm of bees at his ears. Bees love truth and will destroy the deceiver's lies. / Place salt in his mouth lest the deceiver attempt to delight him with the taste of honey or disgust him with the taste of ashes. / Nail his hand with an iron nail so that he shall not raise it to do the deceiver's bidding. / Place his heart in a secret place so that all his desires shall be his own and the deceiver shall find no hold there. / Memorandum: The colour red may be found beneficial."

Back during the beginning of the industrial revolution, there was a surge of scientific categorization - scientists like Darwin tried to categorize the entire natural world, searching for the key to the mind of God. Nobody was trying to disprove God, rather, they were trying to get closer to God by understanding the logic behind creation. Most of these means of categorization built on earlier works - Galileo, Newton, Linneus - but they remain the solid foundation of modern science.

But there were other lists of associations, less clear and logical. These are the foundations of magic. You can be sure that wherever you see a list of things associated with other things where the relationships are neither clear nor provable by ordinary observation, you're treading in necromantic (or at least suspectly metaphysical) waters.

All of which brings us back to Clarke and Wilde's writings. I think it's the convincing nature of their magical lists that makes me love them. Being an inveterate lister, I'm always charmed by other people's good use of them.

But now I'm off. I have a list of my own, and it's time I started ticking some things off it.