The Metaphysics of Novels and Magic

Borges's "Narrative Art and Magic"

In an essay titled “Narrative Art and Magic,” published 1932, our friend Jorge Luis Borges uncovers the metaphysics shared by magic and novels. “The techniques of the novel have not, I believe, been analyzed exhaustively,” he begins. “(…) I therefore beg indulgence for the documentation that follows.”

Borges observes that magic is teleological—that is, it is understood in terms of the purpose it serves rather than the cause by which it arises.¹

If we live in something like a deterministic universe, where everything that happens can be thought of as the next link in a chain of events going back to the big bang (a butterfly flaps its wings etc. etc.), then magic is what we call those occurrences that happen independent of this chain—their happenings are instead begotten by the purpose that they fulfill.

Consider superstitions like knocking on wood (“apotropaic magic”). This little act of magic consists of literally knocking on wood after uttering a favorable prediction, in order to prevent the supernatural undoing of that prediction because of your utterance. In terms of cause and effect, it doesn’t make any sense at all. It only makes teleological sense—the purpose of touching wood is to prevent bad things from happening, and that is why it is done. This is how magical practices and superstitions are developed; people have specific problems they need solved, and specific lofty desires, but they lack the means to systematically satisfy them, so shamans and mystics and wizards come up with techniques which have the express purpose of accomplishing these things… and that’s it. The magic is in the purpose. That’s what makes it magic.

Of course, the universe isn’t teleological. Magic doesn’t work, things don’t happen for a reason, and life is meaningless.

Fiction isn’t like this, though. Fiction is teleological, and it is meaningful. A story is created by an author, and the author creates the details and events of his world for the purpose they serve in the narrative, not because of any identifiable cause (there may happen to be an identifiable cause, but that’s not why the author creates the detail—just as there may be a purpose for something in real life, but that’s not why that thing is). A writer doesn’t decide what to write next by asking herself, “What has happened so far? What would those events precipitate?” Instead, she asks herself, “What is my aim? What is my purpose?” This purpose is always some effect on the reader, some experience. This is the point of writing.

Thus, the reality of fiction is teleological, not causal. As a reader, everything in a text can be understood in terms of the purpose it serves rather than the cause by which it arises. If someone is trying to understand why a character does something, and they start explaining it like “Well, this was what happened to them before, and this is the situation they’re in…”, they’re making a mistake. It is almost always better to ask, “What did the author have in mind when they decided to make the character do this?”

This is illustrated wonderfully by Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which an avant-garde writer attempts to reproduce the legendary novel Don Quixote—but not by copying it. Instead, he attempts to reproduce the mental conditions in which it was written. In other words, he tries to write a novel by way of causality rather than teleology. The absurdity of it reeks.

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Teleology isn’t exclusive to novels, though. All forms of narrative are teleological to some degree—Borges references several short stories and films to illustrate teleology in fiction. But he lands on a novel as the ultimate example: “But the most perfect illustration of an autonomous orb of omens, confirmations, and monuments is Joyce’s preordained Ulysses.”

So what’s the rest of the metaphysical story, then? He says that novels have the same “dangerous harmony” as magic (emphasis mine):

Magic is the crown or nightmare of the law of cause and effect, not its contradiction. […] It is ruled by all of the laws of nature as well as those of imagination. To the superstitious, there is a necessary link not only between a gunshot and a corpse but between a corpse and a tortured wax image or prophetic smashing of a mirror or spilled salt or thirteen ominous people around a table.

That dangerous harmony—a frenzied, clear-cut causality—also holds sway over the novel.

The sense that “everything is connected” is as compelling to the critic and the novelist as it is to the conspiracy theorist and the magician.

Novels are particularly magical, even more than other forms of narrative, because they are networks of occurrences instead of chains. They can have connections in both directions—teleological and causal. They are multidimensional, densely connected, sometimes even cyclical. This puts them more firmly in a magical reality, because in actual reality, things occur by a single proximate cause. In novels, events and details must have several causes and several purposes. Other forms,² somewhat counterintuitively, more closely resemble reality due to their lack of breadth, which forces narrower chains of events instead of networks, where the reason of things is usually singular.

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I don’t think this idea, laid bare, will come as a particular surprise to anyone. Obviously, the events and details of narratives are begotten by an author for a specific purpose. Obviously, magic doesn’t follow the law of cause and effect.

Borges’s exploration of this, though, sheds a revealing light on both the experience and craft of narrative:

Our experience as readers is very much like witnessing magic: we are presented a reality in which things happen free from the chains of cause and effect, in which things happen because they have a purpose.

Similarly, to be effective, authors must relinquish themselves from the chains of cause and effect (and, as James Hillman argued, so should you when examining your life). This is no small task, because cause and effect is so deeply entrenched in the way we normally think, not to mention True Fact. Shedding these chains is difficult, and uncomfortable; but in doing so, you turn yourself into a wizard, and gain great power…

It is quintessential Borges: the remarkable clarity and retrospective obviousness of it, the way it has one foot in the rigorously academic and another in delightfully fantastical, and the effectiveness with which it gets to the philosophical bottom of artistic intuitions. He’s essentially saying that “reading is magic,” but not in the way that this is said in elementary school libraries in order to convince kids that reading is fun—rather, in a way that explains the psychological wonder of literature by examining its philosophical structure as well as that of magic (a structure usually disregarded as fanciful). And he does this in only seven pages.

I have described two causal procedures: the natural or incessant result of endless, uncontrollable causes and effects; and magic, in which every lucid and determined detail is a prophecy. In the novel, I think the only possible integrity lies in the latter. Let the former be left to psychological simulations.

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1. There are at least two different ways of using the word “teleology,” which could cause confusion. The way we are using it here is the philosophical one, sort of an explanatory posture. History and evolutionary biology are two domains that often adopt a teleological posture. But there’s also the theological sense of the word, that is, a belief in the existence of design and purpose in the world. Neither Borges nor I is advocating for this belief. Evolutionary biologists often use teleological explanations of things, but that doesn’t mean that they think the teleology is the reason for these things. For example, one might say that zebras evolved stripes to confuse predators, but that’s just shorthand for the real causal reason—a specific process of natural selection that produces that adaptation.

2. Serious TV series weren’t really around when Borges was writing his essay, but they have breadth rivaling or even surpassing novels, and plenty of opportunity for similar explanatory networks. This is why the Dune movie is a little disappointing to me—the novel very much has that “everything is connected” feel, and the movie just can’t capture it. It should have been a series. Contrast with Game of Thrones, which was able to present a thrilling and convincing world with that branching back and forth structure. What a shame it ended after season six.