A Tale of Boilerplates

While reading Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, I came across a paragraph that felt like deja vu, even though it was my first time reading this marvelous, phenomenal novel. Then I realised it was the motif of the 'mirror', and its prominence in another British authour, China Mieville's short story "The Tain"that I was reminded of.

Here are the two passages from:
(1) Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.
(2) Mieville, China. "The Tain" Cities. Ed. Peter Crowther. New York: 4 Walls 8 Windows, 2004.

(1)

"I thought the King's Roads led to Faerie," said Lascelles.
"Yes, they do. But not only Faerie. The King's Roads lead everywhere. Heaven. Hell. The Houses of Parliament ... They were built by magic. Every mirror, every puddle, every shadow in England is a gate to those roads. I cannot set a lock upon all of them. No body could. It would be a monstrous task! If Strange comes by the King's Roads then I know nothing to prevent him."
(Clarke 696)

(2)
And then the tain.
Glass democratised. Though we fought it, though we sought to keep it arcane. Glass became mass, in scant centuries, and the tain, that dusting of metal that stained its underside, with it. You put out lights at night and trapped us even then in your outlines. Your world was a world of silvered glass. It became mirrored. Every street had a thousand windows to trap us, whole buildings were sheathed in tained glass. We were crushed into your forms. There was no minute, and not a scrap of space where we could be other than you were. No escape or respite, and you not noticing, not knowing as you pinioned us. You made a reflecting world.
You drove us mad.
[...] And then there was Versailles. Our bleakest place. The worst place in our world. A dreadful jail. It can be no worse than this, we thought then, stupidly. We are in hell.
Do you see? Can you understand why we fought?
Every house became Versailles. Every house a hall of mirrors.
(Mieville 97)

I am amazed I never saw this before, but 'magic', 'mirrors', 'reflections', and 'shadows' are prominent things in both novels. Now I realize, as well, that both of these novels centre around, but mainly satirize the cliches and boilerplate of (Tolkienesque) fantasy. Likewise these novels invoke a lot of political imagery. Notice that in Clarke, the Houses of Parliament are featured, as Versailles is in Mieville's tale. Both are symbols of power structures, or to use an overly misused word, hegemony. The literary term for this device eludes me right now. Now, as I edit this blog for the umpteenth time, I also remember that Venice is mentioned in both works. Coincidence? What are the implications of these places?

Also, the perspectives are quite interesting (Clarke's character is the 'first modern magician' Mr Norrell--a gentleman who revives interest in English magic, but later wishes to repress it after his pupil [Strange] supercedes him in ability--and Mieville's narrator is an imago--inspired by Borges's tale "Fauna of Mirrors" from The Book of Imaginary Beings--creatures from the "specular realm" that were once incarcerated in 'reflections' for some past crime, but have liberated themselves in order to invade our world and exact vengeance).

The idea of a 'shoehorned' or 'pigeonholed' image, and its subsequent 'emancipation' from this 'cliche' state of being reads like an allegory, if not satire too. It reminds me of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin or Austin's Northangery Abbey, both parodies of Byronic and Radcliffean Romanticism--except it is Tolkien's 'fairy-tale" cliches that are being satirised. Oh my. That's it. Eureka! That explains the metaphor of 'images'. It also occurred to me that mirrors or puddles are figured as 'portals' in both tales, too.

But what interests me is the metaphor of 'magic' too. Once again, I have to refer to a piece of work that is not mine to explain. It is an article by China Mieville called "The Conspiracy of Architecture: Notes on a Modern Anxiety". The item of interest is Mieville's paragraph on the (Marx's) concept of 'commodity fetish'--something Mieville argues is expressed in the 'figurative language' and/or 'imagery' of inanimate objects being personified as living, breathing creatures. I think there is a connection to these two novels. Otherwise known as 'magic', hmm? Other miscellaneous items of interest are the ideas of a realm of magic, enslavement, otherworldliness, magical things as a force that was once separate from the human realm or something that we once ruled but has enslaved us now--oh my. Is this a 'metaphor' for? Capitalism? Ideology? Fiction? Technocracy?

These are my bizarre thoughts for the day. I'm becoming gitty, so I'll stop.