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
2 - ‘And what has all this to do with experimental writing?’: Words and Ghosts
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 essential business of language is to assert or deny facts.’
Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922‘Inorganic and fanciful associations attach themselves to words … There is something eerie in the look of the silent h in “ghost”.’
J. P. Postgate, ‘Introduction’, in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 1923If magic is error for modernity, then the most scandalous of its errors is its collapsing into identity of words and objects. As Randall Styers argues, one of the central themes running through scholarly work on magic from the second half of the nineteenth century is the claim that magic is fixated on the power of words (Styers 2004: 219ff.). Certainly magic is often defined as that which attempts to animate matter, but again and again writers on magic assert a particular attitude to language as central to this animation. For James Frazer, if magic originates in the human fear of the dead, then the power of language is absolutely central. The most common and the most powerful word taboos amassed by Frazer are those around names and, in particular, the names of the dead are tabooed again and again in ‘primitive’ culture, as speaking the name of a dead person threatens to make them present in body too: ‘In all cases, even where it is not expressly stated, the fundamental reason for this avoidance is probably the fear of the ghost’ (Frazer 1996: 304).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism and MagicExperiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult, pp. 44 - 74Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012