Tolkien, Rowling, and Pratchett briefly compared, and a not-so-breif thought on Discworld.

This post comes indirectly courtesy of the friend's college-aged son who came up with the competing topography of Patema Inverted. Over Christmas, somebody had gotten him Shepherd's Crown, the fifth Tiffany Aching book in Terry Pratchett's discworld series, and the last of the whole series, actually published posthumously from the rough-needing-editing/tightening-but-still-done manuscript he had done at the time of his death in March 2015. So, I was asking what the college-aged son had read up to that point, and he's done all the City Watch / Vimes books, including Snuff, and all the first four Tiffany Aching books, but only Going Postal, not Making Money or Raising Steam, and I don't think really any of the Rincewind/Wizards or the Witches, or at least not many. He was asking me what I thought of Shepherd's Crown and I was saying that I think that it and Raising Steam are kind of two halves of a single ending to the series, not just that they are the last two books because he died, but that they actually make a complete arc of the series, so he should probably read Raising Steam, but then I thought of details in Raising Steam that you sort of need to know where they come from in Making Money unless you want to just gloss them, which is definitely possible to do and still get the more substantial content in Raising Steam, but it's nice to know them if you can. So I lent him Making Money and Raising Steam and told him it was entirely fine to take them back to school with him and read them as he got time (hope I didn't write anything too crazy in the margins; I tend to have a lot of marginalia in some books ... you should see my copy of Barfield's Saving the Appearances ... that's not to say it's all brilliant, some of it is just tags to remember where topics are addressed, and other of it is probably loco theories, but there certainly is a lot of it either way).

But then I was thinking, "hmmm, once he reads them, what do I say in a conversation to explain what I mean about them being two halves of a single ending, should probably think a more structured something up so it's not just 'mumbly stumbly, stumbly mumbly, something about, um, mumble something.'" So, this post is in part covering formulating that response.

But there is something beyond that, which is actually what I am going to do first.

As I was sitting outside just musing on the response, it made something pop into my head about when people ask the question of which author you think is best, which is usually a fanboy/fangirl question. Probably the two most common places I have heard it is Tolkien "loyalists" who think Harry Potter is evil or sucks or something and Marvel "loyalists" who enjoy sitting around home ripping on DC comics and especially DC fans probably more, could they be honest about it, than they actually enjoy the Marvel movies themselves (which is not all self-identifying Marvel fans, let alone me; I don't self identify as particularly a marvel "fan," but I am very much interested to see Black Panther and Infinity War ... but I also really liked the chemistry between Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Ben Affleck as Batman in Justice League and think the male/female combined with the below human [Batman as not only simply human, but as the human subconscious] / child of a god has a lot of potential for analysis [paired respectively: male-underhuman / female-overhuman (woman as super ego?)], but I also admit that, yeah, overall, the actual product put out of Justice League was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination and really didn't capitalize on any of that potential [just as Batman vs Superman didn't really capitalize on potentials of underman and overman tension], whereas Age of Ultron was really strong and Civil War was even stronger ... but I still think that Wonder Woman is the all time best film to come out of the super hero genre of films ... so where does that put me on the spectrum of "Marvel fans versus DC fans"? The real question is "Who cares?").

Anyway, my thoughts on Tolkien, Rowling, and Pratchett (and there is no pecking order there; that's simply the order in which I was introduced to them in my life), is that it is cool that we have three such popular fantasy writers who are actually really good at fantasy (there is a lot out there under the name "adult high fantasy" that is not so great *cough ... Game of Thrones*) but so diverse, having such a variety. I'm going to give my synopsis/categorization of them before I go on to my separate thing about the discworld series, and after I give my little synopsis of the three, I go into the specifics of saying more about discworld.

J.R.R. Tolkien:
Magic is about love/charity: the elves say that the cloaks blend so well with their natural surroundings because they put into them all their love of nature; Sauron and Saruman's machinery is the opposite of love: control, manipulation, and exploitation (and I have this pet theory, sort of as part of a grouping with my thoughts on literature as "incarnational," that Sauron's sin and his undoing was to incarnate himself, as it says that he poured so much of his strength and his power, and really himself, into the ring, which is conquest of nature in middle earth rather than love of it) ...

[SIDE NOTE: I think this criticism of perverse incarnation applies also to the thinking of the author to whom I have referred as "Captain Anglo-but-Catholic" (or at least will refer whenever I finish reading his books and write my "baked on Shake" post, in which I will actually probably find some value in the captain's findings of Catholicism in Shakespeare, although not his underlying "philosophy" of where he takes them, and then try to synthesize the valid critique from a Tolkien perspective and probably wind up with "Shakespeare is a mixed bag"), who also uses the term "incarnational," in particular about Shakespeare, but he uses it in a very different way and I think it is bullshit at best and possibly dangerously close to idolatry: I talk of narrative art as incarnating truths of theme and theology and anthropology and philosophy etc.; he speaks of literature as incarnating the author (or at least one particular author), and he slides VERY VERY easily between big A "Author" (God) and little a "author" (Shakespeare) in presenting his philosophy of "authorialism," which I think is dangerous, because, as a Catholic, I believe there has only ever been one person WORTH incarnating (only one worthy of it), the one who claimed to be the Truth ... and it isn't Sauron, and it isn't William Shakespeare. END SIDE NOTE]

And Tolkien writes in the biblical mode. This isn't a matter of "genre" or of doing an allegory of the Bible, but of a shape and mode that could be applied to different genres, although it works best probably in an alternate universe, and it's fairly unique to Tolkien. In short: two major installments, the first (Silmarillion) being like a tapestry of peoples (much like Genesis's string of "generations," which is the specific Hebrew word toledoth, stretching from the twelve tribes back to creation [Gen 2:4 = "these are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were made"], then the deteriorating story of the twelve tribes in the land in Judges and the histories of the kings of the two kingdoms in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings) with no one single character's arc spanning the whole narrative except Melkor, and the second (Lord of the Rings) being more like morality tales, maybe somewhat like the parables in the Gospels, but not allegorical (that's a whole discussion unto itself, how to define allegory: I say it is when you copy the plot over wholesale, that that's a long discussion), but most like the Gospels themselves in contrast to the Old Testament (not like the Gospels in being inspired or having the Incarnation of the Word as their subject), with characters whose own arcs span the whole of the narrative arc; and the most central element of the "biblical mode" is that the connection between the two installments is typological fulfillment (three pairings of elf and mortal: Beren and Luthien are the original model and they simply get one of the Silmarils back; Tuor and Idril have a child, Earendil, who takes that Silmaril to the Valar to get their help in defeating Melkor; Aragorn, and Arwen are the full-fill-ment, the full measure, beginning a line of kings that rules a world at peace after the final major influence of Melkor has been rooted out in the downfall of his chief lieutenant, Sauron; I have written more on it here, but what I just gave is may be my most succinct yet complete statement of the core theory to date [but def check out the other post .. cool stuff about the similarities between the silmarils and the ark, etc.]).

J. K. Rowling:
Magic is about imagination. At least that is what it is about on a metaphorical level. But I also think that, on a "physics" level, it is extension of self/soul through the wand or focusing element (Jim Butcher does more direct exposition of "focusing" in the Dresden files with the idea of using focus items like the staff and blasting rod [I've never heard him say anything about it, but I don't doubt there is an allusion in the "rod and the staff"] versus raw mojo slinging than does JKR in HP, where it is simply you have a wand or you don't, and if you have one and you're a wizard, you can do magic, but if you don't, you can't, although we also do see examples of magic happening without a focus object in kids doing magic without meaning to, Harry blowing up Marge etc., and she definitely develops the wand as an image heavily, she just doesn't do it defining a concept of the wand as a "focus" on the mechanical level of magic the way Butcher does), and I think the symbolism wraps back around to the wand being symbolic of language ... and if you accept that the line between metaphor and literal is thinner and more fluid than many moderns like to think, and you allow these two to combine, then, like Fred and George's mating fireworks, you get imagination (magic) as the extension of self/soul through language (wand).

But I will stick with describing the imagination part for here. John Granger's Hidden Key to Parry Potter, which came out between books 4 and 5, was the first thing I read on delving into Harry Potter on an analytical level like this. He has a great observation on the symbolizing of imagination in the series: Diagon Alley is an imaginative adaptation of "diagonally" into a place ... and magic/imagination is about looking at the world diagonally, not straight on, or "scientifically." But you have to say it as the imaginary place because, once you start to say it in the "scientifically correct" way and describe it as "viewing aslant" or something along those lines, once you start talking about the actual workings of its referent in a literal way, speaking of it by its literal scientific name, "diagonally," you step out of Diagon Alley into someplace else. And if you try to pronounce it as "diagonally" instead of "Diagon alley," like Harry in the flu network, that someplace else might be getting shunted to Nocturn Alley: If you try to hold on to the magic of the place but make it the scientific, you get the real world version of "magic is might," which is "science is power" ... you get mustard gas and World War I.

Where Tolkien has (I argue) the biblical mode in an entirely alternate universe with a form of interaction called by some "magic," Rowling's construct is the real-world manners and mores boarding school genre, borrowed from Jane Austen (along with the third-person limited-omniscience narrative perspective for narrative misdirection, according to Granger), in the base structure of the seven years of Hogwarts. The story is so much more, but the basic material layout is the education plan, including of course the larger entities that bear on that, like the Ministry etc. But I should put it too that these larger things of Gringott's and the Ministry and the international confederation are also more central to the construct than simply being props for the school: they're a society served by the school, so it's a two-way street between the school and the society. The real story, the real plot, is Harry versus Voldemort and love versus power mongering, but every story has a context, and the context of this story is the wizarding world in England as focused through the lens of education of the young for participation in the structures of that society.


Sir Terry Pratchett:
 Where do you start when talking about Pratchett. There is so much there in forty-one books. Let's start by establishing the setting: Tolkien has the alternate world, and Rowling has the real-world-but-magical school and society. What Pratchett has is a fully alternate universe in which "magic" as such has a more pronounced presence than in Tolkien (in LotR, magic could almost be stated as simply "power" ... the term "magic" is even questioned by Galadriel and other elves with her when they note "but you use the same word to describe the arts of the enemy" ... so maybe "arts" is a better word in LotR, which gets very close to what I think magic really is across all of these great writers .... but in discworld, "magic" is everywhere and everywhere known by that name) but not as codified and structured as in Harry Potter (sure, there is a University, but outside of the fact that it does "magic," it is much more straight up a parody of the social dimensions of real-world academia ... no tensions between the professors of divination and transfiguration, no tensions between two approaches to divination [Trelwaney and Firenze], no concerns about approaches to Defense Against the Dark Arts ... the wizards of Unseen University as a social grouping may be the original jumping off point for exploring the magical disworld and they may play real roles as people in developments of it, but the education institution and its curriculum are not really a huge locus of regimented magical theory or training).

Pratchett is most well-known for his satire and parody, and he is a master at it: Lord Vetinari and Sam Vimes are amazing characters, and Granny Weatherwax's handling of real delicate situations such as Tiffany's coming of age, and even more so Granny as standing on the line between the light and the dark, protecting the real world light (families and the young) from the real world dark (pettiness and an overgrown smallness of spirit, not to get too paradoxical about it), are incredible ... and more interesting than Mustrum Ridcully's whizbangs (although his cheeseboard has wonderful parody and satire potential).

All the parody could lead one to think that the magic is not really important, that all that is really important for meaning is the character interaction and the real-world referent of anything in the novels. But the series begins with Rincewind and the imagined dragons (who are, by the way, great live ... saw them at Barclay's in Brooklyn last fall on the Evolve tour), and as much as Granny Weatherwax does social commentary and management (like Granny Aching), she also does magic ... she borrows and takes the pain away, she defends against the fully and dangerously magical realm of fairies and against the hiver.

There are many kinds of magic in the discworld. There is the natural happenings of mythical embodiment like our young friend who becomes something more than human in Pyramids. There the loud flashbang spells of the Wizards. There is the sympathy with nature magic of Granny's borrowing.There is the power of mythological personification, like Death and Hogfather, as well as Teatime's way to kill the latter through killing belief in him by controlling the belief by controlling the believers through their childhood teeth in the tooth fairy tower (I think that's called thaumaturgy, at least in some traditions, like the whole voodoo thing of making a simulacrum with something of another person, like hair or blood, or in this case, teeth, and controlling them with the simulacrum ... Butcher uses it a lot in the Dresden novels). There is an ant farm that is basically a computer, but with its own twists, and there are other magics that parody real world technology, like the imps, who embody a sort of method Pratchett has of using animism not as actual animism but as a way to get to the idea that there is a lot more of the "animal" than we think in "inanimate" objects simply because they are objects as understood by us, the "rational animal."

The base concept of magic IN the discworld is, I think, mystical (which is where you have the monks of history and so on) and about imagination, and the latter (imagination) is stated even more directly and on the page in The Colour of Magic than it even is in Harry Potter: ". . . the King Color, of which all the lesser colors are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections. It [is] octarine, the color of magic. It [is] alive and glowing and vibrant and it [is] the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It [is] enchantment itself."

I would say "magic IN the disc world" is tied to but not exactly the same thing as the magic OF the discworld, what the whole thing is as a magical construct in Pratchett's head. Magic OF the discworld is really Pratchett's artistry and it is tied to something like "mystery/mythical " in the sense of a  mysterious connection between the magic IN the discworld, on the one hand,  and the comedy and commentary and characterization in his parody and satire, on the other. It is in instances like the question of how something can be so deep and so funny at the same time, like "write only memory": it is a concept brought in by a "thinking machine" that is the collective working of an ant farm, so it is part of the magic IN discworld, but it is also a funny AND profound wordplay (a parody of "read only memory," or ROM) that expresses the paradox that we think about "memory" as being about the past, but memory always has something to do with sense of self, and sense of self is about futural expectation as much as, and probably more than, it is about the past; it's about who we want to become, who we believe we can and should become, since HEX brings in the concept as a way to get the concept of "belief" that Death is trying to explain to it in Hogfather (and having Death fill in for the discworld version of Father Christmas is in itself an ingenious thought with a wealth of philosophical possibilities).

The last thing that I will add here is that Pratchett is the reason I put this comparison up before the specific material on discworld. I said in that post on Patema Inverted that there needs to be a what to do the saving (of the appearances) for, that all discussions of topographies and other literary methods needs to be in the service of something larger (and will be, one way or the other: if an author isn't consciously choosing, somebody might likely choose for them; somebody like Pratchett may have a humanitarian enough of a core for it to work subconsciously, but not all do). I wanted to go into this broader characterization of Pratchett before getting into specific narratological details of the series as an attempt to give that what as a grounds for the how and not be just discussing technique for technique's sake, practicing erudition for erudition's sake, like four-year-old Danny Saunders in The Chosen by Chaim Potok (to bring in a VERY different genre), who could only see and take joy in the prowess in his own being able to read, not see and sympathize with the suffering in the story he read (and so Reb Saunders must teach him to sympathize with suffering the only way he can see to do it, by making him suffer through raising him in silence: he never talks to him except about Torah and Talmud when specifically studying them ... the scene in which he explains this to Danny when Danny is on the verge of manhood by explaining it to Reuben Malter while Danny is sitting right there simply tears your heart out, throws it on the ground, kicks it violently in the dirt, and then shoves it back in your chest to try to survive ... the only scene I've ever read that has a stronger impact is the painting of the second Brooklyn Crucifixion in Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, although the breakthrough moment with Michael at the end of his The Promise hits pretty hard too).

A good example of the cross between magic and morals via characterization is Tiffany's "see me" spell in A Hat Full of Sky. There is sympathy intended from the audience: all her clothes are handed down from her sisters, and they are not rich to begin with; wanting to see what she looks like all around in the nice dress is understandable. But there are things in the world that prey on the understandable, and I think that part of the moral is to take the horror we feel in the sudden shocking revelation of the hijacking of her identity by the hiver (at least there was for me ... I still get chills from that end-position-accented line, "we see you; we ARE you!") and turn it into an impetus for protecting children in the real world from manipulation. And the power of magic stands in for that power of manipulation in the real world: there are people who can use the imagination to control and enthrall others.

The Ending of Discworld
The series is magical from start to finish. It opens with Rincewind and dragons and sapient pear wood luggage and the symbolism in the number 8 as the color of magic, basically octarine as numerology, symbolizing magic as that which is out beyond our normal mundane world, what can be imagined rather than what can be scientifically verified. And then by the third book, Equal Rites, we are into the witches material with Granny's borrowing and here interchanges taking Eskarina to Unseen University in Ankh Morpork.

In a way, something small like the two leaders of these two strands, Ridcully and Granny, having been in love a little as young people before they both went their illustrious ways (revealed in his visit after her death in Shepherd's Crown) symbolizes the whole series. The series starts with Rincewind and Magic (and, nicely, it also starts with the really deep parody of society, not mocking but mystified and exploring, in an early version of the Patrician, the ultimate version of which will be Vetinari ... the man for whom there really was only ever one woman, one lover: the city itself, the polis ... he can rule Vimes because he is the purest "police man," man of the city [and you know that is on Prathcett's mind because he has Carrot specifically mention that etymology]).

With Raising Steam and Shepherd's Crown, the series ends with male and female, like Ridcully and Granny.

The mystical thing about it is that it does it with a real world bent. In the first of the two books, the male version, it closes with a magic that is actually identical to something in our own real world technology, BUT thought of in a magical way: Steam. But then, in the second of the two books, the female, it also ends with the radically and dangerously magical, with Tiffany as the new hag o' hags protecting the human world from invasion by the world of fairy (fairy being the radically dangerous magic for humans ... not Tiffany ... Tiffany protects the regular world from malicious invasion by the fairy world).

(ASIDE: And lest it be thought that my saying "second" necessarily means the feminine is secondary to the male here, it should be remembered that there is another way to think of things, and this gets really deep: it is scientism's radical chronism that places the meaning solely in material priority; in literary story telling, the penultimate always serves the ultimate, the next-to-last is in the service of the last, leading up to it, not the other way around, because the "last" is what is sought, the goal, in ancient and medieval terms, the telos ... and I can attest to the fact that scientismists dislike teleological thought by my own experience not long ago of hearing one go on a bit about how the Greeks had to "make up" a word for Plato's new made up category of teleology [the scientismist had a very disapproving tone in his voice concerning it ... interesting factoid: check the Wikipage on Discworld under the heading of "narrative causality," the first sentence of which reads "the Disc's nature is fundamentally teleological; its basic composition is determined by what it is ultimately meant to be"]. Teleology is basically the consideration of intention in the form of a goal, and "end" in the "end justifies the means"  sense rather than simply the strictly materially descriptive sense of "last." The word telos always meant "end" as "last," and it was indeed a new interpretive move to tie it to intentionality, just as fifth-century preSocratic philosophy was a new thing completely different from the mythology that preceded it, but it was a consciously interpretive move and not a fantastic inventive one. In the philosophical sense, teleological means the fact that the last in execution is the first in the order of intention, meaning it is what whatever the whole shebang in question was all about in the first place, and scientism really doesn't like that because desire and intent are subjective categories, and the scientismist believes that completely objective scientific description is not only possible (which I don't think that it is, not complete objectivity), but is in fact the base mode of all human understanding ... of course, the Plato aspect was in a language this particular scientismist doesn't know how to read, but that never stops a good scientismist .... I'm not saying that I think Pratchett had a conscious teleological plan to lead up to Shepherd's Crown; in fact, I don't think that the deep things for him always played out on the field of consciousness in the way we like to think of it, as I have said before in comments on the fact that he never mentioned trying to write structure but he did come out so structured, like 5 Death books in which two openings build to a trilogy, and 8 Vimes books with a structure of 4 ramp-up books leading to a trilogy and then an 8th (yes, octarine) book out beyond (the opening to the new generation, as young Sam develops his own personality) simply because Pratchett was hardwired for that structure; he didn't have to "think" it for it to happen ... and in the same vein, I think that, if we could look inside his head when he began Shepherd's Crown, we might see that it is no coincidence that, when parts of him could tell that his own end was near, he decided to write the book that put the fully fitting ending on the series, the book that could be a culmination of the whole. If you want evidence that I think the female is at the very least as strong as the male: I'm the one who will point out to you that Rincewind and the Wizards, and even Moist von Lipwig, have to have an ensemble cast (Vetinari, Vimes, Harry King, etc) and a new protagonist added to do the male half of the ending, whereas Tiffany and her witches rock their half all on their own ... well, with the help of a backhouse boy and his goat :) END ASIDE]

(Now I have to cover my ass by making sure I explain what seems like a real leap out of nowhere, saying that Raising Steam is masculine). Dick Simnel and Moist von Lipwig are, in Raising Steam, the men of our real world but coming at it from a magically informed perspective, one a physical tinkerer thinking about how steam harnesses the four elements and the other a societal tinkerer behind the scenes of the methods of communication (the post office fighting the juggernaut of the clacks) and economy (making money), but alongside figuring out how to wrangle golems (and how does he get the golems to wrangle? he's too clueless to get them on his own ... he's needs somebody really wise, like Adora Belle Dearhart ... and that line in Going Postal is possibly one of the greatest romantic lines ever penned: "and so he told her all of it ... she particularly liked the part where he was hanged, and made him tell it twice. And between them the ash tray filled up with ash and around them the post office happened" [paraphrasing/condensing]).

Tiffany is the female half of the ending ... the actually wise one, the one who can find the meaning of the railroad for the deeper things like invasion by the too-mystical AND effectively communicate it as an argument to the king of fairies so he puts his foot down on any from his realm who try this kind of stunt again (the argument that the world is now becoming ever-more girded in iron, to use Simnel's name for his first steam engine; and there is a sort of connection between this magic IN discworld and the magic OF discworld: Tiffany can keep the magic OF discworld, which symbolizes the mystical, from taking over the mundane too much, from getting the human lost in the mystical, the way Eskarina (I think? not Tiffany?) got lost borrowing the hawk and it took a while for her to come back to a human way of thinking or the way Wentworth and others get lost in the fairy world in The Wee Free Men, the way we can get lost in a story or a construct. It is fitting that her story is the one that tells us: "and here we must have an ending to the discworld, we must stay grounded in the real world ... use the discworld as a focusing lens and a source of models for imaginative approaches to the real world that find more joy and humor and love, but the real world is the place you actually live ... let the fantasy world help it, not conquer it."

A Further thought on Discworld

An earlier version of some of the basics of this part is here. There, in considering the possibility of Raising Steam as the final book of the series, I went through the various protagonist subseries to look at how they wound up with a structure to them. The new further thought about discworld for here and in connection with the closing of the series in Raising Steam and Shepherd's Crown is that I see the two protagonist series with the least structure, the Wizards and the Witches, as being the ones who provide the most structure to the overall series. Even though the Wizards appear only slightly in Raising Steam (if at all?), their thread did carry up through 2009's Unseen Academicals, one of the last five books of a forty-one-book series, and their specific number of books puts them as tied with Vimes as far as number of books for a subseries, Eight, which is the highest number except when you take Granny across the span of the witches and the Tiffany books together (Tiffany/Feagle have five, Death has five, Moist has three). More importantly, the theme of Rincewind and the wizards is the magic in discworld, and the driving thematic of Raising Steam is the magical/technological parody, the magic IN discworld getting as close to real world technology as is possible (beyond that you have to start delving into electrical manipulation of current to make strong and weak pulses that get interpreted as 0s and 1s to make digital computing [if I understand it rightly, which is a big if ... editing an interesting book right now on internet "daemons," small programs that control traffic flow and other things on the internet] ... and it's a long-standing trope used in both Harry Potter and Harry Dresden that magic and electrically based technology don't mix).

As I have said, the other half of this bringing the discworld magic as close to our own technology as possible is keeping magic from invading, and that it the job of Tiffany and her "hedge witches" and her book, Shepherd's Crown. The nice tie-together Pratchett does is to have the element that she uses to clinch her argument in getting the fairy king to put his foot down (he wasn't the one who made the invasion, but he was too busy partying with his vegenitals to be bothered, and Tiffany makes clear that he needs to be bothered to keep his people in check) is the very thing that happens in Raising Steam, the railroad is girding the world with tracks made of the very thing that is poison to fairies, iron.

In these two books, you have the two character/theme arcs that spanned the whole series, Wizards/Magic and Witches (if Rincewind and the Wizards tied with Vimes for number of books, as I said, Granny beat them by having the six witches books plus her role in the first four Tiffany books, and really the witches win over all when Tiff's final identity is as the hag o' hags, the true heiress of Granny, giving the witches eleven books total ... but neither the witches nor the wizards completely opens and closes the series: the wizards open and the witches close).

I'll move on in a second here to a secondary point with the Wizard stream that I think I'm writing for the first time, but first I want to note that I think that an important role of personal disposition for Pratchett is played by the thing of the two protagonists who provide the arc of the whole series not having as much distinct structure in their own actual series of books. The way that Pratchett wrote the series was rambling: one year a witches book, the next a Vimes/Watch, the next maybe a stand-alone YA like The Amazing Maurice, the next maybe a Death book or a more postmodern theoretical stand alone like Monstrous Regiment (the whole thing of gender, which he also has going with the "low king" of the dwarves). And I think it was important to him to have that rambling and meandering feel, in part because life simply is that way. When I come in and find these structures of trilogies and such even though he probably didn't consciously intend at first to do them, it is probably less eisogesis and more chaos theory. I don't think he would have minded being shown the structure as long as he was not expected to play a part and say "yeah, yeah, I'm really excited about it being structured, and I actually intended it that way." The point of chaos theory is that the order is discovered after, and in the actual writing, Pratchett is able to meander and ramble in that way that is so productive for him in coming up with this wonderful material. But it is still chaos theory, not radical reader response: the order is found, not inserted.

It's funny that the most meandering series ever written should be described as being teleological in its magic (on the Wikipedia page indicated above in the aside), but I think that that fact is more paradox, in a positive, Chestertonian way, than irony. So it is fitting that the two most meandering subseries are also the ones to provide structure, at least the structure of having a theme-based arc, to the whole. It is very Terry.

I would say that the person writing that on Wikipedia is speaking of the magic IN the discworld, and that most people think that the magic OF discworld, meaning his creativity in writing and constructing and connecting, basically his plotting, is not teleological, but rather very random and meandering. But I would argue that the magic OF discworld is also teleological; it's just that it is completely chaos theory discovering it (I have always thought we emphasize conscious intent in literature too much), or at least that part of it that is the structures of which I am speaking.

Raising Steam
So, since I admitted that the Wizards aren't in Raising Steam, I have to do some heavier work here to demonstrate that their particular theme, which is the version of magic particular to their strain (versus the hedge magic or human-sympathy magic of the witches, like Tiffany taking the Baron's pain away or what Granny calls "headology"), is indeed central to the book. But I also hope that this will enable me to pick up another new point, or at least one I don't think I have written on in here yet, which is the origin of magic as "occult property."

Magic started the discworld series with Rincewind and the imagined/believed dragons, but Raising Steam ends it with magic by going back to the real world roots of magical thinking, just as it brings magic as close as it is possible to bring it to our real world technology (without going into electricity ... or that wonderful scene in Colour of Magic, I think, where Rincewind crosses from Discworld to real world as a Norwegian psychologist on a commercial flight, but then the luggage crosses over too and chases him down the plane and they both pop back into the Discworld). It is noted several times in Raising Steam that steam is the combination of the four elements: earth, air, water, fire all work together to make it. This was ancient Greek "natural philosophy," basically their thinking on "science." So Raising Steam takes it back to core magic thinking not in the manner of having the same wizards who started the series, but by going back beyond them into the real world history of thought on "magic.'

Actually this goes back "beyond" magic, not in a temporal, historical way, but rather in a "grounds on which a thing is built" way. The way all magical thinking starts that is properly magical, rather than religious (appealing to a god or demon), is in the consideration of "occult properties," consideration of them within the "scientific" material universe. For the Greeks, that material universe was the four elements cosmology (built on the four contraries) and the four humors anthropology (also built on the four contraries). But the belief was that we could in some way or another observe all of this natural cause and effect going on ... except in the case of occult properties. The word itself means "hidden," so they would be unobservable by definition. If you look up "occult" in Merriam Webster, you get "supernatural," which sort of misses the point in the original meaning, or maybe jumps over it to get to a modern meaning of supernatural by way of supernatural being invisible to natural, only they don't explain that jump. You can see more of the real meaning if you look up "occlude." There you get closer with something that fits something like "occulemency" in Harry Potter better, which, since "mens" is the Latin for "mind," could be described as "blocking off" the mind. But really what the word means, and what would be a better way to describe occlumency, is "hiding," because originally, magic is about manipulating the "hidden" properties. The key example they always used to talk about occult properties was the lode stone, a magnet, which has the ability to move iron in unobservable ways (fitting ... the whole iron thing). All other stuff we can see: my hand moves a nail by picking it up and you can see that. But a magnet moves a nail and you can't see how, so it must be a hidden property. And magic begins with the attempt to find the way to manipulate those hidden properties.

[NOTE: Occult properties were tied also to astrology in that being born under certain stars made those stars exert certain pressures or forces, occult modes of causality, on a person and make them to be a specific type of person. Even somebody as orthodox as Thomas Aquinas bought this much ... but he emphatically did not buy what they call the "semiological" side of things, which here does not have to do with words as language signs pointing to things (linguistics and language studies are the most common place one hears of "semiotics"). The Greek semeia means "signs," and in the ancient world it would be astrological signs or miraculous workings (Christ did "signs" and wonders). So here, the "semiological" side that Thomas distinctly did NOT buy was that, based in the fact that astrological bodies exerted particular occult pressures at the time of conception or birth yielding particular personal dispositions, the movements of the stars could be used as "signs" of what was going to happen in a person's life ... the practice we commonly call "astrology." END NOTE]

So, at the same time as Raising Steam brings Pratchett's magical world as close to our own as you can without crossing (bring computers other than Hex into the discworld, and Hex is powered by the animism of an ant colony, not the manipulation of electricity), the book also includes elements that pair that with an opening that is not only back before the discworld's magic in Colour of Magic, but back beyond magical thought in the real world, back beyond the attempt to manipulate the "occult" properties, back to the desire to understand and work with the "natural philosophy" of the four elements cosmology, what was conceived of as the "natural" world: Dick Simnel working with earth, air, fire, and water by Raising Steam.


Shepherd's Crown
I have sort of stated at least most of what I have to state about this one at various points already, so for here I will just collect the basics in one place to make sure the connections aren't missed. Where Raising Steam brings our world and the discworld as close together as they can be brought, Shepherd's Crown presents a protection against an incursion of the magical/mythical world into our own on some sort of literal level by giving us the image of Tiffany protecting discworld against the fairies. And the thing that connects the two books is the railroad: developed by Simnel and Moist in  Raising Steam and deployed by Tiffany in Shepherd's Crown as an argument to persuade the fairy king to keep his people in check (if your people try, we witches will be here to fight you off, but you should tell them that they might as well not even try because it's going to be a serious pain in the ass because of how the world is now so girded in iron, which is poisonous to you all).

I'll just end by saying that I think that Tiffany's job is extra hard in our day and age because she not only has to keep fairy from over-running the real world; she has to keep the science of the real world from destroying the world of the imagination when used as weapons by the scientismists who have hijacked more legitimate science. The book itself is mainly about the one half, protecting the mundane from the magical, but there is an equal need to protect the magical from the mundane, to protect literature from the conquests of so-called "scientists" who think that the way to find the meaning of literature is for their "science" to force literature into that science's own categories of understanding.

(At some point I should get around to reading the "science of discworld" books, which seem like an incredibly imaginative thought experiment: the wizards at Unseen University make a model of an alternate universe that just happens to be our own real universe, and they send Rincewind in to poke around and try to understand how our "science," our nature, works so as to compare it to the magic in discworld.)

[ASIDE, BUT REALLY GOOD ONE: I have always loved that title of the fourth Tiffany book and the line it comes from: "When I am older, I shall wear midnight." Aside from the just awesome characterization (especially when she finally dons midnight and where the specific dress came from at the end of that book ... and the competitor for the best romantic line ever is in that ending too [again, paraphrasing]: "Miss Tiffany the witch, what does love sound like?" asked Preston, and the world grew still and the bees stopped buzzing and all noise died ... And Tiffany said "listen."), the line about "wearing midnight," for me, connects to an old complaint I had in learning Latin: when it says "attacked with fire and iron" they tell you to translate "attacked with torches and swords." No. There is more than just the material "thing" referent. There is the fact that in doing so, they wielded the elements. And here, "wear midnight" is more than wearing a black dress ... it is wearing midnight itself, wearing an emblem of the fact that the witch stands on the edge between light and dark, protecting light from dark, and so she knows that darkness better than most; she is the one who could realize the violence of human psychology on its way in the "rough music" and not only save Mr Petty from being murdered but also save the good townspeople from becoming murderers, but who also had to use the very pain he caused his daughter, use that darkness to fight off his besotted attempts to stop her from helping him. And out of that darkness, the daughter and her beau, comes the gift of the dress that symbolizes being the one who can handle the darkness, the one who can wear midnight. END ASIDE].

City Watch
At the time of the writing of this piece, Pratchett's Facebook page began a thing of "reading the most popular book together," and the unanimous choice for the first one of these, according to actual reader votes, was Guards Guards. And this was actually the first one that I read myself. And I also think it provides a unique in on the magic of discworld, that thing that I was describing as the mystical connection between magic as power of thought or imagination (like those dragons in the inverted structure in Colour of Magic, which get thinner and thinner the further away they get from the construct that relies on imagination) and the parody and characterization.

In a way, the City Watch series represents a tension in that the Vimes books are all about the character, with very little magic involved anywhere (there is, but it usually quickly connects into much more human modes, like the golems and goblins as outsiders/pariahs but ones who are needed by the same society that marginalizes and abuses them), and the same is true of the Moist von Lipwig books (Going Postal is a close second for favorite for me, but Night Watch still holds number 1). But with the City Watch series, Guards Guards is an important opening because it grounds the character-driven subseries in the magical-themed whole series by having it be about a magical, alternate-world creature like a dragon (although neither the swamp dragon nor the big dragon of Guards Guards are the imagination-mountain controlled dragons of Colour of Magic). And the actual anchoring is the fact that the two dragons pretty much represent the human couple of Sam and Sybil, the same characterization but in a magical mode. Sam is wiry and a common functionary, and a low-level one at that (a drunk leader of the squad viewed as a joke, the night watch), whereas Sybil is full-figured and from a much larger and more powerful strata of society. And so, even the most character-driven and social-criticism-driven subseries of the whole discworld series begins with a grounding in a magic element of the alternate universe.

So, for now, be it blessing or curse: May we live in interesting times.