From Tempest to Harry Potter: Understanding magic through literature at ULAB

Human realities are not the same without a door to the unknown and literature provides the pointers with which the magic is navigated.

Understanding this force was the focal point of the two-day conference organised by the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) which started in Dhaka on Friday.

Whether as religious alternative or a modern commodity, magic formed the basis for 87 academic papers for the event ‘Magic and Literature’. Was it more than just a method of mastering limitations? 

‘Magicians’ have captured human imagination in many forms, said Dr Subir Kumar Dhar who provided the keynote in the auditorium packed with eager academics and students.

Geoffrey Chaucer in Franklin’s Tale envisions the practitioner of magic as a scholar who sells his skills to those seeking immediate results that prayers do not deliver, said the professor of English at the Rabindra Bharati University in West Bengal.    

“Sorcery was a very learned attribute in medieval times, practised by men of wealth.” But it was also seen as an inverted form of religion – ‘a means to an end’ as opposed to spiritual values, he said.   

The darkness of ambition takes the form of three witches from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Unlike the rich wizard, the bearded women roam free spaces to transgress gender and class to attain ‘a form of power that comes from being unusual.’

Man who struggles with his turbulent mind has imagined the magician as someone who possesses the super ability to control objects as well as his own being. 

But man’s world of magic must be grounded in his reality, Dr Dhar said. “The magic shops in Harry Potter are like those at London’s Davenport... complete fantasy is only relatable to the author, to the rest, its incomprehensible nonsense.”

The desire to know unspoken thoughts which also occupied the Renaissance men features in The Tempest as Prospero uses ‘telepathic awareness’ to learn the intention of those who plot against him.

Dr Dhar went on to demonstrate the kind of magic that Shakespeare was used to seeing while walking the streets. 

The professor, who transitioned into the literary world in the 70s after years of performing professional magic, baffled the spectators with illusions using a Scry Glass, a magic square and telepathic awareness - elements used 400 years ago.

The margin

“We all grew up loving fairy tales, but we are eventually taught not to respect them. Fantasies and science fiction are basically ignored in our adult educations,” said ATM Sajedul Huq, Director of ULAB’s Centre for Language Studies.

“But we never really let go of what we truly admire,” he said after presenting a paper on Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy ‘Wheel of Time’ in one of the many parallel sessions that looked at magic’s relationship to popular culture, nature, memory, commodity, resistance, reality and more. 

So despite the marginilisation of magical creatures, genres of fantasy live on as parallel realities, providing lasting images of justice, equality and resistance against oppression.

“As a child, I encountered morality in the pages of Spider Man comics... lessons I never unlearned,” said Huq.

“You can’t name a single area that graphic novels have not covered. The format is now used to teach difficult subjects, because visuals are thousands times more effective especially when our attention spans continue to get shorter.”

Prof Firdous Azim, who chaired the session, threw light on how magic in literature is more than just a mode of escapism which in its base form serves as ‘opiates’.

“Literature poses itself as the world where can be free. Authorities, not authors or their readers, frown on magic because of its potential for freedom,” the Chairperson of BRAC University’s Department of English and Humanities told bdnews24.com.

Declaration of existence

Magic’s definition is never 'static' but somewhat ‘slippery’ because to change is ‘the dialectical nature of being,’ said Dr Azfar Hussain. “Magic will be there as long as there is life.”

The Michigan-based professor of liberal studies was moderating a panel discussion on magic in Bangla literature with poets Mohammad Rafiq, Shamim Reza and Razu Alauddin.

From Charyapada in the early era to Mangalkabya in the middle ages, magical elements were vastly incorporated to complete the author’s literary reality.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s weaving of the fantastic with war, science and prejudice gave his ground-breaking novel, ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’ a kind of totality that Western works have not been not able to achieve. What had been sheer nature for Marquez came to be understood as magic realism, said Alauddin.         

Magic meant ‘a declaration of existence’, said Rafiq. Humankind used magic for the same reason it created songs and science.

In colonial contexts, it can feature as a weapon for being an art innate to one’s existence, he said. 

“There was magic, but it’s not there anymore. The same reason they don’t practise singing in our townships anymore. It was taken away from us because our history as Bengalis are so fragmented.

“We are as old as time itself, but we can’t access it, we lost our dances and songs under colonial rule.”

French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal best described man’s exhaustion with the mundane, he said,  “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of ...”

The event, that has bdnews24.com as its media partner, will continue on Saturday with more lectures and discussions.