MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the titular practical magicians pursue often-conflicting goals of restoring magic to an alternative-history nineteenth-century England. While Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell practice, adapt, and create spells and establish varying relationships with Faerie, all the while, they work in the shadow of the mysterious Raven King, John Uskglass, a human who centuries before ruled kingdoms in Yorkshire, Faerie, and Hell, and who established the practice of magic in England. John Uskglass’s role in the novel is both peripheral and essential: While little of the narrative is actually about him, per se, no part of the magic done in the story—and, therefore, no part of the story—takes place without his influence and, as it turns out, his involvement. Despite his general absence in the novel, John Uskglass shadows the entire text. If Strange and Norrell are, as one character states, the spell the Raven King is doing, the whole novel is really his story. He is the frame on which it hangs, the subtext on which the logic of its world depends. He is the king and savior his most fervent disciples desire and fear. Yet, when he comes, those same disciples either fail to recognize him, or fear him, or assimilate his appearance by retreating from logic. In this paper, I argue that John Uskglass’s appearance in the novel represents the appearance of the Lacanian Real in Clarke’s narrative. As a disrupter of paradigms and a figure of otherworldliness breaking into the world of the novel, the Raven King embodies that which is beyond our comprehension, yet which we subconsciously expect. In examining the character of John Uskglass, we can explore whether the Real is an object of horror, as Lacan posits, or whether it incorporates a more comforting aspect.