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Article Excerpt
This essay reads the books of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series as novels of sexual and gender metamorphosis, looking particularly at magic within Duane's work as a linguistic instrument for sculpting bodies. It argues that YA novels in particular represent adolescent turmoil through narratives of wizardry and marvellous transformation, with Duane's work occupying a significantly feminist position.
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I am the trees that drink the light; I am the air of the green things' breathing; I am the stone that the trees break asunder; I am the molten heart of the world. --from Life's "I Am," Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
This essay examines the relationship of speech and metamorphosis within the work of Diane Duane. In Duane's Young Wizards books, magic is constructed through language, and her central protagonists--two sisters, Nita and Dairine--undergo a variety of amazing transformations as a result of their linguistic (and ethical) choices. Language, in fact, becomes the purest expression of their ethics, as they strive to encounter their others (both cosmic and contingent) in that crucial meeting of faith that Levinas describes as the very core of ethical life. I want to argue that, just as magic and shapeshifting often represent the violent transitions of adolescence within children's literature, physical transformation in Duane's work is also an expression of gender transgression and sexual rebellion. The Speech, the language of wizards, both human and non, remains the key to these transformations, and language itself becomes the battlefield upon which Duane's characters fight for control of their own identities.
The Young Wizards series, which began in 1983 with So You Want to Be a Wizard, includes seven books with an eighth in development. The first three books were reissued in 2003 as a twentieth anniversary printing, and the series has won multiple awards: both Hornbook and Locus have consistently praised it. Despite this, Duane's work has received almost no critical attention, and she is frequently compared to canonical authors such as Ursula K. Leguin and Marion Zimmer Bradley, rather than being examined closely in her own right. My focus concerns the first three books in Duane's series--So You Want to Be a Wizard, Deep Wizardry, and High Wizardry--which pay particular attention to the sibling relationship between Nita and Dairine. Although the later books also deserve attention, these primary books represent a compelling ambiguity in terms of genre. They are often billed as being "darker" than Duane's later work, and her storytelling style definitely changes between the third book (High Wizardry) and the fourth (A Wizard Abroad). Although the fourth book is actually the first to address young romance, the "pre-romantic" books have far more disturbing content, including suicide, genocide, and even apocalypse.
Duane writes about female characters whose agency lies in their ability to speak beyond masculine constraint, to make themselves emotionally accessible and therefore vulnerable, and to cite their own corporeality rather than avoiding the audience's gaze upon their bodies through the use of prosthetics--such as swords, wands, and magic--in the way that most male heroes protect themselves from being looked at. While celebrated heroes like Taran, Frodo, and Harry Potter all have an array of weapons at their disposal (including swords, daggers, wands, and even broomsticks), Nita and Dairine are often left only with their words. Language becomes their primary defense, and its intimate contours place them within a space of dangerous disclosure. In order to defeat the powers that work in opposition to life (never "evil," in Duane's universe, but simply belonging to a different principle), Nita and Dairine have to put their lives and hearts on the line.
Language is the "molten heart" of Duane's universe, and what I want to approach in this essay is how "the Speech," as the ultimate Austinian "speech-act," also creates a flexible space of physical and psychic metamorphosis for both sisters. Just as Nita and Dairine are able to re-alter the universe through language-driven magic, they are also able to reconfigure their own bodies, to extend and transform their own experiences of gender, sexuality, and desire. They literally speak themselves into being, and their spells become J.L. Austin's "felicitous performative," the speech act that both conveys information and creates reality at the same time. His famous example of the bride's "I do" in How to Do Things with Words, the speech act that literally renders her as "bride," is echoed and reconfigured by Duane's "I Am," the soliloquy of the earth itself whose insistent truth is able to drive back the forces of entropy and decay. By participating in this ancient language chain, Nita and Dairine go impossibly beyond their preadolescent bodies, while at the same time claiming a place for those bodies within the ontology of the world.
Leguin is Duane's most obvious literary influence, and her wizards' mastery of a particular language--the "Old Speech"--mirrors Nita's own exploration of the wizardly Speech that can alter the universe. Within the fantasy tradition, magic has always been governed by speech and ritual: Merlin uses secret words and gestures to transform Uther (in order to aid his own dreams of sexual conquest); Gandalf calls upon mystical signs and names in The Lord of the Rings, even magically binding the Balrog by addressing it properly as the "Flame of Udun" (Tolkien, Lord 1.322); Harry Potter must master spells and charms at Hogwarts, and the deadliest spell known by Rowling's wizards is actually an explosive utterance--"Avada Kedavra"--that kills instantly. Shows like Buffy, Angel, and Charmed employ liberal uses of Latin and Ancient Greek as the substance of magical spells, although characters like Willow often move beyond the need for language, and can simply will things to happen. For Willow, magic becomes "a unity of sexual and elemental power that is every bit as primal as the Slayer's strength [...] [it] is not merely conflated with sexuality in the show, but contiguous with it" (Battis 36). Speech seems to be a crucial ingress into the world of magic, but also something that can (occasionally) be transcended by desire and emotion.
Although a wealth of criticism exists on notions of "the fantastic" and "the Uncanny," very little of it actually discusses the role of magic as a linguistic force within contemporary fantasy. Todorov, in The Fantastic, locates magic as a function of "the marvelous," which is a much more concise genre than the fantastic. Marvelous elements have their own rules and laws, they can be seen and accepted by a reader, whereas the fantastic is actually "the hesitation between genres" (31), and "is not situated within the work but in the reader's individual experience" (34). The reader, in effect, creates the fantastic by agnosis, by not understanding whether it is real or not. Magic,...
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