Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the Occult by Leigh Wilson (review)

Leigh Wilson sets out to explore how occult and magical practices in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries did not merely influence modernist authors such as W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound but became the mechanism through which they fulfilled their well-known principle to “make it new.”¹ Unlike other scholarly discussions of magic and modernism²—which attempt to marginalize occult practices such as theosophy and spiritualism and their impact on modernist works and which usually underplay the extent to which many modernist authors participated in such practices—Wilson argues that these discourses created a “productive magic” that she asserts is “productive because it was a magic that fundamentally understood that the mimetic is able to produce, not just an inert copy, but an animated copy powerful enough to enact change in the original” (1). In other words, she argues that the occult discourses popular during this period allowed modernist authors to believe that the mimetic work they were doing had the ability to take the world and create it anew.

Wilson’s monograph consists of an introduction and five chapters that address different occult practices or concepts and their relation to modernist works. The introduction provides a background on magic and its connection to modernism in general, including an overview of previous works on the topic that is an excellent resource, while the first chapter focuses on the idea of experimentation and examines how the modernist experiment with form can be related to approaches to magic. Wilson argues that magic is often understood as error, and it is through these very mistakes that a new world may be created. Modernist authors’ innovations in both form and content play with the idea of error, making “possible our interaction with the world beyond the self in a way for which science cannot account” (27).

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on film and the strategies two Russian filmmakers, Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, employed to reflect ideas about telepathy and ectoplasm. Wilson’s explorations in each of these chapters are illuminating, shed new light on modernist innovation, and will be valuable for those seeking both a general understanding of the context of that time, as well as for those who specifically wish to explore occult practices of the period.

In chapters 2 and 3, Wilson focuses more specifically on Joyce and his connections with magic, discussing both the “Cyclops” episode’s use of interpellations and their relationships with ghosts and séances and the use of sound in Finnegans Wake. In this examination, she provides excellent background information about Joyce’s own skepticism regarding occult practices and then goes on to argue that, while Joyce typically is seen as having a parodic approach to magic, there are points where he embraces its power to transform the world. Wilson looks specifically at the interpellation in which a séance is held for Paddy Dignam and argues that—unlike all other interpellations that parody events taking place in the episode—this one focuses on occurrences that decidedly do not take place. Wilson contends that “Joyce here uses spiritualism formally in a way that is not parodic. While his representation of the contents of the séance is parodic, his repetition of the séance’s function is not” (71-72). She concentrates here on the magical ability of words to create that which does not already exist; this perception was the major aim of many philosophers of the time, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, and she argues that Joyce wrote in the context of these philosophers’ exploration of the power of language to create words like “ghost” or “unicorn”—things that do not exist. Joyce demonstrates “the magical word at the heart of literary experiment and that language is so powerful that it can make ghosts” in his séance for Paddy Dignam (67).

Chapter 3 is entirely dedicated to exploring Joyce’s...