Magic at the margins: towards a magical realist human geography

Discovering Magic

How does an academic geographer enculturated in the social science traditions become interested in ‘magic’? I approach this question with a reflection upon my own journey as an ethnographer and magically oriented geographer, based upon ethnographic and narrative research projects to include doctoral and postdoctoral work, spanning (at the time of writing) an 8-year period.

To tell a story then, for me, magic arrived around and about the 22nd month of my doctoral fieldwork, on a rainy afternoon in the final weeks before Christmas, at the therapeutic work programme I have called elsewhere the Plumtree Centre. ¹⁰ Formally, the project was a qualitative study of the links between work, employment and mental (ill) health, comprising ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork at a range of therapeutic workshops and employment rehabilitation projects in the North East of England. At the time of commencing, this was a field consumed with the question of how best to get recipients of long-term sickness benefits back into the paid labour market. In any standard review of the evidence, the large scale quantitative study or systematic review of health and employment outcomes would form the archetypal research type. ¹¹ As my own work progressed, however, I became less interested in overarching trends in back to work journeys (the stuff of the conventional evidence base) and instead in the incredible and indeed awe-inspiring differences between individual experience – and in the variously strange, courageous, funny, upsetting and inexplicable encounters that constituted so much of what I saw happening at the Centre and yet which were almost completely absent from more systematic and policy-facing research accounts.

We might say that these are the types of revelation that are experienced by every ethnographer. However, on that December day, watching as the work team became briefly diverted from their workshop activities to witness the season’s first meagre snowflakes and someone saying something about there being ‘some kind of magic’ at Plumtree today (referring both to snowflakes and the whole way we’d all pulled together all afternoon), these ideas began crystilising as fast as the snow on the window. This surplus of therapeutic outcome, that tingling feeling in the gut entirely beyond what could reasonably be expressed in formal articulations of a therapeutic work programme – all of the things that had enchanted my enthnography that were encapsulated by that irreducible word ‘magic’ – such obseverations could only make sense if they were of the same order of importance and reality as all the other kinds of everyday things (meetings, classes, workplace visits, formal counselling sessions) that also took place at the Centre. Yet, arriving at any expanded understanding of what is ‘real’ (by which I mean what matters) required immediately a second expansion. I have written elsewhere ¹² (see also my introduction to Sam and David below) how the formally unreal experiences of delusion and psychosis assume physical, corporeal and linguistic presences in spaces like Plumtree. If the enchantment of watching snowflakes and ‘feeling magical’ (blessed, enchanted) warranted the formal status of reality, so too did the malign forces of our worries and cares. To believe in magic was not just an ethical or aesthetic disposition but an ontological one.

I am not, of course, the only person to have found or sought magic in response to the mainstay of scholarly ‘evidence’. The much loved texts by David Abram ¹³ or Jane Bennett, ¹⁴ for example, the enchanted geographies of Tara Woodyer and Hilary Geoghegan ¹⁵ or occult globalisations of Steve Pile, ¹⁶ adopt similar vocabularies to explore how the everyday world seems rich with wonder and magic. (Of these pieces, Woodyer and Geoghegan offer the best introduction to geography’s disciplinary engagement with enchantment and the more-than-rational.) ¹⁷ Andy Merrifield’s Magical Marxism also offers encouragement, drawing upon the power of an ‘unbridled imagination’ ¹⁸ as a critical source of political power and motivation for social change. In the specific context of mental (ill) health, Mick Smith et al.’s work on phobic lifeworlds ¹⁹ draws explicitly upon a framework of magic in ways that are deeply complementary to my own (see also Mary Levens for a more psychologically oriented account). ²⁰ I have noted elsewhere ²¹ my indebtedness to the late anthropologist Els van Dongen in her understanding of the storytelling of people living with unusual and psychotic mental states as creative forms of magic in a world in which ‘the rhetoric of suffering has little meaning’. ²²

Encouraged by this flurry of turns towards the more-than-rational and more-than-empirical then, in my new role as a magically oriented researcher, I positioned myself as a collector of stories about that which seemed otherwise ‘beyond’ or ‘in excess of’ ²³ the regular empirical research report. The resulting research portfolio might to an extent be understood as a catalogue of everyday magic – of mystery illnesses and magical cures, of magical therapeutic happenings and sometimes of the complex and problematic magic of despair and madness.

And so the people I introduce in my research – again, many of whom themselves articulated their stories through some reference to magic or enchantment – include the new mother who falls into a fairy-tale sleep for exactly 2 years (a real life sleeping beauty, or so her husband says) ²⁴ or the respondent who, on the brink of suicide in the wake of an abusive marriage, finds herself in a halted train carriage in the midst of a power cut when she discovers ‘as if by magic’, left behind in the seat beside her, a self-help book about surviving abuse in which pencilled into the inside cover is written her maiden name and furthermore, a folded bookmark of a newspaper cutting which advertises an affordable housing scheme for people who are ‘just starting out alone’, where she will eventually end up living. ²⁵ But also in the catalogue are the people who live with the dark and difficult magical burdens that unusual psychological experiences can bring. ²⁶ I will talk later of David, a former employee of a local public transport provider, who must ‘check’ (tap lightly with his knuckles) the walls and floors of his surroundings at intervals directed by invisible voices in order to secure the timely running of the North East bus network and prevent the apocalypse; or Deborah, who (as she puts it) is ‘entirely normal’ apart from her fear of particular shades of green, ²⁷ and who thus lives almost entirely indoors in a green-free safe house. An interesting facet of becoming a magically oriented geographer is that the further I became interested in these kinds of story, the more I found them coming to me – both in the figurative sense of the imaginative impetus to recognise such moments within any particular research encounter, and also in a literal way – the research participant, for example, who would phone me up and say, ‘I have a friend here and I think you would be interested in her story’. I refer us again to the quotation from the writer and dramatist Eden Phillpotts with which I open this article: ‘The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper’.

Finding magic in the evidence

I had been feeling really shit that day but it just hit me – not because I could have died, but thinking about that van and the little blacked out windows and them inside not knowing where they’re going and I thought ‘well, at least I’m not in that – at least I’m not locked up somewhere’. It was a wake-up call. I never went to the building site [. . .] I went and got a coffee, I got myself a newspaper and I started looking for a proper job. Experiences such as Pete’s near-miss collision clearly cannot be replicated for the purposes of a randomised controlled trial – yet, as Pete will tell you, being nearly hit by a prison van probably saved his life.

If magic evades a positive description (in that, as a collection of occurrences beyond the conventional evidence base, a concept which is defined primarily through that-which-it-is-not), in each of the above examples, I try instead to capture just one aspect of this thing I call magic. And so, as candidates of magic we include the following: that moment of therapeutic awakening that emerges so surprisingly after years of therapeutic failure ²⁹ (a kick in the gut for inductive theories of extrapolation, including those which make the future treatment decisions about what support to offer an individual based on their previous therapeutic responsiveness – as if the world was really that predictable!?); the role of ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’, by which presumably we mean here the effects of coincidence and chance; the animating forces of spiritual, religious and superstitious world narratives in the lives of individual actors; the intimate and often unforeseeable ways in which the landscapes of the unconscious or delusion can come to ‘matter’ in all kinds of ordinary, everyday ways.

While each of the above extracts represents a different relation to the evidence base, what draws such stories together is their difficulty in fitting with conventional research evidence – either because the nature of the experience itself could not be controlled or reproduced in the formats demanded by the methodologies of a robustly ‘evidenced-based’ research project or – perhaps more poignantly – because the subject matter itself was not of the kind deemed suitable for policy-facing academic engagement. In the longer version of this argument, I develop this last point with reference to a later strand of my research, which this time included conducting paired interviews with mental health service users who had taken part in previous research projects and the researchers who had interviewed them, about the experience of telling and hearing mental health stories in academic contexts. ³⁰ Echoing Sara MacKian’s comments about the strains of researching unconventionally evidenced phenomena, ³¹ what emerged in these discussions was how many of the marginal experiences I have here called magic were at each stage of the research process removed, adjusted or politely forgotten in the final research outputs. As MacKian reports of her own research into spiritual encounters, ³² the routes for such ‘silencing’ (or at the very least, omission) of magic from the evidence base were various – because such experiences weren’t disclosed by the participant to the researcher in the first place or else weren’t recognised as the sort of thing that constituted ‘proper’ data, or quite often, because they were expressed but were later dismissed (and again, for all kinds of reason – disbelief or lack of understanding about what the respondent had reported, concern about how a research piece containing such stories might be received, the lack of a common language to speak about magical occurrences or simply the lack of space to tell stories in academic reports). It is interesting to note that such censorship emerged from respondents as well as researchers in these encounters (i.e. this is not a straightforward tale of the researcher–researched power inequality). To return to the woman from my own research with the book on the broken-down train, the interview ended as follows: ‘I feel a bit weird saying all this in front of the tape recorder . . . it doesn’t feel very scientific somehow’. ³³

While magic might not always ‘feel’ the stuff of a scientific research encounter, however, it is important to stress simultaneously that to believe in the everyday enchantments of the people I discuss in my research requires no formal departure from the metaphysics and epistemological commitments of the regular evidence base but rather only its rhetoric. To summarise the arguments I make about everyday magic and its relation to ‘best evidence’ then are as follows: (1) magic, as here phrased, is an ordinary part of the human world, particularly where concerning matters of breakdown and recovery (the ontological argument), (2) the evidence base, as it currently stands, is impoverished by the lack of a full appreciation of magic (the epistemological argument) and (3) it follows that social inquiry should expect to encounter magic and should design itself where possible to see magic and the prosaic together (the methodological argument).

A magical realist perspective

For some readers no doubt, magic will remain an indulgent candidate for inclusion in a social science evidence base. Yet, reiterating the emphases of Pile and MacKian in their treatments of the spiritual or occult, what I highlight instead in the above research extracts is the unexpected compatibility of magic with wholly realist perspectives. In the remainder of this article, I want to develop these ideas by stepping into another genre of magical writing – that which has become known in the secondary literature as magical realism. I have alluded already in this article to one particular application of a magical realist approach within Geography in the form of Merrifield’s Magical Marxism, which is illustrated with scenes from Gabriel García Márquez’s fantastical town Macondo as it appears in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. ³⁴ While Merrifield uses Macondo to animate his vision for an alternative future, my own emphasis in this article has been to embrace what is already magical about the existing world and to turn to magical realist literatures for clues upon how we might respond to it. In turning to literary magical realism, I present a mode of thinking and writing that I suggest can help us to integrate the magical experiences I have discussed in this article into more mainstream evidence bases about illness and recovery – while simultaneously taking up the challenge of Woodyer and Geoghegan to find ‘“new” ways of appreciating and capturing enchantment’ ³⁵ in human geographical research. Beyond the academy, however, through the unusual ontological strategies of magical realism, I also find potentials for practical and pragmatic ways of responding to the needs of people with unusual and magical experiences, for whom – as demonstrated in the stories above – ‘conventional’ professional wisdoms have often failed.

With origins traced as dispersedly as 20th century Latin America and 19th century Russia, magical realism might be thought of as a broad collection of fantastic narrative and artistic forms (for examples beyond Márquez, see Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Alejo Carpentier, Isabel Allende, aspects of Gogol and Kafka) that variously transgress or problematise the conventional division between bourgeois scientific rationality and the fantastic or magical. ³⁶ In magical realist stories, magic is part of the ordinary world – flying carpets wait alongside taxicabs in Mumbai traffic jams, circuses and carnivals have as many technologies as the medical clinic and humans share agency with animals and spirits in quite undiscerning manners. Highly acclaimed in the academic literature, magical realist texts can be read as politicised fairy tales embedded not in a land ‘far, far away’ but in the everyday landscapes of the contemporary world. Often originating from the Global South, magical realism now enjoys an established presence in postcolonial ³⁷ and indigenous ³⁸ studies. To consider how magical realism might inform the similarly peripheral identity politics of mental health research thus seems an interesting and pertinent line of inquiry. While there are differences between the canonical magical realist masterpieces and the approach to magic that I take, in what follows I offer just a few suggestions as to how social research in matters of illness and recovery might benefit from a magical realist perspective, and how a ‘belief in magic’ might offer one way of taking the call for a renewed criticality within social research very seriously indeed.

The first point I make about magical realism and its relevance to a critical study of mental distress is one of solidarity. Already, we have seen that magical realism is a genre where eccentrics (ex-centrics, perhaps) are centralised while traditional strongholds of knowledge and power are simultaneously decentred. As forms of narrative written ‘by and for people at the margins’, ³⁹ mad and magical realist stories thus share common themes, committed similarly to the challenges of the liminal and marginal. Just as Azaru exists between the spirit world and the living in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, ⁴⁰ Sam, who I introduce above, lives between the magical worlds of fighter pilots and imaginary wars that appear to her in her psychoses and the more mundane spaces of the ‘back to work’ programme, both of which problematically demand her attention and time.

Like many of the narratives in my own research, magical realism similarly attunes us to the complex and problematic relations between personal distress and a wider politics of anxiety. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsor wakes one rainy morning to find he has been ‘transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin’, ⁴¹ apparently a result of his long working hours as a travelling salesman. Similarly, in Gogol’s The Nose, ⁴² the reader follows the story of Major Kovalev, whose nose falls off his face and runs away to lead a life without him – an experience which appears to be the result of the myriad frustrations of Russian bureaucracy. Many of the vignettes I include in my own evidence base reveal something of the tensions between the individualised narratives of ‘illness’ and broader socio-cultural-political distress (consider the case of Pete (who we met before), for instance, whose story seems as explicable through the combined lenses of labour market restructuring and retrenchments of the welfare state as it does from some clinical class of depression). Yet – breaking away from less fantastical literary traditions – the literal transfigurations that encumber the characters of Kafka or Gogol above also provide ways of talking about the intensity and vitalism with which individuals come to carry the tensions of an economic system in mind and body: consider Sally (another participant in my research), who has been working double shifts at a 24-hour supermarket, and who has become increasingly convinced that her body is part of the till, and that her hands transferring money from customer to cash draw are just part of the machinery (in fact, appropriately for a machine, she has actually lost feeling in both arms: indeed it was this symptom rather than feelings of mental ill health that encouraged her to consult her doctor).

Beyond the critique of individualist accounts of mental distress, magical realist stories also offer prototypes for moving beyond the biases of institutional power that can reside ‘between the lines’ of traditional mental health research writing. The second strength I find in magical realism then is a mode of talking about intense or unusual emotional experiences without automatic deferral to the institutionalised authorities of psychology or medicine. The characters of magical realist texts are in various combinations suffering or disabled, or apparently ‘mad’ or haunted – however, and in a way that cannot be said for many literary forms dealing more explicitly with distress and unhappiness, in shying away from the expressly psychological, magical realism simultaneously remains assuredly non-reductive (by which I mean neither medicalised nor psychologised). In contrast to the literary genres from which the medical and social sciences have traditionally sought insight – patient testimonies and biographies (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath), for example – magical realism speaks little of the emotional experience of sickness and recovery and less still of the world of therapists, doctors and treatments. In The Nose, Kovalev finds the disappearance of his extremity a matter for the police rather than the physician and Gogol provides little information as to how Kovalev might feel about such inconvenience; in Metamorphosis, Gregor’s family sends the doctor away when they realise what misfortune has befallen him. I reiterate here that this is a de-centred rather than a re-centred mode of approaching power and knowledge – and so it is not the medicine or the psychological that are demonised in magical realism but rather that they are simply not indispensable. Such achievement will be instructive to the kind of approach that critical approaches to researching mental distress find necessary too – that is, neither to take for granted any inherent authority of the psychological or medical professions, yet also to avoid some of the more dogmatic and universalistic objections of reactive anti-psychiatry either.

Third and more importantly in my defence for a magical realist geography is the impressive and compassionate approach to conceptualising difference that I find in magical realist literary genres, ⁴³ a feature we will find particularly instructive with regard to the requirements in mental health geographies and indeed geographical inquiry more broadly both to consider the radical differentiation of individual narratives and to speak collectively (socially and politically) about the conditions of distress. In terms of the ‘evidence base’, this is significant: in any endeavour which seeks to represent the experiences and views of those who have felt first-hand the effects of mental illness lies a question of who can speak for whom – especially in a group which demonstrates already such ‘wonderful’ differences. ⁴⁴ More prosaically, however, regardless of our analytic or methodological preferences, the unescapable demands of writing – the tasks of synthesising an argument or empirical data (from Greek, syntithenai, ‘to combine’) – inevitably require the sacrifice of some minutia of individual variance in the name of the ‘bigger’ picture. To quote from a succinct and somewhat incidental passage from one of Márquez’s lesser-known works, the short story, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, in which the characters Pelayo and Elisenda have been caring for an angel since he crashed in their yard in the rain:

[On hearing about the arrival of the angel], the most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. ⁴⁵

In this list of unfortunates, we are told much about the nature of unhappiness: that the concerns of these individuals are to be taken seriously and that there are many others like them. Furthermore, in this extract, a wonderful sense of collective individualism is seen which I think epitomises magical realism. Despite the woeful atomism of their individual complaints, the invalids move both as a discrete subsection of society and as inhabitants of a common, shared world (the story opens with the assertion that ‘the world had been sad since Tuesday’). Illness is never reduced to the Other since death and madness are in Pelayo and Elisenda’s house from the start – the narrator tells us in the introduction to the story that the eponymous angel had been visiting to collect their critically ill child (although after the accident, the child is miraculously cured). And yet, suffering is never reduced to the collective, either: these individuals – trapped as they are in the unique responsibilities of their magical illnesses – must be treated with the particularity that their concerns demand. The list – which is Márquez’ literary device – is thus another trope of magical realism which I find helpful, instructing the reader to see how condensing a number of individuals into a class or kind is both a necessary and a problematic strategy. ⁴⁶

Yet the final, and most important, argument upon which I shall focus the remainder of this article concerns the realism of magical realism itself, although in conclusion I will take this argument through realism to pragmatism, which will be the final resting point of my case for magic. For many commentators, the most distinctive feature of magical realism is its ontological intervention: unsurprisingly, the introduction of magic to everyday settings and the refusal to allow a hierarchical approach to reality in which magic is subordinate to more ordinary metaphysical happenings. Certainly, this ‘ontological flattening’ ⁴⁷ is one strength of the genre and part of its helpfulness to our discussion: if magical realism simultaneously says, ‘everything is as real as everything else’ and ‘we cannot be sure what is real and so we shall treat all things equally’ then this offers a respectful and inclusive attitude towards the minority experiences and magical happenings that are often excluded from traditional evidence bases (a strategy which might already be apparent in responding to the magical stories in my own research). ⁴⁸ In displaying what is metaphysically bizarre or unreal in textually realistic lights, magical realism as such opens a new ‘mythical and magical perspective on reality’ ⁴⁹ – often with the effect of revealing to the reader what is strange and incongruous about the status quo of the regular world. Beyond this, the alternative world evoked in magical realism and the non-stratified ontologies that produce it are themselves subversive – disrupting the hegemony of modernist literature in which the magical and mysterious are marginalised in relation to rational logocentric narrative modalities ⁵⁰ – and, for the case I seek to make here, blowing apart a stratified theory of knowledge and method, in which ‘hierarchies of evidence’ will be natural effects.

However, despite this talk of ontological assertion (of realistic narration, of magic-as-real), what impresses me more about magical realist literary forms and their potential for a magically informed social science is their simultaneous and paradoxical withdrawal from or agnosticism towards (lack of interest in, even) questions of ontology – for at the same time it is true that very rarely is ontology deeply questioned either by the characters themselves in magical realist stories or by their authors. In A Very Old Man, it is thus indicative that Pelayo and Elisenda are at first a little afraid of the angel who appears in their courtyard, but ‘very soon overcome their surprise’ ⁵¹ and ‘in the end find him familiar’, ⁵² in the same way that the villagers in Márquez’s story are able to respond to the unusual impairments of the travellers who come to visit the angel with non-judgemental and unfussing practicality. In magical realist fiction, this ontological reticence of characters and their authors provides an essential means for ‘the story to progress’, for people to get on with doing what they need, for a brief escape from the relentless obligation to explain, interpret and justify the things that one feels or experiences (a curse inflicted upon the mentally ill). It is thus this highly practical, pragmatic, quality of a withdrawal from questions of ontology that I suggest has potential in matters of severe and enduring mental distress, not just in the scholarly pursuit of building evidence bases but in the on-the-ground matters of caring and responding too. ⁵³

Having started out by working in philosophically realist dimensions, it is finally then with a pragmatic position that I finalise the case for magical realism in social science’s treatments of mental distress. It is my opinion that social research and scholarly writing about mental distress have for too long concentrated on questions of ontology and causation (i.e. the status of unhappiness as an illness and its possible causes), that is what we can now see as the fussy process of establishing what is real. Both academic psychiatry and its critics fall into this trap in their keenness to persuade us either of the biogenetic bases of mental ill health or to disabuse us of such beliefs (we are left with the memory that mental illness may or may not be a myth, ⁵⁴ but with less certainty about what this means for us). Freud too, in his almost exclusive interest in the psycho origins of distress, seems guilty of not matching his commitment to establishing causation with care for whether such insight will be helpful to his patients. In contemporary and dominant forms of social science research (the focus of this article), the heavy emphasis on ‘best evidence’ might similarly be seen to overtake other valuable ways of thinking about and responding to people in distress and sickness – when research (like mine) can sit only on the bottom rung of those policy-facing evidence hierarchies – and when interventions like the Plumtree Centre struggle to justify their continued existence without being able to demonstrate that they are evidence-based. ⁵⁵

Perhaps then a magical pragmatist approach offers one way of moving beyond this interpretive and evidence-fixated struggle. Magic happens and transforms people’s lives. Thankfully, we may feel, the current world has a little less of the transcendental magic seen in magical realism – yet, interruptions from a magical world shape people’s lives alongside and along with the forces more ordinarily considered by social science research.

I return to the man I call David, the ex-bus driver who compulsively checks the walls and furniture around him at fixed times during the day. While we might spend much time thinking of reasons for David’s compulsive tapping behaviours, if we are going to keep up with David or help him integrate in a mainstream ‘non-tapping’ world, we (as researchers, policymakers, mental health professionals, friends) must accept that David does tap walls and must cease being alarmed by every instance of tapping and checking that David displays. Similarly, we might think of Deborah, the participant on the back-to-work project, whose phobia of the colour green has kept her captive in her home for the last several years. If we were working with Deborah we might do well to remember that green is a historically unlucky colour ⁵⁶ (‘And with a green and yellow melancholy, she sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief’, Twelfth Night, II, ii) – her ‘madness’ here is not unintelligible. Likewise, we might be particularly sensitive to Deborah’s strict Catholic upbringing in a rural community, where the condemnation of lay superstitions as ‘deviances of religion’ was equalled by the incessant superstitions of the Catechism. Yet, interpretation does little to capture the phenomenological greenness of green ⁵⁷ or the particular powers which prevent Deborah from trespassing onto green vocabularies (Wednesday is a difficult day because Wednesday is unlucky in its own right (Wednesday’s child is full of woe) but also because Wednesday is recycling day and thus the day that the green bins come out). Whatever are the reasons for Deborah’s unusual disposition, for now, if we want to help Deborah find a work placement, we must simply accept that green is off limits (a particular component of the geography of Deborah’s home town then will mean anything involving the Newcastle light railway Green Line) and to do so without fuss or condescension. We might feel that in the longer term it would be preferable to encourage Deborah and David beyond these magical worlds and the entrapment they bring, but in the meantime, we are going to have to work with and not against such magic.

Pragmatism may seem a strange stopping place for a paper which has drawn heavily on magical realism – especially where we see pragmatism as only an instrumentalist theory of knowledge into which magic doesn’t fit easily – and especially where we see realism and pragmatism as irrevocably separated poles of philosophy. ⁵⁸ Yet, in the analysis I have offered above – that the innovation in magical realism is less, its experimental engagement with ontology than its circumnavigation of or withdrawal from ontological angst – it appears that pragmatism, especially of the ‘neo’ kind which has been associated most closely with Richard Rorty, is highly commensurate with the remarks I am making. To turn to Rorty directly,

[Pragmatism] says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about. For pragmatists, ‘truth’ is just the name of a property which all true statements share. It is what is common to ‘Bacon did not write Shakespeare’, ‘E equals mc²’, ‘Love is better than hate’. They doubt this for the same reason they doubt there is much to be said about the common feature shared by such morally praiseworthy actions as Susan leaving her husband, America joining the war against the Nazis, Socrates not escaping from jail, Roger picking up litter from the trail, and the suicide of the Jews at Masada. [. . .] When they suggest that we do not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that ‘there is no such thing’ as Truth and Goodness. Nor do they have a ‘relativistic’ or ‘subjectivist’ theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. ⁵⁹

As Rorty has it then, matters of truth, as of ethics, are less something that correspond in any representational sense to reality than simply ways of thinking that allow one to move or to act in particular ways that make sense at that time. In this way, pragmatism attempts exactly that which magical realism does – to do away with a stratified theory of knowledge in which particular kinds of truth or evidence are valued higher than others: the pyramids of evidence in which only the tightest clinical trials make top ranks or the traditional division between scientific and magical or sane and mad affairs that organise ordinary discourse. It is this way in which Rorty sees pragmatism as overcoming traditional means of dividing the ‘assemblage of true statements’ ⁶⁰ into upper and lower divisions of knowledge (the old task of the Platonic traditions). It is in this same way that Pelayo and Elisenda are able to overcome their surprise at the angel who crashes in their garden in A Very Old Man – by setting aside the metaphysical questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ and instead acting only at the level of ‘this is the case’.

To mirror my tripartite formulation earlier in this article, advocating a pragmatic base from which to develop a magically informed social science then is a way of (1) rejecting hierarchical theories of truth which limit the kinds of knowledge that are admissible as social science evidence, in order (2) to conceptualise the maximum number of dimensions of mental distress and recovery, so that (3) we can act in the world in a way which is meaningful to each of these contexts in equal regard.

Like most journeys into unfamiliar or magical territories, exploring magical realist (and magical pragmatist) textual forms is not without its dangers. Echoing concerns within literary critique of the genre’s postcolonial credentials, ⁶¹ associating the experiences of madness and unhappiness with the magic of magical realism risks a romanticism or exoticism of mental difference that is counter to its desired subversive politics. ⁶² More prosaically, contrary to the greater thrust of the ‘emotional turn’ in geography, the prevailing character of magical realist fictional writing is itself distinctly unaffective – giving little space to the feel or texture of suffering or depression (or indeed any other element of internal sensation or experience, including that of wonder or enchantment itself). ⁶³ I have argued that the strength of this stylistic form, which I have attempted to emulate here in the matter-of-fact narration of my own empirical casework, is to offer more pragmatic and non-judgemental ways of presenting mad experiences than those told through exclusively psycho(patho)logical perspectives. Yet, it is apparent that this strategy cannot be sufficient alone. Simultaneously, we must also find space for forms of magical writing – like Smith et al.’s descriptions of the magical distortions of phobias, perhaps – that explore distress and madness in ways that reveal too their phenomenological and affective depth and complexity.

Suggesting a way to learn from magical realism – or indeed magical pragmatism – then is not to offer some new competing method for the analysis of magical realist or other magical narratives, nor to deny value in approaches to academic research in geography and beyond whose interests are to consider the reality-status of events and phenomena (for to suggest this would be to replicate the very kind of epistemological violence that has concerned me in the ‘best evidence’ agenda). Rather, it is just – as Rorty has it – to ‘change the conversation’, to move on from the question, to ‘work around’.

A manifesto in the making

Having suggested some ways in which the literary genre of magical realism might begin to offer some ways of incorporating the experiences, I have called ‘magic’ into more mainstream evidence bases, it is my intention to end this article with some thoughts of how this might play out in practice – for instance, at the level of developing mental health policy or strategic direction in geographical research and beyond. The following is a prototype for academics, policymakers and organisations working with people in mental distress (although naturally such prototype would require development differently for each of these audiences). I have presented this as a manifesto as a reference both to ideologies of academic research which imagine speaking back to policy as the only way of ‘mattering’ in the academy and also as an allusion to that other older action philosophy that had magical ideas about how to change the world. ⁶⁴ Admittedly, the manifesto is scant on detail in places (a common failing of manifestos . . .). Yet, perhaps any move towards a more magical geography, like Merrifield’s cautious rendition of Macondo, will have to be one that allows space for both imagination and pragmatics to unfurl at the level of the local and particular.

The magical manifesto and notes from the field with which I conclude this article are consciously playful. However, if ‘playing’ with the ways in which we imagine the world and think and learn in the academy has long been the imagined purpose of cultural geography, then it must be seen that like the excursions into magic undertaken by others alongside me, ⁶⁶ that this is also a critical effort – in the case of my everyday catalogues of magic, reinvigorating and re-politicising the border between what we consider known and unknowable (and on whose authority we draw the boundaries) and gently moving away from that idea that magic only matters in a land far, far away. ‘The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper’.