The Pen and the Telescope: Words as a Source of Power in So You Want to Be a Wizard

Warning: The following post contains significant spoilers for the plot of So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane. If you haven't read the novel, and you have any intention of doing so, save this post for later! I've tried to write this post in a way so as to make it accessible to people who haven't even heard of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series before, so if you haven't read it you shouldn't be confused -- and if you are, please let me know in a comment so that I can make myself clearer!

“Part of the problem, Nita thought to herself as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can’t keep my mouth shut.” (11)

So begins Diane Duane’s first young adult fantasy novel, So You Want to Be a Wizard. From the genre and the title, the first-time reader might expect thirteen-year-old Nita to be fleeing some fierce mythological creature or an evil sorcerer, but the truth is at once more mundane and more threatening: she lives firmly in our world, and she’s running from a group of schoolyard bullies.

Bookish and intelligent at an age when such qualities will get Nita shunned at best and beaten up at worst, her brain is all she has going for, but when taunted by Joanne and her gang, even her quick tongue won’t save her, and her cunning retorts are more likely to get her in trouble than save her skin. Like everyone else who was ever labeled a geek, nerd, or bookworm as a kid (myself included), Nita seems vitally aware of the supreme unfairness of her situation. She’s smart, so she talks; she talks, so she gets in trouble. There’s always the possibility that she could be just like the other kids if only she could just stay quiet—but she can’t, not while maintaining her own integrity and sense of self.

Luckily, Nita manages to hide from the bullies in “a little brown-brick building with windows warmly alight—refuge, safety, sanctuary. The library” (12). The knowing librarian suggests that Nita hide in the children’s section and promises to misdirect the bullies who come in after her. So it’s in the basement of her local library that Nita first discovers the book that’s about to change her life: an innocuous-looking book called So You Want to Be a Wizard. At first she’s sure it’s someone’s idea of a joke—there can’t really be wizards, and even if there were, they certainly wouldn’t have instruction manuals—but she begins to read it all the same, until “it abruptly stopped being a game, with one paragraph”:

Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world—a tree, say, or a stone—that it’s not what it thinks it is, that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skillfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing or into it—freeze fire, burn rain—even slow down the death of the Universe. (15-16)

So You Want to Be a Wizard announces itself to a child who is both at risk and at promise because of her strong relationship to books and her appreciation for words. It appears in the moment when Nita is both at her most vulnerable and her most protected, on the run from disaster and yet surrounded by the books that have been her friends and companions when people can’t be counted on. Tellingly, the fantasy it presents her with is linguistic: become a wizard, the book says, and your words will have power. Forget those bullies—when you talk, the whole universe will listen.

Unfortunately, the bullies don’t make themselves easy to forget. The library provides only temporary solace, and as soon as Nita leaves (with her copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard in tow), she’s ambushed by Joanne and her gang. They beat her up and steal one of her most prized possessions, her space pen “that could write on butter or glass or upside down” (19). The space pen, with its pressurized ink cartridge that allows it to write on almost anything, seems the perfect representation of Nita’s desire to express herself without restrictions, and it is exactly this kind of freedom that Joanne denies her. Words are the only tools Nita has for fighting back, and Joanne both literally and metaphorically robs her of them.

The bullies might have stolen her pen, but her library book is still intact, and Nita reads on, learning of “the Speech, the magical tongue in which objects and living creatures can be described in more accuracy than any human language” (16), in which names are “‘a way of saying what you are’” (34) with the same devastating precision. Wizardry, for Nita, becomes a way of reclaiming linguistic agency and using it to fight back, not just against Joanne’s physical bullying, but against Joanne’s attempt to redefine Nita’s geekiness from a hostile perspective. Despite children’s rhymes to the contrary, Nita knows that words can hurt just as well as sticks and stones:

(Bookworm,) she heard the old jeering voices go in her head, (foureyes, smartass, hide-in-the-house-and-read. Walking encyclopedia. Think you’re so hot.) “No,” she remembered herself answering once, “I just like to find things out!” And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she had found out about being punched in the stomach. (13)

Her experience suggests that there is no separating harsh words from harsh actions, and that it’s not only in the Speech that names have a frightening ability to define who you are. When Nita resists the bullies, she is resisting a kind of malevolent renaming. It’s no surprise that when Nita first meets Kit, a fellow young wizard with whom she shares a history of being bullied, the first thing they have in common is a dislike of what other people call them:

“I’m Kit,” he said then. “Christopher, really, but I hate Christopher.”

“Nita,” she said. “It’s short for Juanita. I hate that too.” (30)

Like Nita, Kit’s linguistic expression is threatened—he’s teased and bullied partly because he’s skipped a grade, but partly because of his Hispanic accent—and when she tells him about Joanne stealing her pen, it doesn’t take long for him to agree to help Nita get it back. The first spell they work together is one that makes use of their growing fluency in the Speech to stop the bullying and the redefinition that comes along with it. Kit hopes to attract an aura to himself that will keep the other boys from trying to beat him up; Nita just wants to regain her pen.

It turns out that wizardry is not quite so simple. Their initial spell backfires, and Nita and Kit find themselves unintentionally babysitting a white hole dubbed “Fred,” who has come to Earth to warn the local wizarding advisories that what he calls The Naming of Lights—and what Earth wizards know as The Book of Night With Moon—has gone missing. Suddenly, the story is not just about allowing Nita and Kit to reclaim their own names, but about making sure that the definition of everything in existence is preserved. One advisory wizard explains:

“When you use [the Speech], you define what you’re speaking about. That’s why it’s dangerous to use the Speech carelessly. You can accidentally redefine something, change its nature. […] The Book of Night with Moon is written in the Speech. In it, everything’s described. Everything. […] It’s one of the reasons we’re all here—the power of those descriptions helps keep everything that is, in existence.” (51)

The quest to find The Book of Night With Moon takes Nita and Kit straight out of their universe and into one “next door,” where carnivorous taxi cabs prowl the streets of Manhattan and living things cower in the shadow of Life’s great antagonist, the Lone Power, who invented death and set it loose among the worlds, and who spends his days tricking species after species into accepting his “gift.” There’s some sneaking, some fighting, some injuries, and a whole lot of running—but when it comes down to it, the final battle to keep The Book of Night With Moon and to preserve the universe in working order is fought with words. In the book that describes everything, exactly as it is, Nita and Kit find the section that describes the Lone Power. To gain influence over him, and to come out the winners, all they need to do is finish reading his name—because encapsulated in the Lone One’s name is his first banishment, and to read that name again is to re-enact the expulsion from grace, the fall from heaven, the removal (even if only temporarily) from a space of influence over this universe.

As far as magic goes, it’s rather straightforward: read the name, and banish Life’s eternal enemy into darkness (at least for a time). But Nita and Kit understand something important about the value of names, something that comes not only from their training as wizards, but from years of enduring taunts and name-calling. They understand what it means to allow what others call you—perhaps even what you come to call yourself—to overcome and ultimately become who you are, limiting the possibility for change and growth. And that’s not something they would wish upon anyone, the Lone Power included.

If only there were some way he could be otherwise if he wanted to. For here was his name, a long splendid flow of syllables in the Speech, wild and courageous in its own way—and it said that he had not always been so hostile; that he got tired sometimes of being wicked, but his pride and his fear of being ridiculed would never let him stop. Never, forever, said the symbol at the very end of his name, the closed circle that binds spells into an unbreakable cycle and indicates lives bound the same way.

[…]

…she knew what she had to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed. She clicked it open. The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly—the same glitter as the ink in which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the Book and, with the pen, in lines of light, drew from that final circle an arrow pointing upward, the way out, the symbol that said change could happen—if, only if—and together they finished the Starsnuffer’s name in the Speech, said the new last syllable, made it real. (145)

What started out as a simple desire to regain a lost pen directly precipitates the greatest and most significant change in the novel, and the pen itself is the tool Nita uses, not just to defeat the Lone Power, but to give him the room to change his nature—to remove the trappings of eons and become something beyond what he has formerly been. This might seem strange for a number of reasons, but in a universe that values the power of linguistic agency so highly, it is anything but. The pen is an object of power, a tool for writing one’s own history instead of succumbing to the definitions of others. Nita rewrites the Lone One’s name from a perspective inconceivable to those who have bullied her throughout the years, and probably quite inconceivable to the Lone One himself: rather than attempting to restrict or to bind him, she turns his name and all of the connotative baggage it entails into something that can set him free.

If the novel ended there, it would still constitute a powerful argument for the magic inherent in language. But it goes a step further. Rather than concluding with Nita and Kit’s heroic victory over the Lone Power and their triumphant return of The Book of Night With Moon to the appropriate authorities, the novel ends where it began, with Nita and Joanne face to face once more. This time, they exchange words rather than punches:

I don’t know what to say to her, we have absolutely nothing in common, Nita thought frantically. But it has to start somewhere. She swallowed and did her best to look Joanne in the eye, calmly and not in threat. “Come over to my place after supper sometime and look through my telescope,” she said. “I’ll show you Jupiter’s moons. Or Mars—” (150)

Nita still can’t keep her mouth shut. But what makes her a target for bullying at the beginning of the novel has turned into a tool for disarming bullies by the novel’s end. Wizardry offers Nita the opportunity to see the positive uses to which all language, not just the Speech, can be put. Rather than keeping this knowledge to herself, she shares it—even with a bully who can’t quite be trusted to listen.

Ultimately, Duane shares the same message with her readers. After all, we are reading a book with the same title as Nita’s wizard’s manual. Just as Nita learns a new language from her copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard, we can learn one from ours. Even if we can’t become wizards and fight evil throughout the worlds, we can become kinder and more considerate people who use plain English to break the cycle of violence within our home lives—and to Duane, this work is just as important as that carried out by wizards with all their powers:

A wizard’s business is to conserve energy—to keep it from being wasted. On the simplest level this includes such unmagical-looking actions as paying one’s bills on time, turning off the lights when you go out, and supporting the people around you in getting their lives to work. (16)

Throughout the novel, Duane transforms not just “unmagical-looking actions” but the commonplace and often unmagical-looking given of language itself. All words, it seems, can be “magic” when used properly. And if “a spell always works” (150)—if language always, no matter how gradually, effects the changes it seeks—then it’s not just wizards who have a duty to make sure that the power of language is used for good.

All citations are from Support Your Local Wizard, an omnibus edition of the first three novels in the Young Wizard series.

Tailor Made

One of my favorite feelings upon reading a book is the sensation that, somehow mysteriously, the author has written this specifically for me. It doesn't crop up too often, so I know it when I feel it -- that headlong rush into stunningly familiar territory, the thrill of discovery underwritten by a sense of comfort at the fact that you and the book exist within the same universe, have the same notions of right and wrong and have come to a basic agreement as to how stories should work.

But there's a flip side to this coin. Sometimes, my reactions to these kinds of books seem so intricately (and intimately) tied up in specific strands of my personality that I'm wary of recommending them to others who don't share my values and obsessions. More often than not, I'm afraid to admit the depth of my affection for these books, despite feeling like my bookshelves are empty when I don't have them near. Maybe it's because I move in academic circles and the books that have hit me in this way are mostly not academic. Maybe it's because I'm afraid what portrait of me might be constructed from the books that I feel drawn to in this way. And maybe I'm just afraid to think about what this list of books might tell me about myself -- about what I see as fundamentally me, what I care about, what makes my heart beat.

Whatever the reason, I'm about to (begin to) find out, because here -- for the moment -- is my list.

So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane

On the run from bullies, Nita Callahan takes refuge in the children's room of her local public library and finds a book called So You Want to Be a Wizard. At first she's sure that it must be a joke, but she picks it up and begins to read it -- and the moment when it stopped being a joke for her is the moment I would have known (or at least so furiously desired) the same:

Wizards love words. Most of them read a great deal, and indeed one strong sign of a potential wizard is the inability to get to sleep without reading something first. But their love for and fluency with words is what makes wizards a force to be reckoned with. Their ability to convince a piece of the world — a tree, say, or a stone — that it’s not what it thinks it is, that it’s something else, is the very heart of wizardry. Words skilfully used, the persuasive voice, the persuading mind, are the wizard’s most basic tools. With them a wizard can stop a tidal wave, talk a tree out of growing, or into it — freeze fire, burn rain — even slow down the heat death of the Universe.

That last, of course, is the reason there are wizards. See the next chapter.

Nita's copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard goes on to change her life. My copy continues to change mine.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I have a complicated relationship to this novel, but it all started when I was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, just starting to take life and literature (and love) seriously, and searching for a paradigm that would speak to the struggle that I felt, but would do so without rejecting the goals I'd set for myself. I don't exactly understand how this came to pass, but Jane Eyre helped me find those answers I hadn't even known I was looking for Four years later, I've read it for at least three other (college) English courses. Thumbing through my well-worn Oxford Classics copy (thoroughly underlined, festooned with Post-its and dripping with marginalia) in search of a single quote that would sum up this book's impact on me, I find it impossible to choose just one, because so many of the words of this book are like old friends, pleased to meet me in my re-perusal.

Heart's Blood by Juliet Marillier

When I first read this book, I was overcome with a sense that this was the novel I had always wanted to write. In fact, its plot is in some ways quite similar to the one I've been trying to write for five years: a retelling/homage to the story of Beauty and the Beast, which pits an educated heroine against a culture that cannot value her education and carefully questions what it means to be a "beast" and what it means to be a man from within a richly-defined world. Marillier's tale departs from mine in many ways (not the least of which being that her version is finished and published), but I nonetheless feel a connection to it that ignores its occasional flaws in favor of lovingly attending to the moments where everything happens just as it ought. And from my perspective, at least, there are many moments like these.

Possession by A. S. Byatt

"Do you ever have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects — all the time — and I suppose one studies — I study — literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful — as though we held a clue to the true nature of things?"

I knew long before this passage of dialogue that Possession had been written with me in mind, but this is perhaps one of the most coherent examples of why this book speaks to me in a voice at once wise and familiar. Roland's hesitant shift from "one studies" to "I study" speaks to the dilemma of every modern academic, but particularly those in the humanities: how much of me is meant to be in what I do? The questions he asks here are in some senses rhetorical -- he wants, like I want, to believe that there is some "clue to the true nature of things" secreted away within literature -- but also intensely doubting. Who is he -- who am I -- to say that things even have a true nature at all? And yet. By the end of that second sentence, the question that he started all those interjections ago isn't really a question at all.