Books are magic. You’ve heard this phrase before. Repeated, mantra-like, from sixth-grade English enthusiasts at book fairs all the way up through high school: Books are magic. Books are magic. It’s completely lost whatever meaning it might have had at this point.
So, the obvious: Books aren’t magic in the least. There’s nothing supernatural about them. There’s nothing outwardly sacred. They don’t transcend any natural law.
(Although, to be fair, some works are so beautiful, that it’s hard to believe a mere human could have created it. James Joyce or Fyodor Dostoevsky are two such examples.)
When you’re reading a piece of carefully crafted fiction, you are holding the work of a mind, with a personal conception of the world and the characters that function in it.
Don’t believe authors who say that these characters “have a life of their own.” They exist because of the author and do what the author believes to be their most authentic action.
To put it simply, dialogue in fiction is the author talking to themselves.
That’s not to say that these characters don’t seem real. The best realized characters seem so real that other people believe they actually exist, on some level.
For instance, how many of us are, somewhere in the back of our minds, convinced that Harry Potter or Frodo actually existed in some way? If you were asked the question, “Is Harry Potter real?” you’d (probably) say no. But, because the character has that slight touch of reality, your mind can stretch itself enough to suspend disbelief.
The Hogwarts castle was real enough to most of us, even before that fictional place was finally visible through the films. Every reader has his own unique conception of the layout of the castle, the feel of the Quidditch grounds and so on. What once only existed in J. K. Rowling’s mind now exists, in slightly different forms, in the minds of millions of people.
If I’m completely wrong here, and books are magic, then that type of magic has to be filed under “telepathy.”
Which brings me to my next point: The author isn’t the sole authority when it comes to their work, however much it pains them.
Post-modernism aside, the fact is that when you read a book, you carry your whole history (that is, your experience) on your back. A line that resonates with one reader will fall flat on its face for another.
It’s not only a question of taste, either. The sheer breadth of the much-maligned field of literary criticism betrays another interaction, based solely on the reader: the application of meaning.
When you read a book critically, keeping in mind the minute interactions of the characters, you find yourself making more than simply judgments on plot. You also draw specific meanings from the text, some of which the author may have intended, some of which the author may not have.
In Paradise Lost, for example, you can take the meaning that Milton intended: that God was just to damn Satan to hell to eat ashes forever, punishing him for tempting Eve. Another reader, however, may see in Satan a tragic hero, created only to serve an eternal monarch and doomed in his inevitable revolt. What readers may take from the book may not be what the author intended, which gives them some, if not all, control of its meaning.
So, what are books if not magic? It’s hard to say, on the whole. There are all kinds of books, good and bad, and lumping them into one category isn’t easy to do.
The closest definition I can think of is this: They are the record of the author’s ability to create new worlds. Whether you choose to explore them is up to you.