"A black writing upon the sky" : the interplay of knowledge, discourse, and power in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Susanna Clarke’s fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell depicts a feud between two magicians with opposing philosophies regarding the study and practice of magic in an alternate version of nineteenth-century England. Where Gilbert Norrell favours a ritualistic doctrine of textual analysis and logocentrism, Jonathan Strange takes a more experimental approach, adapting and extrapolating on old magical principles from both textual sources and oral folklore in order to suit new circumstances. Norrell’s highly structured process assumes a textual point of origin for every conceivable magical effect: every signifier has a single, clearly identifiable and unalterable signified, and thus reinterpretation is not possible. By contrast, Strange’s approach embraces ambiguous signifiers and contradictory signifieds, and acknowledges that a given word may have multiple meanings at the same time. For Strange, ambiguity and contradiction represent opportunities for reinvention and experimentation. Strange and Norrell’s disagreement over which methodology is superior reflects a larger tension between, on the one hand, formulaic modes of expression that are well-suited to standardized hierarchies of knowledge, authority, and power in a conservative status quo, and on the other hand, more elastic modes of expression better suited to subversive actors who achieve success outside of or despite the normative institutional frameworks of nineteenth-century English society. Through its depiction of the interaction between Regency England’s conservative halls of power and an increasingly subversive corpus of magical lore, the novel repeatedly exposes the limits and hypocrisies inherent in the static, restrained epistemology that Norrell champions. Because a form of this same epistemology also manifests in the ideological construction of social hierarchies, the novel simultaneously exposes the weaknesses of so-called “traditional” hierarchies and power structures. Instead, in multiple key moments, the novel focuses on individuals who do not conform to societal conventions, and highlights the successes they achieve by doing that which is unexpected. In this way, JSMN suggests that a more elastic form of discourse, which embraces ambiguity, contradiction, and experimentation, affords its users greater opportunities for success and has the potential to lead us to a more equitable future by challenging traditional modes of knowledge exchange.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".