On Entering the Discworld

Last weekend I drove up to Leeds to help transport some second hand books to be sold at the International Medieval Congress. While driving I listened, once again, to a couple of Tony Robinson’s reading of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. I bought these originally when I was travelling back and forth, from Kidderminster to Retford in North Nottinghamshire, during the final illnesses of my parents and, subsequent to their deaths (within three months of each other), while my sister and I were sorting out the house, the estate and related matters. On that occasion I simply listened to the next novel that I found within the local bookshop (since closed of course) and so followed the series in no particular order. On this occasion I have decided to listen in order and over the weekend got as far as ‘Sourcery’, number five in the series according to the CD.

It is not so much the specific content of the story that interests me at this point. It is first of all the effect of spending two and half hours at a time driving and listening to the reading of a novel. This is different from reading. Half my mind (or perhaps it should have been more than half my mind) is on the act of driving and the various diversions of motorway traffic. The text, however, is also mediated through a voice - with Tony Robinson a very persuasive voice - and this does, to my mind, change the experience. As I arrived, negotiated the traffic of inner-city Leeds to find the University, and then turned the engine, and the CD off, I left one world, the Discworld, and entered another world, that of second hand book selling and the Medieval Congress. It took some adjusting (well, perhaps not that much!). What is more, having been on the road a couple of days, fairly consistently, and having listened to five or six CDs worth of text, the adjustment back into the real world of my everyday life was somewhat more challenging than I had imagined. I was still living, at least in part, somewhere entirely different, not far from Ankh-Morpork.

The other factor that struck me was the way in which the texts of the Discworld spoke so significantly into the world I currently live in. I have always felt that Pratchett is one of the most insightful commentators on religion (far more so than the academics of this world, and actually more so than many senior religious figures). I use elements of his novels on a regular basis in my Introduction to the Study of Religion module, although it saddens me to note that the students rarely appreciate either the references or the insights. But it is Pratchett’s insight into human nature, and particularly into the nature of human institutions in the modern world that I find so uncanny and so real. There is something about the Unseen University that, despite its subject matter (magic) and its rather arcane structures, not to mention the architecture, is remarkably familiar and speaks directly into my own experience of trying to engage with colleagues, and especially the senior management, of an institution such as my own University. You can see just the same responses, the same disputes, the same fears, the same mistakes, the same triumphs, and, in so many ways, the same people. That, of course, is part of the genius of a writer such as Terry Pratchett.

There is another element, however, that links the world of the novels, the Discworld, and my own experiences of academia. This is perhaps more difficult to express, but in some way combines the previous two elements. I have always felt, in some odd way, that to enter into the academic life is to enter into a fictional world. I don’t really mean this in the sense of the University as an unreal space. The physicality of the institution, the students, my colleagues, the administrators, the managers etc. are all real enough, and while there is an element of all institutional life that has to do with the playing of games, the ‘micro-politics’ of everyday life, this is the ‘real’, in very much the same way that so many of Pratchett’s characters are ‘real’. This is one reason I tend to towards management and encouraging others to fulfil themselves. That engagement with colleagues, other human beings, is something I can relate to: it is my work; it is something concrete.

 

What I find ‘unreal’, and perhaps always have, is that which others seem to get so obsessed about, that is the research, the theory, the ‘ideas’ and the subject matter of what we teach. I write about ‘religion’, I engage in fieldwork, I read the theories of others, I think and I construct my own analysis, I then write and I teach this to others. Entering into that world, the world of research, of writing and even of teaching, is for me to enter the world of the fictional. I can never fully take it seriously. It will always have something of the air of unreality about it, a flimsy construction that I am actively willing to stay standing upright (perhaps by magic alone) and know could be brought crashing down at any time. I find that expressed so perfectly within the Discworld novels, the ever encroaching forces of the nether regions, the creatures of the dungeon dimensions, that need to be kept just beyond reality. That is what I feel about research, theory and the attempt to talk intelligently about religion, about society or perhaps about anything ‘real’ at all. And as with the end of the journey, the arrival, whether in Leeds or Kidderminster, or wherever it may be, there will have to come a time when I need to leave the car, leave the construction of theory, and adjust to the real world around me, and that is never entirely easy.