Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader(6)

It makes such good sense in the books because these are places that feel unfamiliar in reality to anyone who hasn’t spent time getting to know them. It’s a short leap from this occasionally unsettling unfamiliarity to the enticing possibility of the presence of something truly otherworldly, something fantastic, something darkly magical dwelling behind at least one of the thousands of windows or the thousands of faces you pass on any given day.




In Jentsch’s and Freud’s essays on the uncanny, the revelation of the unheimlich is usually characterized by unease and fear—normal, understandable reactions. But the beauty of fantasy is that it allows the protagonist to pass through fear to come to know this different reality and to find a place in it. It allows the protagonist to accept the true, occult (again in the hidden sense) character of the place, to reconcile the mundane and the uncanny elements into a whole, to let go of preconceptions and expectations and open himor herself to experience the full reality of the place. It is perhaps particularly appropriate that, after several hundred pages of jamais-vu experiences, Clary is allowed to experience the opposite: Magnus Bane presents her with the Gray Book and instructs her to stare at one particular rune. “Look at it,” he says, “until you feel something change in your mind.” It takes long moments, but then abruptly the unfamiliar Mark on the page has meaning. Clary does not suddenly discover that she has known this Mark all along, but she is suddenly able to understand its significance.

In stories like these, where the setting is a character, a major part of the protagonist’s evolution is the passage by which she, suddenly marooned right at home in a place that isn’t what she thought it was, must learn to love (or at least accept) the city. Only then can she truly take part in shaping the narrative. And there’s no going back either. In the scenario of the uncanny city, the protagonist isn’t questing for the portal home; she’s questing for a way to be at home. This is a powerful message to carry back to the real world; for those who have experienced the alienation that the sense of unheimlich (when related to place) describes for anything longer than a fleeting moment, there are only two options: Go elsewhere, or find a way to survive, to belong, and, hopefully, to thrive. There isn’t a portal that can whisk you home if you’re already there, so the challenge is to understand and to adapt and to find the homely even in that which is not like home.

The final scene of City of Bones is a lovely visualization of this: Clary is presented with a panoramic view of the city, alive with all the things she can now see and sense but still visible and recognizable as the same place in which she grew up:

And there it was spread out before her like a carelessly opened jewelry box, this city more populous and more amazing than she had ever imagined: There was the emerald square of Central Park, where the faerie courts met on midsummer evenings; there were the lights of the clubs and bars downtown, where the vampires danced the nights away at Pandemonium; there were the alleys of Chinatown down which the werewolves slunk at night, their coats reflecting the city’s lights. There walked warlocks in all their bat-winged, cat-eyed glory, and here, as they swung out over the river, she saw the darting flash of multicolored tails under the silvery skin of the water, the shimmer of long, pearl-strewn hair, and heard the high, rippling laughter of the mermaids.

Jace turned to look over his shoulder, the wind whipping his hair into tangles. “What are you thinking?” he called back to her.

“Just how different everything down there is now, you know, now that I can see.”

“Everything down there is exactly the same,” he said, angling the cycle toward the East River. They were heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge again. “You’re the one that’s different.”

…Her stomach dropped out from under her as the silver river spun away and the spires of the bridge slid under her feet, but this time Clary kept her eyes open, so that she could see it all.

And for possibly the first time, the sight is truly beautiful.



Kate Milford is the author of The Boneshaker, The Broken Lands, and The Kairos Mechanism. She has written for stage and screen and, thanks to a deep and abiding love for strange and uncanny places, is also an occasional travel columnist for the Nagspeake Board of Tourism and Culture. She can be found online at www.clockworkfoundry.com.





SARAH CROSS

I love Sarah’s essay because it cuts to the heart of the nature of a true warrior: the ability to work with what you have, and the ability to adapt. I don’t just mean what you have materially, but what you have inside you: your background, the skills you possess, your ability to think on your feet. While everything else in Clary’s life is turned upside down when she discovers she’s a Shadowhunter, Clary’s weapon of choice remains unchanged: art.

Beyond runes, which have remained the same for centuries, there is no precedent for Shadowhunters using art as a weapon. Luckily, Clary’s pretty good at setting her own precedents. This essay is a great articulation of how she goes about it.


THE ART OF WAR

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE GIRL WITH THE SKETCHBOOK

Everyone loves a kick-ass girl. (Well—maybe not her enemies, but you know what I mean.) Whether her strength and fighting prowess come from years of training, supernatural powers, or a combination of both, she’s a force to be reckoned with—and admired. We envy her seemingly effortless domination of her enemies, her killer instinct, and how cool she is under pressure. She has the strength and endurance of an Olympic athlete and the knockout punch of an action hero. Who wouldn’t want to be like that?