An ecstasy of action: telepathy and the uncanny in Blyton and Bowie

Reading notes series: David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the sun machine (2023) by Nicholas Royle

Posts on earlier chapters: here and here.

Part II: A sense of the ending

Telepathy (third lecture)

[....]  I’d like to start off today, if I may, with the melancholy, rather hypnotic Bowie song I referred to last time, ‘All the Madmen’, from the 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World. As I said, it’s a song about the undermind.

[....]  ouvre le chien…. open the dog!

[Play David Bowie, ‘All the Madmen’]

[....]  telepathy in the context of works of fiction is, in many respects, normality itself…. readers take it for granted.

[....]  A work of fiction is a work of mind- reading: the book takes you inside the thoughts and feelings of another or others– inside the world of a narrator, inside the minds and bodies of characters, and so on.

[....]  Readers are mind- readers in turn. This is a role that they accept without really thinking about it. Readers are in fact quietly rather pleased to be telepathic. It’s an opportunity to indulge in magical thinking. They take it in their stride. Like breathin…