Why Magical Realism. Why Not.
For any writer of fiction, either working in genres or inventing new ones of their own, it’s difficult at times to understand the source or multiple sources of one’s creation. If I were to write a novel about World War II in the future, will my idea for that work come out of my reading of historical texts and microfilm in the library? Out of old black-and-white movies of that time period that I happened to remember from my salad days as a movie buff? Out of my obsession with folks in Great Britain braving the onslaught of bombs raining down over London while still investigating crimes in the countryside, as in the brilliant television series Foyle’s War?
Perhaps it will come out of all of those sources, and none of them. Perhaps I’ll truly never know. How can I, realistically speaking? Where’s the empirical evidence? And ultimately, does it really matter?
It does matter. The source of one’s fiction is similar to the source of one’s identity: how and to whom were you born, how you grew up, what you learned in school or better yet, outside of school, how you navigated your way through the twists and turns of life, like the main character, a young lad of twenty on his way in the world with hardly a penny in his pocket in 1930s London, in Dylan Thomas’s most excellent Adventures in the Skin Trade. All of that plays an important part in what you write, even how you write, and for whom.
The source does matter but even if it is discernible and known to the writer (a rarity, in my view), I suggest it should remain private and not shared with anyone outside the writer’s inner circle. For one thing, it’s far more interesting to have the reader discover the sources or, if you’re a graduate student, the allusions in a work of fiction. While in graduate school in Berkeley, studying comparative literature, one of my professors had an entire course devoted to the subject of “allusions” in fiction. He pushed us, as a matter of fact, to take the summer off from school, and work both individually and with our classmates to hunt down the allusions in Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle novel: a formidable task indeed. That novel, the work of a master running over 600 pages, is a scholar’s treasure trove of echoes, cross-references, obscure symbols, bizarre dreams and memories, puns, digressions, neologisms, and opaque links to a vast array of previously written literary works, a polyglot’s paradise of Russian, European and American sources (known only to Nabokov, of course, and there for us lowly grad students to spend our summers in hard labor to discover). It was the classic training and trial by fire for all scholars of literature: be a literary detective and find out who influenced whom to say what when. Done—and voila! you have a tenure-producing essay ready for publication in a recondite journal for your contemporaries. Hey, what more do you want? My distaste for this exercise, as well as for the professor who “taught” the course, was one of the reasons I left graduate school and ventured out on my own like a rolling stone to write plays, novels, and works of non-fiction. It also made me realize the importance of never divulging the sources of my work (as journalists do routinely to ensure the privacy of those whom they’re writing about).
The best I can do now is to reflect on the direction or navigational path my fiction has taken over the course of more than a dozen novels and novellas. My sources, such as they are, shall remain my own and not the subject of commentary or interviews. The writer should never have to interpret his or her work, should they? Divulging one’s sources clouds the reader’s experience in understanding your work.
Lately, my direction in fiction has been toward what is commonly referred to as magical realism. There are many definitions, and many examples of writers who have been tagged with the term, like Borges (Ficciones), Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), Grass (The Tin Drum), Pynchon (V., in particular), Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality), the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (Blow-Up, among other great stories), Kafka (The Metamorphosis), the Australian writer Peter Carey (Illywhacker), and the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World). These are among my favorites, writers to whom I’m probably more indebted than I realize, consciously or unconsciously, in my own work.
As a literary or artistic genre, it is defined more formally as a realistic narrative, using naturalistic techniques and combining them with surreal elements of dream or fantasy. Its origin is from the German magischer Realismus (magic plus realism), once used by the writer Franz Roh, although it has deep roots in the work of many Latin American writers. Typically, magical realist novels include elements of myth, dream, fable, even the supernatural, all assembled into narratives that extend the boundaries of conventional fiction. “The fantastic attributes given to characters in such novels—levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis—are among the means that magic realism adopts in order to encompass the often phantasmagoric political realities of the twentieth century,” according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms).
Magical realism is not everybody’s cup of tea. Folks in publishing sometimes think of it as contemporary fantasy written to a high literary standard: in other words, serious fantasy, not quite escapist like popular tropes (science fiction, adventure, and the like), but with intellectual appeal (whatever that means) to a more culturally savvy readership that may disdain pure works of speculative fantasy. The key point about magical realism is that is serious, in both intent and narrative execution. The realistic does merge with the fantastical, and the other way around, most often in unpredictable ways.
* * *
Here’s a riff from one of my novels, an outtake (later reworked, then published), which I’ll let the reader decide whether or not it fits the definition as an example of magical realism:
The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma, as Huxley writes presciently.
When I opened the back of the camera I found inside a roll of film with forty-eight shots, as I say, which I hesitated getting developed because I didn’t think there was anything worthwhile on the roll. Rather, I thought I’d pop the roll out and put another one in, and begin to take my own pictures. Just for the hell of it.
As I say, the camera, which had a Leica body made in Wetzlar, Germany, but a modified lens whose manufacturer I could not identify and whose inner workings were comprised of computer chips, strange optics, wires and prickly little gears without markings or numbers, inspired my philosophy thesis, this vision of the future that we’re all Brains in a Vat, Brains Embedded in the Net, a symphony of voices clamoring to be heard, cries of hope and desperation, sorrow and pity, fear and joy: all the good things in life. There’s a philosopher, a man named Hilary Putnam, who’s written a treatise refuting the theory that we’re all Brains in a Vat, but I want to dispute it, prove the old man wrong.
Next day, dosed on painkillers and pedaling my bike with only my left arm clinging to the handlebars, trying to steer and keep control, I wobbled over to the camera shop on Boulder Avenue and picked up a few packages of film, surprising the clerk at the front counter that I actually wanted rolls of celluloid and wasn’t shooting with a digital device. He looked at the camera as I loaded up my sling with film and started to laugh, as if I were some kind of fuddy-duddy, an old geezer stuck with a relic from the past, obsolete technology, to his mind, unwilling, like everybody else, to modernize and go digital. What are you, man, a dinosaur? He was telling me with his cheeky looks and attitude.
Later that day, a Monday with no classes to attend, I took the camera for a walk on the Santa Lucia campus, like a dog on a leash. Simplistically, I found myself photographing the usual array of ordinary objects: birds in flight, flowers in a garden on campus, buildings in the afterglow of a sunset. But when I got the film developed, excited to see my visionary eye at work, I was stunned. The camera was recording images not visible to the naked eye, almost like an X-ray machine. It was even recording images in the dark. It made no sense to my scientifically-trained mind. The prints from my first roll of thirty-six shots were stark and revealing: the auras of people on campus, a swirl of color and energy transmitted and captured at impossibly low-light conditions. What was going on?
I’m lying in bed, late at night, staring at the ceiling, pondering the outlines of my philosophy thesis, clinging to my camera as my new source of inspiration when Lisa McHale my faculty advisor calls and tells me, “Hey, Aaron, guess what?”
“What?”
“Did you know?”
“Know what, Lisa?”
“They’ve stopped doing xoma on campus.”
“Don’t believe it. Where you’d hear that?”
“I’m seeing it. Seeing it now in my classes. The students are coming to class without getting stoned on xoma or while they’re surfing mindlessly on their xoma devices.”
“That, I find hard to believe, Lisa. Xoma devices are incredibly addictive. Once you’re hooked, you can’t get off them.”
“Well, it’s true. It’s happening. Society is undergoing some of kind internal change as we speak. An evolution. At least among the younger generation. Your generation.”
“Hey, Lisa, aren’t you part of my generation?”
“I was, once.”
“You’re not that old.”
“Aaron, I’m a professor and you’re a student. We shouldn’t be dating. I’m too old for you.”
“C’mon, Lisa. I don’t see it that way. I like you, I’m cool with you. Why don’t you come over now and spend the night with me? In the morning, after we’ve made love a few times I’ll cook you a great breakfast, an omelette made with bacon, feta cheese and greens onions, with hash browns and white toast on the side. You know I like to cook for you.”
“Aaron, you’re a man after my heart. But not tonight, or tomorrow morning. I’ve got two classes I need to prepare for. Besides, there’s a big demonstration scheduled for noon on the steps of the Administration building.”
“Lisa, you must hallucinating. Demonstrations are a thing of the past, nobody protests anything anymore. Why would they? They’ve got it too good, or they’re just—well, comatose. Huxley’s soma becomes xoma and the rest is history. We’ll pleasure ourselves to death.”
“Well, they are protesting. A campus activist, this young guy they call Cheetah who was in one of my classes, is leading the charge. He’s got all the charisma of the next undergraduate council president. He rocks!”
“I’ll take some pictures and find out for you,” I told Lisa before signing off. “We’ll see about this charisma thingie.”
Next day I try to track down the manufacturer of the camera, but the guy at the photo shop laughs at me. He says, “This is a custom job, based on a Leica body. There are no serial numbers or markings of any kind on the outer shell or body of the camera.” And the lens is different, too, like nothing he can identify or has seen before, he adds. He then offers to buy it from me, saying he’ll take it off my hands. “It’s just a piece of junk.” No, it’s not, I tell him. He looks me in the eye, with a crooked smile, and says, “Hey, buddy, you think you’re like that photographer in the movie Blow-Up? You planning to get the girls naked on the floor and solve the mysteries of a murder in the park at the same time? Ha ha. Good luck with that.”
I tell him, “Look, I don’t think that’s very funny.”
“Well, you wanted my opinion, didn’t you?”
“Not really. I’m no photographer. Just a lowly student at the university who’s got a really cool camera, in my opinion. See ya!”
Around the corner, later in the day I fall by a secondhand bookstore near the Santa Lucia campus and come across a volume of stories, buried deep in the stacks, by Julio Cortázar. He’s an Argentine writer, I’m told, who lived and worked most of his life in Paris, a master of fiction like Borges.
Beginning on page 114 is the story, Blow-Up, brilliantly translated from the Spanish (if my Spanish is correct and workable) by Paul Blackburn, an American poet, I later learn, who died young of cancer in the fall of 1971, a few years after the book was published. The story Blow-Up is dog-eared with a passage heavily marked in pencil:
“Several days went by before Michel developed the photos he’d taken on Sunday; his shots of the Conservatoire and of Sainte-Chapelle were all they should be. Then he found two or three proof-shots he’d forgotten, a poor attempt to catch a cat perched astonishingly on the roof of a rambling public urinal, and also the shot of the blond and the kid. The negative was so good that he made an enlargement; the enlargement was so good that he made one very much larger, almost the size of a poster. It did not occur to him (now one wonders and wonders) that only the shots of the Conservatoire were worth so much work. Of the whole series, the snapshot of the tip of the island was the only one which interested him; he tacked up the enlargement on one wall of the room, and the first day he spent some time looking at it and remembering, that gloomy operation of comparing the memory with the gone reality; a frozen memory, like any photo, where nothing is missing, not even, and especially, nothingness, the true solidifier of the scene. There was the woman, there was the boy, the tree rigid above their heads, the sky as sharp as the stone of the parapet, clouds and stones melded into a single substance and inseparable (now one with sharp edges is going by, like a thunderhead).”
On reflection, I begin to see myself for a fleeting moment as that photographer Michel in Cortázar’s fiction, enlarging the stories of all those around me.
* * *
What happens is that what you think of as the “fantastical” becomes so incredible, so “real” that it changes the way you see the world. This happens in Borges (The Aleph, to take the most well-known example) almost routinely: you follow a character through the labyrinthine streets of Buenos Aires one day and end up in a cellar where a friend tells you he has in his possession an Aleph (the first letter of the Persian, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets), an object so extraordinary that it lets you see all points and objects and places in the universe simultaneously and you believe, naturally enough it must be “true” — without a hint of doubt in your mind. Borges does this over and over again in his fictions and they become enduring works of literature, which stand the test of time, even if they were written a hundred years ago.
To quote Marquez: “My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.” What we take for “realistic” fiction these days (lots of thrillers, detective stories, family chronicles, and so on) to me, when seen through a Borgesian or Marquez lens, could be interpreted as “fantastical” or mythic, perhaps weirdly supernatural, even if it was not the author’s original intent. How we read changes, and that’s a good thing.
As it happened, magical realism came to me, rather than my going to it, if that makes any sense at all. It found me and became the primary mechanism for tapping into and moderating all the sources of fiction that I was able to draw upon: from life itself (of course), from intense reading and study, from a lifetime of savoring movies, art, music, literature, science, history, philosophy, and that all but forgotten experience in modern times: the gift of conversation.
I’d like to encourage other writers of fiction to break free from the shackles of so-called “realism” and explore the world of magical realism. The world itself is so rich in its infinite bounty of natural wonders and experience that it almost defies the imagination. At the same time, our imaginations are equally rich in our dreams, memories and reflections, if we’re willing to tap into them and let go. Ultimately, writers need to find the language and storytelling that reconciles those worlds. Readers, I’m convinced, will be all the better for it.