“Ambivalence” doesn’t even come close to capturing my schizoid views about magic (or magical) realism.
The term has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and for most of its life has been associated especially with the work of certain Latin American authors. Here’s part of the definition from A Glossary of Literary Terms (6th edition, 1993), which I found here:
The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England. These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements… These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic — and sometimes highly effective — experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.
Nicely placed editorial “sometimes” there, huh? But in the hands of, well, a true magician, magic realism just slays me: beneath the gray, mundane surfaces of everyday life writhe fantastically colored creatures of plot, setting, and character — a reality behind the reality — and I find it difficult not to be hypnotized when I discover good examples of it. (I linked to one such story in yesterday’s whiskey river-inspired Friday post.)
(Note, by the way, that “magic realism” isn’t synonymous with “fantasy.” Fantasy takes place in unreal worlds, unrecognizable worlds, while the action in works of magic realism is grounded on good old terra firma. Soil is soil. There’s only one sun in the sky, and only one moon. Country roads are paved with asphalt or gravel, not with yellow bricks.)
But wow, is the technique subject to abuse, or what? A lazy author can find it all too tempting to reach for the supernatural to explain something otherwise inexplicable; if anyone challenges a sudden rainfall of fiery goldfish in the used-car lot (or whatever), the writer can just stare, goggle-eyed, at the the ignorant questioner before replying, “It’s magic realism, you jerk!”
Whether an author brings magical and/or fantastic elements into an otherwise real-world story partly depends, naturally, on the author’s own personality and beliefs. You don’t have to be avowedly (or even secretly) religious, for instance, to feel that many experiences in a world ruled by physics, chemistry, and biology seem to have no physical, chemical, or biological basis — at least, they have no such basis yet.
Theology aside, in writing one class of fiction you really can’t ignore the magical: fiction — even contemporary, real-world fiction — which retells or is otherwise based on ancient legends and myths.
Consider the Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou? When one-eyed Bible salesman Big Dan Teague is onscreen, he projects — like John Goodman, who plays him — a powerful presence. But if you know that the plot loosely retells that of The Odyssey, including the encounter between Ulysses and the Cyclops, mightn’t that deepen your appreciation of the Big Dan character?
At the Turner Classic Movies site, there’s a nice clip of the scene in which Big Dan, Ulysses Everett McGill, and his pal Dunbar share a picnic lunch. I don’t know how long it will be there, though. The only YouTube video I’ve found of the scene has botched the aspect ratio, squashing the wide screen down to standard TV proportions, and I can’t stand to watch it for more than a few seconds before the claustrophobia sets in.
I’ve had to worry about this magical-and/or-mythological stuff throughout the work-in-progress, Seems to Fit. As you know if you’ve heard me stewing about it at almost any point since the early 1990s, the book’s original working title was Grail. And it’s possible, I guess, to recast the Arthurian Grail legends without representing Merlin as a magician, without talking about the Grail’s supposedly magical properties, never alluding to the sword stuck in the stone, not mentioning the Lady in the Lake…
Possible, but maybe not very, y’know, interesting. (To me, anyhow.)
Seems to Fit doesn’t incorporate all those elements but it does bring in quite a few. In all drafts of the book until the current one, I had one loose end dangling. It was a reference to one of the seldom-mentioned versions of the Grail legend; in this version, the Grail was not a vessel of any sort, but a green stone which had fallen from the sky — a green stone with certain magical properties. I liked that story but for other reasons, in my retelling I absolutely had to make the “Grail” a drinking vessel. But I still mentioned a mysterious green stone: just couldn’t give it up, you see, even though I hadn’t actually accounted for it in the story line.
The Missus and I were talking about some of this on a long road trip last year.* Well, actually she was grilling me** about the motivations of the main characters: why would a group of 70(ish)-year-old guys in 1980s Pennsylvania — retired middle-management types — want to steal something which obviously didn’t belong to them, and which they’d have to go to great, possibly dangerous lengths to steal? I’d given them some general reasons, but none really convincing.
In that conversation and in this draft, I was pleased to discover my green stone’s more-than-two-centuries-old back story. And I am really delighted that that resolves (I think) the big, big motivational dilemma.
That’s the purpose of the excerpt to which I’ve linked below.
In the scene which leads into this passage, a cranky old metalworker has been showing off his latest work to a visitor: a large flagon, intricately worked, with a secret hidden in the base. The flagon will eventually be stored in a “box” of sorts: a solid block of ancient oak — a log, really — which has been sliced lengthwise, its interior carved out in the flagon’s shape and lined with velvet. All of it velvet-lined, that is, except for a small patch of wood — just a couple of inches square — which turns out to be a tiny door over a tiny compartment, which itself once held a tiny secret. The metalworker — whose name is Sandy Landis-Drinkwater — proceeds to share that secret with his visitor. This excerpt presents the story not in Sandy’s words, but with the advantage of his omniscient POV.
(All the customary warnings about draft quality apply, of course.)
[Read the green stone's story.]
_________________________
* Love those captive audiences!
** She wasn’t the only captive audience.
Wow, this is intriguing. Whenever I hear talented people talk about their work, their plots and contrives, their efforts to add “teh interesting” to the work, I freak out. I feel like my own stuff reads like “See Dick run. Run, Dick, run.”
Off to see the excerpt!
Darc: Writing fiction would be so much easier if we didn’t have to make it, y’know, actually interesting. ;) I suspect that you, like many (most?) writers of good fiction, are a lot harder on yourself than your readers will ever be… they’ll be too caught up in what’s going on!
I too am deeply sceptical of magical realism – too often just a cheap and easy trick, rarely done all that well or to any real purpose. It’s the thin end of the fantasy wedge, which is a genre that leaves me completely cold: whatever you may gain in terms of the breadth and depth of symbolism at your disposal, you lose in realism – and I find it hard to care about characters and stories that aren’t grounded in reality.
What we have with your allusions to the Arthurian stories (and with the Coens’ references to Homer) is rather different, though – perhaps potentially a means of introducing a sense of the magical without actually having magic in the story?
Again, though, I worry if it’s not easily overdone, or if there’s any real point to it. This kind of thing can easily seem to be just a self-satisfied in-joke. What, in fact, does the Homeric overlay add to Oh Brother Where Art Thou?. Damn all, I would say (well, except that three beautiful women in the water or a one-eyed man might be DANGEROUS – but I think we’d get that anyway). It was just the brothers’ private joke, to get the screenplay accepted in ‘best adapted’ awards categories! Apart from those two scenes and a few of the characters’ names, the story’s got nothing to do with The Odyssey at all; there are far more un-Homeric than elements to it.
I wonder, also, if there’s a potential to ‘comment’ on the Arthurian stories – perhaps to send up their more improbable or formulaic elements, or to suggest a possible basis in reality for some of them – through the ‘parallel’ action in your story.
I quite liked Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur a few years back for some of its intelligent, witty touches of this sort: Lancelot imagined to be a ladies’ man because he’s so handsome (Ioan Gruffudd!), but in fact terminally bashful (and possibly gay?); swords used as warriors’ grave-markers (much easier to remove from turf than from a block of stone).
I wonder what you thought of that one, JES?
Froog: I’m not ready to do without the fantasy genre, myself!
My Arthurian “research” stopped, more or less, in the pre-Web dusk of 1992 or so. Pretty much on a whim of the moment, I’d picked up Morte d’Arthur about a year before just because I’d never read it, and had found myself getting sucked into the strangeness of the world it depicted. From that I went to a lot of non-fictional explorations of Arthurian and general British/Celtic legend and history (or rather “history”), Parsifal, “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight,” the tales of the Mabinogi, and so on. I found a latter-day adaptation of the Arthur story by Donald Barthelme, and saw the film version of (but didn’t read) Malamud’s The Natural, and watched John Boorman’s Excalibur, too. (Oh, and of course I’d absorbed the Pythons’ take on it years before.) I took notes on a lot of that, transcribed them into the computer I had at the time, and fed the whole body of it into a little program I’d picked up which randomized text — and printed that program’s output to hardcopy.
Along the way, separately, I’d started sampling really good beers and ales, stuff I’d never even looked at, let alone drunk, in earlier years.
My Dad had died a few years before, and he was still much on my mind.
And then I read Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils — and loved it.
All of this got mushed around together into my story, the first draft of which I finished sometime in 1992. The current version is the fourth draft (but #2 and 3 were not complete rewritings).
…which — because you’ve got be wondering why I’m blathering on about it — boils down to: Seems to Fit is, yes, structured like an Arthurian Grail quest; the main characters have rough counterparts in one or another of the original stories; some events, objects, and, um, themes (?) are lifted straight out of precursor versions. But I really haven’t made an effort to hew too closely to the “matter of Arthur” party line, as it were — in terms of either history or legend. And I’d be mightily embarrassed if anyone read it as a commentary on any of that.
When Fuqua’s version came out, I didn’t see it (still haven’t), although I rolled my eyes, figuratively speaking, at the reworking they must have had to do to turn Guinevere, apparently, into Boadicea (except in name). I’ll have to watch it at some point, I know, just for completeness’s sake.
Well, I see that your story is inspired by the Grail legends – but what exactly does it gain from overt references and parallels?
The Grail is just one example of the Quest story archetype. There are gazillions of myths about the search for a lost, hidden, or remote object that somehow confers power or status on its possessor. I think readers will be able to recognise and accept your story as part of that tradition without a lot of “Oh, isn’t this just like King Arthur?” nudging. It seems like maybe you’re moving away from too close an identification by dropping Grail as the title?
I might be stretching the point a little, but re-reading the above genres of fiction, well, isn’t all the fiction we write a product of what we have absorbed by all the reading we’ve done? I mean what makes Merlin stick in my mind and not yours? And what’s the reason that I repeatedly re-read The Once and Future King by T.H. White, but not Parsifal? Isn’t it because something in it speaks to me or resonates inside for one reason or another? And if Arthurian legends resonate in your story, what’s wrong with that? Does a sword pulled out of a stone make any noise when no one is there to narrate it?
I mean all of the references we have in our own works of art are influenced in some way by the stuff that sticks versus the stuff that doesn’t. And sometimes pushing the stuff that sticks into a corner ’cause it doesn’t “seem to fit” is not the answer, but conversely sometimes it is. Maybe we have to venture in another direction only to come back to the idea we had originally.
Anyway, I’m probably rambling, but I’ve been thinking about this post for a couple of days now and I thought I’d post the comment.
Froog: The “overt references and parallels” are what finally put me off the title, yes. I don’t want readers or reviewers or dusty old academics or anyone else checking off the points of reference and noting, say, Aha! THIS doesn’t square at ALL with the legend!
At the same time, it’s fun to talk about the bits that are in there. I don’t think I made any of it too corny, or at all ham-fisted (while realizing that yes, that will be up for others to decide ultimately). I hope people who are “Grail insiders,” so to speak, will have fun catching those references. Something for everyone, y’know?
cynth: Not stretching the point at all — at least, not stretching it unsatisfactorily. (My point-stretching threshold is pretty high, you may have noticed. :)) Especially loooooved the sword-from-the-stone line!
I don’t think (?) anyone is saying, “Avoid all influences!” It’s more like “Tell your OWN story, not someone else’s!” It feels to me like a kind of cheap parlor trick to air-quote “update” a myth or legend by simply changing just the setting, timeline, characters’ names, and so on, without contributing to — deepening, broadening, heightening — the stories already told.
Have you ever seen the PBS mini-series with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth? I think you might like it!
I think the biggest reason why you and some of your commenters have an issue with magical realism can be summed up by how you defined the process of writing magical realism: an author brings magical and/or fantastic elements into an otherwise real-world story.
Thinking of the fantastic elements as an add on makes them the parsley on the side of the plate and not the meal itself. No wonder you’re finding it distasteful!
If you’re going to do it and do it well you have to approach the entire novel as if magic can happen in our world — that it really can rain goldfish, not that it just suddenly did one day. It’s not so far fetched as it may seem — many people still believe in ghosts and supernatural, approach your entire novel as they might. If you approach it without that belief in wonder and awe then, yes, any such elements you add in are going to seem like trite attempts at overwrought symbolism.
You can say magical realism is different from fantasy, but I think to write it well you have to start the novel believing that you are indeed writing a literary fantasy.
I know you tried to sort out magical realism from fantasy in your post, but it’s a slippery definition. By what you wrote, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is magical realism.
Of course, all these titles are just a highly inefficient system of categorizing things that really doesn’t matter unless you’re a marketing the thing. Lately I’ve heard the term “fabalism” applied to magical realism written by the non-Latin set. Yet another box when the box doesn’t matter nearly as much as whether the writing’s good or not.
[...] gentle reader. I know, I know. You are not a child. You are sick unto death of authors plundering familiar mythology — like the Narcissus story, in this case — and tarting it up in cheap fabric for their [...]