I too, dislike it:*
Let us go then, you and I, to The Mausoleum of Genre Literati and enter the Magical Realism Room.
Niche 1, One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . Niche 2, The House of the Spirits . . . Niche 3, The Famished Road . . . and outside with the commoners . . . The Metamorphosis.
In the land where the critics go, they see things backwards. After the well-spring, after the pouring, after the drinking, they do postmortems. No vivisections here, they hack the corpus and examine chapters and paragraphs and sentences and words, and when the work is done, their hands are put to a different task, explicating all the bits and bobs.
Think Phrenology. Think Scientific Racism. Think New Criticism. Or don’t. No matter, because a book is a dead thing, detritus left over from absent creators and gone cultures. Celtic runes. Egyptian hieroglyphs. Chinese characters. The Cave Paintings of Maltravieso. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. All signifying nothing . . . until . . . until an active mind plays Dr. Frankenstein and reads the body back to life. Science? The scientists tell us so. Magic? Much more likely.
When a writer points the way to magic, only a fool studies the words.
How curious! How real!
“How curious! How real!”—a cutting from Leaves of Grass (1860, 6:4)—planted and nurtured by the bubbleheaded Walt Whitman, the poet who wouldn’t shut up. Now the cutting, dried and pressed onto the page of a book, is ready to be transplanted. But just like there are different sorts of gardeners—English, Baroque, Industrial—so there are different kinds of readers, and if as a child the reader went forth and heard only “spare the rod, spoil the child” and “cleanliness is next to godliness,” the reader would think there was something very frivolous, maybe even dangerous, about Leaves of Grass.
Even more so if the reader gardened in the plowed, planted, barbed wire-fenced wordscapes of nineteenth century novels, the soil where Mr. Ian Watt boils down “real” (and I’m paraphrasing here from Rise of the Novel, 1957) to a record of consciousness moving through a particular time and place—all of which a middle-class reader will recognize as real.
All well and good for well-behaved children and well-tempered novels, but it certainly will not do for Leaves of Grass.
I
believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-
work of the stars,
And
the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of
sand, and the egg of the wren,
And
the tree-toad is a chef-d'œuvre for the highest,
And
the running blackberry would adorn the parlors
of heaven,
And
the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all
machinery,
And
the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses
any statue,
And
a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions
of infidels,
And
I could come every afternoon of my life to look
at the farmer's girl boiling her iron
tea-kettle
and baking short-cake. (1860, 64:189)
And, And, And, And, And, And, And . . . so that the reader suspects that the ands will never end, which is Whitman’s point. From leaf of grass to tree-toad and mouse to short-cake, Whitman’s “how real!” cannot be limited by consciousness, time, or place. It cannot be limited to what some reader claims is real. Instead, “how real!” acknowledges the infinite particularity of the dynamic universe.
When a writer tunes the
wavelength to real, magic begins to play.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise*
Ah, we’ve come to the crux . . . the meat and potatoes . . . the magical realist’s worry doll: not losing Whitman’s “!” when bridging the “how” and “real.”
“Ten Lessons about . . .” “Ground Rules for . . .” “Four Reasons You Should . . .” and “Five Myths about . . .” may be someone’s “How to . . .” for writing, but none of these paths can square the magic realist’s circle. What will?
Let us go then, you and I, to Allen Ginberg’s “Cosmopolitan Greetings.”
Observe
what’s vivid.
Notice
what you notice.
Catch
yourself thinking.
Vividness
is self-selecting.
Need more? Rick Rubin uses the word awareness. Not mindfulness, although that’s a place to start; instead, in The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rubin does mindfulness one better.
Through detached noticing, awareness [italics mine] allows an observed flower to reveal more of itself without our intervention. This is true of all things.
Awareness
is not a state you force. There is little effort involved, though persistence
is key. It’s something you actively allow to happen. It is a presence with, and
acceptance of, what is happening in the eternal now. (20)
Here, then, is “how real” gets its “!”, which is to say, the path to writing’s dressing room, the place where the real puts on its magical clothes.
I don’t read a lot of magical realism. Instead, I read a lot nature writing. I read it for the kick in the head, the what's-a matter you that only someone more aware can provide. Robin Wall Kimmerer, moss-loving and card-carrying Ph.D. Biologist, writes in Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, “Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking. A cursory glance will not do . . . Mosses are not elevator music, they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet. You can look at mosses the way you can listen deeply to water running over rocks” (10-11).
Cursory awareness, no. Synesthetic awareness, yes, a consciousness where one sense of the real informs and bleeds into another. Awareness “that the fir forest and the moss forest mirror each other,” that the mirror through which this correspondence can be seen is a dew drop, and that these awarenesses are mirrored in the fractal geometry of a snowflake (10-11).
a dynamic,
stop-action dragonfly,
how real!
all these phenomena are important*
Or is it a magician focusing the audience on the performer instead of the performance? “Only I can do it,” the magician says. “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me . . . Presto chango,” and there it is, the word change. Of course, the magic is not in the performer, it’s in the change: a handful of rye now a pint of stout, a storm cloud now a lightning bolt, a bud now a flower, a chance encounter now two hearts racing.
Back in The Mausoleum of Genre Literati, there are two rooms: the Magical Realism Room and The Fantasy Room. After the postmortem, where does Cinderella go? Traditionally called a fairy tale (lit crits, those little name callers!), Cinderella gets its niche in the Fantasy Room because of, you know, supernatural intervention, the fairy god mother and all that.
But take the fairy godmother out for the moment. I mean, if the transformation is the magic and the fairy god mother is the magician, why not dispense with her altogether? . . . poof, gone in a sprinkle of her own fairy dust.
On its face, Cinderella is a pretty gritty story, one that harkens all the way back to “Rhodopis,” a tale told somewhere between 100 BC-100 AD by The Greek geographer Strabo. From then until now, our Cinderella is either a slave or a servant or an abused stepdaughter/sister. Let’s just say Cinderella is the poster child for keepin’ it real, every day, in every way. Then—we all know the story—Cinderella goes all rags to riches, but here’s the catch, the riches themselves aren’t unrealistic. They’re just part and parcel of a different social class. Gowns. Carriages. Footmen. Palaces. Balls. Fancy Shoes. All these are very real, just not part of Cinderella’s experience. These rich trappings seem magical not only to Cinderella but also to middle class readers, not because they are unaware of how the aristocracy lives, but because both are denied access. Put another way, the world of the aristocracy is a world so apart, it’s as if the commoners need supernatural intervention—cue the fairy godmother—before they can load up their moving carts and move into the manor.
All this is to say that supernatural intervention, although one of the devices a writer can employ to bring the magic, is a bit of a cheap parlor trick. Yes, the change Cinderella undergoes is magical, but not primarily because of the fairy godmother, but more so because of the barriers that make the change so politically and socio-economically preposterous. Said another way, Cinderella’s move out of the outhouse and into the big house is so unrealistic, that those who tell Cinderella tales feel the need to add a deus ex fairy to make the magical transformation plausible.
Now you see it, now you .
. . the old bait and switch.
“literalists of
the imagination”*
There are many paths to magic. Nature writers go outside themselves, but there is also an endless supply fermenting inside. Fantasy writers ferment a strange brew inside their minds, a liquor free from outside contamination. Not so with magical realists. Like nature writers, magical realists first mash their outside awareness, but unlike nature writers, their outside awareness-mash is fermented inside their mind-pots, thereby compounding the magic.
Haruki Murakami distills and collects the drippings in his 1Q84 trilogy. Book One opens inside a taxi. Stuck in freeway traffic, the driver and the passenger, Aomame, are listening to Janáček’s Sinfonietta. So far so real. Unfortunately, Aomame, one of two protagonists, has a very important appointment, and the traffic threatens to make her late. The driver notes that there is an emergency set of stairs, and if Aomame is so inclined, she could take a different path to her appointment. She has her doubts, and although he doesn’t advise leaving his cab, she decides she doesn’t want to be late and goes for the stairs, prompting the driver to say, “[P]lease remember: things are not what they seem” (17).
If the reader hasn’t read Murakami, such a comment could just be a minor character’s curious response, but in 1Q84, it’s Chekhov’s staircase to an unstable reality. On her way down the stairs, Aomame thinks to herself, “I move, therefore I am” (39), clearly a shot at the big daddy and dirty dog of rationalism, René Descartes. Once down the stairs and on the way to her appointment, Aomame then passes an ordinary policeman and notices that his uniform and gun are out of the ordinary—all setting the stage for the inside and the outside, as well as fiction and nonfiction, to exchange places.
As for me, writing magic for real is where it’s at. My novel Radio Free Olympia (Izzard Ink) has been called “a sprawling intertidal zone of magical realism,”—a bit of all right—but when I discovered that my novel Wildcat: An Historical Romance (Izzard Ink) was being read as fantasy, I sat down and had a think. Yes, Wildcat is full of magic—a hotel now a housing and eating co-op, a floodplain now a dairy, a coal mine now a mushroom farm, an ironworks now an artisanal collective—but none of these are unrealistic, which is to say, I don’t believe that generational poverty and Appalachia are hopelessly linked, and that the magical changes I depicted are necessarily a dream deferred.
But it’s also true that Wildcat has an element unique to my own strange brew: The Shadows. Think of a residue, a trace, a presence of someone who has died. No, not ghosts. Not memories, per se. More like visual echoes. Here is how New Kid, the protagonist who has retired to Wildcat, describes The Shadows. “Not everyone can see The Shadows, but of those who can, a few prefer not to. As it turns out, I’m not one of those . . . There was nothing creepy about them, and if I put my hand in, I felt a pleasant chill” (26, 27).
Put another way, “I taste
a liquor never brewed.” Bottoms up, Emily!**
*Moore, Marianne. “Poetry.” poets.org. https://poets.org/poem/poetry.
**Dickinson, Emily. “I
taste a liquor never brewed.” poets.org. https://poets.org/poem/i-taste-liquor-never-brewed-214.
About Jeffrey Dunn:
His Ph.D. in English
literature and cultural studies laid the foundation for his 41-year teaching
career of addressing student learning issues and implementing educational
programs at the local, state, and national levels. Embracing his dyslexia as a
gift, this dream fisher and history miner roams the woods whenever possible.
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Jeffrey Dunn's novel Wildcat is our featured new release on June 18th, 2024.
