Saturday (September 1) at 1200: What is Magical Realism?
Panelists listed in program: Roberta Gregory, Mr. Magic Realism/Bruce Taylor, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Jeremy Lassen, Inanna Arthen/Vyrdolak
Disclaimer: These are my notes from the panel and my own, later thoughts. I often was unable to attend the entire panel, and also chronically missed panelist introductions. When possible I try to note who said something, but often was unable to. Also, unless something is in double quotes it should be considered a summary and not a direct quotation.
Magical realism is perhaps a reaction to colonialism; not just South American. Non-dominant culture writers. Literature of the marginalized; essentially created by people who are second-class citizens in their own countries.
Magical realism = lucid dream. Kafka in Metamorphosis didn’t wonder WHY he was a cockroach, just wanted to know what to do about it when it had happened. A lucid dream FEELS as real as reality. That is reality when you write it.
Vyrdolak disagrees that lucid dreaming is more surreal than magical realism; it’s a discrete reality with its own non-linear and illogical rules. Sees the term as almost condescending; it’s literary from non-white guy authors that contains fantastic elements that aren’t part of agreed-upon WESTERN reality. She has grown up with magic as a fact; these writers are writing THEIR reality, and it’s simply unfamiliar to the materialist western mindset. The term has since evolved and it’s moving more to the mainstream now.
Resurgence in interest is probably because there is a breakdown between popular mass media consensual reality and what we personally experience every day. There is a disconnect. “Do I live in that world? Is that my world?”
Fantastic elements slip in and are there but aren’t necessarily directly addressed.
Is ghost fiction and supernatural fiction of this type? Classic English ghost fiction? When people are explicitly playing around with the traditions of ghost fiction, it is very different. Thus anything where the supernatural intrudes into the mundane is NOT magical realism.
Appropriation of magical realism term to western sf/f of 20th century might be an attempt at trying to get validation because magical realism is still more critically “valid” than genre fiction.
Vyrdolak : The extraordinary event in a fantasy pulls the world off center and must be resolved so that the story can get back to reality. In magical realism the supernatural element is integral and does not need to be “fixed” so that the story can have meaning.
The Shout (movie) treated the ancient motif that JK Rowling used for the horcruxes and did it as magical realism instead of fantasy.
Magical realism changes how YOU view the world after.
In modern America, is imagination still suspect? Panel disagrees on this point. There is a lot of sf/f around… within pop culture there is respect for imagination. The puritanical underpinnings/foundation still values nonfiction over fiction, however. But “science fiction has won the war and made itself obsolete.” At least as far as pop culture/entertainment.
Need to be careful about exotification in saying that well indigenous people accept magic more, since it relates closely to the less romantic and ugly definition of the indigenous as people who believe in magic and are therefore inferior.
More accurate to say that new wave writers are influenced by magical realism than claiming the older writers were.
Magical realism and magical realist writing techniques are two different things.
Can movies actually be magical realism? In writing a book, there is collaboration between the writer and reader. Whereas a movie is a received experience without audience participation. Example movies:
- O Brother, Where Art Thou
- Midnight in Paris
- Field of Dreams
- LA Story
- Stranger Than Fiction
- Men Who Stare At Goats
Books mentioned:
- Of Blood and Honey, And Blue Skies From Pain – Stina Leicht
- Life of Pi – Yann martel
- Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury (potentially)
Not just metaphor. All genres of literature can embrace a good metaphor. Though another panelist argues that mainstream literature shies from fantastic metaphor.
Liminal (?) fantasy instead of magical realism as a term?
Writers like Michael Shaven(?) allow the literary community to reassess writers like Tim Powers.
Readers of sf/f are not marginalized outsiders even if that is our core narrative. In 21st century western world, scifi won the war and our culture is everywhere. We need to let the idea that we are second class citizens go, because it devalues our victory.
Cultural approval is commercialism – popularity in the lucrative sense. Thus if it’s lucrative it’s mainstream and then people write academic papers about it. That sort of acceptance is highly ephemeral. We cannot let just the market define this.
Just because sf/f is out there doesn’t mean that it’s accepted.
Let’s start using a term other than magical realism, get away from the term from turn of the century academics. Give us a chance for better dialog. (Heuvelt disagrees and says just enjoy it no matter what it’s called.)
Whelp, after attending most of a panel about what magical realism is, I still don’t think I could manage to give you a coherent answer. Which is a little annoying, since that’s kind of the reason I went to the panel – what the hell is it even?
Though maybe that’s the point. It’s like art. Or pornography. You know it when you see it.
Or potentially, it’s also just a constructed label.
Though I find the idea that it’s based in a reality with different rules where the fantastic is ordinary, and its purpose is to make us question the nature of what is real when we’re done reading it.
So basically, I need to think about this a lot more, and do more reading. Though I found it quite interesting (and this could be because I missed the first bit of the panel) that more movies were mentioned when I was there than books.
The part of the discussion that actually caught my attention the most was the suggestion that science fiction has in fact won the war, so to speak. Science fiction and fantasy are everywhere in the popular culture. Hell, look at the most recent record-breaking bestsellers. It’s mostly been scifi/fantasy. So perhaps at one point sf/f was the literary ghetto that was just occupied by weirdos and the nerdy kids hiding in the library, but it’s certainly expanded beyond that.
And really, it does seem a little silly to hear writers bewail being second-class citizens because they write genre when JK Rowling is one of the wealthiest people ever because of fantasy. Though I do know genre writers still get grief in some university writing programs.
Or perhaps sf/f is okay when it’s young adult, because that makes it’s basic “weirdness” more acceptable. Since when you think about it, much of the wildly popular sf/f recently has indeed been young adult – Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and as much as I shudder to think of anyone reading it (let alone impressionable young’ns) Twilight. But the point was made that particularly in mainstream “technothrillers,” much of what is standard now would have been shunned as scifi in the past.
And scifi and fantasy certainly dominate in the movies. We do make for the best explosions, I guess.