Does Your Fiction Need to Be Stretched?: Five Authors Describe the Magic of Magical Realism in Expressing Emotional Truths

Does your fiction need to be stretched?: Five authors describe the magic of magical realism in expressing emotional truths. By: Corso, Paola, Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.), 00439517, , Vol. 120, Issue 10 Section: INTERVIEW Five authors describe the magic of magical realism in expressing emotional truths AS ONE WHO was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area, I've seen my native city from just about every angle--from the North Side, South Side, West End, East End and from the Golden Triangle, where three rivers converge and meander along its valleys. And when writing my story collection, Giovanna's 86 Circles, set in the Pittsburgh area, I began by rendering this familiar setting realistically. My characters live in a Pittsburgh on the decline, a time when mills are closing and unemployment is high, though they have a strong desire to somehow take hold of a future that's out of their control. But they end up in uncharted territory--a place where magical leaps in my writing allow them to see beyond the uncertainty. They are transported away in a daydream or a folktale or a bend in the story that offers a moment of clarity and vision. So while my stories are set in distinct Pittsburgh-area locations, what happens in them is not always so "grounded" or predictable. At Yesterday's News, a vintage clothing store on the South Side, a woman who donates her dead mother's clothes there learns that their destiny is not what she expected. In a steamy hospital laundry room along the Allegheny River, a high school girl hallucinates and discovers that she can see her co-workers' futures. A skeptical journalist visits a tavern to track down the town mayor, who he finds in seemingly perfect health, drinking with his buddies and celebrating what he claims is the last day of his life. As Eudora Welty said, if we don't surprise ourselves as writers, readers won't be surprised either. So how do we keep the element of surprise going? How do we observe the world around us and fill it with characters who take us somewhere we never imagined in our prose and poetry? We often make such leaps in our writing, but some of us take small steps forward, and some of us are broad jumpers who start with feet firmly planted in realism and yet end up in the magical. Consider such broad jumpers as Gabriel García Márquez, whose characters in the classic work of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude, say incredible things with (in the author's words) "a completely unperturbed face" A priest in the novel levitates by means of chocolate, for example, and declares, "Just a moment, now we shall witness an undeniable proof of the infinite power of God." And there is Salman Rushdie, whose main use of magical realism in Midnight's Children involves the telepathic abilities of Saleem and the other thousand and one children born at the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, the date of Indian independence. These abilities enable them to communicate with each other and read minds. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave in the troubled years following the Civil War. Magical realism is a genre that is certainly full of surprises, and it is a way to experiment in your writing for the sake of telling a good story and illustrating its theme. To provide you with a primer on this genre, I interviewed five of its accomplished authors. Read through their comments, and I think you'll better understand not just what magical realism is and why and how writers of fiction and poetry gravitate to it, but what it might allow you to do in your own storytelling that realism doesn't. You'll also learn what techniques the authors employ in their work and find a list of noteworthy titles to further acquaint you with the genre. My panelists were Linsey Abrams, Oscar De Los Santos, Anosh Irani, Tamara Kaye Sellman and Daniela Gioseffi. (See sidebar below for brief biographies.) How do you define magical realism? Oscar De Los Santos: Fiction that adheres closely to the laws of realism until it decides to take that turn into wondrous territories. Sometimes the movement is subtle and the shift slight. Other times, the change in the story is radical and discombobulates the reader. Linsey Abrams: My definition doesn't include the powerful Latin American literature for which the term was coined: a surreal narrative in which odd events and consequences quite naturally twist human fate and history. For me, magical realism in fiction occurs when "real life" meets a question at the crossroads. When standing on real ground, we are suddenly confronted with an event or person whose behavior or existence belies the ground rules. In life we might call out: "I must have been dreaming!" "What a wild coincidence!" "This can't possibly be happening!" Tamara Kaye Sellman: It's almost easier to define what magical realism is not. To my mind, it's not fantasy, in the purest sense. Fantasy uses world-building and very specific tropes (i.e., unicorns, wizards, dragons), whereas magical realism is written as part of the known universe and generally avoids communion with fantastic devices, except in the case of some more supernatural tropes like angels, devils and ghosts. Even then, magical realism is not particularly gothic or moralizing; the impossibilities are part of a more mundane environment. No character is ever shocked by the talking animal or the ages-old curse or the conversation with the dead: These things are normal, as conveyed by the writer. They reflect community beliefs and folkways, old knowledge in a new world. Daniela Gioseffi: A story or poem written in the style of magical realism contains surreal or fantastical elements that happen within a realistic setting or circumstance. Characterizations are often realistic, but magical events happen that express an emotional truth. Properties of the fantastic and realistic are blended in one work. One well-known visual example might demonstrate: The painting "Birthday" created by Marc Chagall in 1915, contains some fantastic elements in a realistic and mundane setting. The man is floating in the air as he kisses the woman, who is surrounded by ordinary household objects. The couple is realistically portrayed as human figures in an indoor setting of chairs and tables and plates and cooking utensils. The man's floating above the woman as he kisses her obviously represents the emotion the man experiences as he kisses the woman and hands her a birthday bouquet. One can't talk about magical realism without mentioning surrealism and symbolism as elements of the genre. Why did you gravitate toward this genre as a writer? Irani: I think there are certain stories that cannot be written in any other way. My first novel, The Cripple and His Talismans, is the story of a man in search of his lost arm. It's obvious that there is a magical element to it. So the choice was natural. For my second book, The Song of Kahunsha, I took a realistic approach because it's about an orphan's journey into the underbelly of Bombay, and his fight to retain morality. The "magic" in this book is simply the fact that after all the things he has seen and done, he manages to keep hope alive. So story dictates style. De Los Santos: I believe that authors who choose to use the fantastic do so to explore their ideas more daringly and expansively. Also, they use magical realism to challenge readers to think about a story in ways they may not have had the tale remained conventional and mainstream. Gioseffi: I feel magical realism allows more emotional expression through symbolism, through magical elements that may be intrinsically believable but are never actually explained, leaving more room for readers' imagination to enter into a poem or story. Perhaps, too, there is more ability to explore sensory details when freed from strict reality. Cause and effect can be inverted and time collapsed. Abrams: I didn't start out gravitating toward the genre. … But I am a lyrical writer, and I think lyricism, if taken far enough, becomes like dreaming, or mythic imagining or even yearning, the most powerful emotion. In these instances, anything can happen and because of the "reality" of the predicaments, can be believed. (In Morrison's Beloved, a ghost has the illegitimacy of a ghost [but] the legitimate claims of a character.) I will say that I have never been interested in what can be explained away. What does this magical realism allow you to do in your storytelling that realism doesn't? Irani: There are certain stories that simply cannot be told in a realistic manner. They need an element of the absurd, the illogical, to arrive at a deeper understanding. De Los Santos: I like to weave magical realism into some of my fiction because it allows me to develop radical metaphors that I hope more strikingly illuminate whatever I'm conveying. It and other forms of fantastic storytelling -- horror, for example--are extremely liberating. Sellman: Magical realism allows you to express a subversive message without being maudlin or didactic. This happens through the expert use of symbolism and metaphor. Writers in Latin America have used magical realism to express their versions of history, truth and identity while living through centuries of colonial oppression and civil unrest. Listen, there is the truth that the state sanctions and the truth that a community witnesses, and many times these are not one and the same. In a sense, magical realism has served as a kind of literature of witness; it favors the voice of the little guy, the odd man out, the one who was there even if no one believes what he has to say. But it isn't just the major political rifts that magical real ism straddles. Anyone who has ever felt oppressed (a gay person, a neglected child, a person in a wheelchair, a Muslim in the U. S.?) can make apt use of magical realism to convey their world. … This is why there are so many wonderful magical realist writers who are Native American, for instance, or female, or of working-class status. Magical realism also allows the writer to borrow from older narrative forms. I'm talking about fables and allegories, parables and urban legends, oral traditions. These older forms, made contemporary, create narratives that assign new brilliance to the ordinary, in a world we think we understand even as we question everything we ever assumed about it. Finally, magical realism gives writers permission to push the envelope of what they believe. Surrealism resides beyond the world of magical realism; it is the ultimate breakdown of logic and order in literature. Realism, of course, depends upon consensual reality and refuses entrance to chaos and restless incoherence. Magicalrealism says "wait a minute, it isn't quite like that," and then goes on to deliver a startling new context of the world that is written so lucidly, with such verisimilitude, that it really can't be denied, at least not easily. Describe your writing process and how you come to incorporate magical realism. Irani: I start with an image. For example, I was working on a short story when I suddenly had an image of amputated limbs hanging from the ceiling in a very orderly fashion in a dungeon. I had no idea what this image meant or where it was going to take me, but I started writing. Obviously, the image itself is magical. So I had to move in the opposite direction--the reality--to discover what the image meant. Abrams: When I began my first novel, Charting by the Stars, I knew it Was a book about searching in unconventional and maybe difficult ways. The title refers to airplane navigation. If a pilot's instruments go out while flying and he can't get his bearings, he has to "chart by the stars." My father did this in World War II--in childhood it seemed scientific, heroic and ultimately cosmic. At the end of the novel, a character called The Captain shows up among a group of young people in New York attempting to invent themselves as moral adults. Angela, the narrator, befriends him, or her, though only for a short time. It's a visitation, as in the case of fairies, leprechauns, angels or aliens. We chart unknown territories, with uncanny help, but mostly on our own. Gioseffi: I believe that reading profoundly affects one's writing. I read Italo Calvino, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Luisa Valenzuela, and the French symbolists André Breton, Charles Baudelaire. Salvador Dalí in painting, of course. My writing simply took on aspects of those I read and artists I viewed. I studied modern art and was influenced by it as well. The effects were all around me. Surrealism and magical realism were a part of my literary life. It all just came naturally to me as I wrote the poems in Eggs in the Lake, my first published collection [in 1979]. De Los Santos: I'm a fairly careful plotter, at least in my head. Still, there's a lot of discovery that goes on as I write and rewrite (and re-rewrite). I never worry about themes. I just set out to tell a good story, and the rest takes care of itself. Sometimes as I write, I decide that telling that good story will involve moving it into a fantastic genre. When I feel a story needs to shift into magical realism territory, I allow it to go there. For example, I wrote a story called "Muerte en Méjico." My protagonist ends up chasing a murderer through downtown Mexico City. In the middle of the chase, he runs into a vendor with colorful wrestling masks. As a kid, he admired the famous masked wrestler El Santo, so he dons a silver Santo mask and continues the chase. Shoppers take note of the man in the shiny mask and follow him. Eventually, my masked hero and a mob of Mexican citizens trap the murderer in a cemetery. My hero believes that the spirit of the dead masked wrestler El Santo helped him trap the killer because he donned the mask. Now, there's nothing supernatural going on in the story, but it does go over the top and moves into magical realism territory. What kinds of magical realism techniques do you use? Abrams: I always start out with story and then see what happens. Right now I'm working on volume two of my most recent novel, Our History in New York. An old man walking down a block in the East Village moves a swarm of bees on a pole. [There's] a swami at a cash machine, which appears to be broken until be, and only he in a line of people, can get it to dispense money. Are these [moments] "magical" or "real"? Because they exist in a "realistic" narrative, they seem real. In the end, fiction is not an account of what happened, but rather of what might have happened. Therein lies the beautiful, magical opening. Irani: Keep it as natural as possible. The moment you think about technique, the work loses soul. Sellman: I'm not sure I consciously employ anything when I write magical realism, at least in the first draft. I write both realism and magical realism; whatever results really depends upon the story itself. Each story wants to be its own thing, so I give it permission to be. Some things, which I focus more on in drafts, include the presence of theme and subtext, metaphor, symbolism and humor. Magical realism must read like solid concrete to work, so I tend to the tiniest details of ordinary life to give them a super-real quality. When the so-called "magical" things happen, they do so in such a matter-of-fact way that, at least in the universe I've built for them, they tend to represent the mundane aspects of that landscape.… It works if you can think in those terms as you write. What advice do you have for writers employing magical leaps in their work? Irani: Instead of exploring the truth behind a magical image and uncovering the story, some writers get carried away with the freedom the image gives them. It becomes an exercise in imagination, rather than a hard look at the truth. De Los Santos: Use magical realism sparingly. Save it for moments when you want your story to explode with a kind of hyper-reality. Don't use magical realism to be cutesy. Don't use it just to try to jar the reader for the hell of it. Magical realism is another writing tool--a genre or subgenre, actually, that can be threaded into your writing to make your love story more passionate, your political statement stronger, your existential or psychological explorations deeper and more multifaceted. Abrams: I think the only trap in writing magical realism is to copy what someone else has done. That's not to say that wonderful books exist in a vacuum--we read them. But you have to nail down your own particular world, and then rise up out of it from necessity. Sellman: If you're not Latin American, it would behoove you to avoid writing a story set in a jungle with a mestizo character, a boatload of butterflies, an alchemist turning lead into gold while a town remains ensconced in the longest nap in history.… I've read thousands of attempts at magical realist writing as editor of Margin and I can assure you, clichés and knockoffs abound! It's far harder than it looks to write a convincing, beautiful and memorable work of magical realism. For one thing, it's really important to know who you are and why you would choose to pen a magical realist manuscript in the first place. These seeming flights of fancy have darker, more grave purposes than their writers first let on. It's important to be yourself when you engage in writing a magical realist narrative, and to take the job seriously. To write any other way is to be inauthentic or to trivialize the form, and that's no small thing in a world where art is commodified and cultural identity continues to cede to the homogenizing threat of assimilation. I also think it's important to capture the landscape you understand. I strongly adhere to the notion that the landscape is where magical realism begins. For me, it's the suburban and rural Pacific Northwest landscape, primarily. A place loaded with magical attributes, to be sure. But any place with which you share any sort of emotional communion will work. From the details of that landscape--which should reflect your deep understanding of its sociopolitical history and all of its folkways, secretive or celebrated--an organic magical realist story line can emerge. Finally, magical realism has a collective quality to it that separates it from American-style literary writing in the sense that the voice of one is the voice of many. Learn about oral tradition and why it's so important, and you'll get the necessary insight to write from the point of view of communities rather than individuals. This will lend depth and quality to your magical realist work. What is the future of magical realism? Sellman: As long as there are political imbalances and devastating differences between cultures, there will be a need to put a voice to their resident conflicts. I see the 21st century as a tremendous time for growth in magical realist writing, thinking and understanding. I predict gay writers and women writers from all around the world will write more of it than anyone. People will continue to misuse the term (publishers do this all the time), and Latin American writers will continue to express their displeasure with it because they have been pigeonholed for so long by the term. But in attempting to write, read or understand magical realism, people in general (especially in the U.S.) will begin to master the idea that there really are many truths out there, not only one, and that it is better to question assumed reality than it is to conform, if you're interested in knowing what's really real De Los Santos: We're living in an exciting time when it comes to fiction. The boundaries between genres are eroding. More and more, we're seeing wonderful amalgamations. People are becoming more accepting of blurred genres. They are accepting this meshing as good storytelling, period. They don't care about categories or labels on the book spines. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a good example. It won the Pulitzer, yet it's solid science fiction. Peter Straub's Lost Boy Lost Girl is another fine example of a novel that slips between genres. You can argue that it's a horror novel or a psychological thriller or a mainstream novel that uses magicalrealism to get its points across. This acceptance of genre blurring gives me hope that those of us who are still in love with reading and writing and words are becoming more savvy readers. Meet the panel Anosh Irani was born and raised in Bombay, India, and moved to Vancouver in 1998. His first play, The Matka King, premiered in Vancouver in 2003, and his first novel, The Cripple and His Talismans, was published two years later. The Song of Kahunsha is his second novel. His award-winning play Bombay Black was first produced last year. Oscar De Los Santos is chair of the Department of Professional Writing, Linguistics and Creative Process at Western Connecticut State University. He is the author of Hardboiled Egg (short stories), Spirits of Texas and New England (folklore stories), and other books. His stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, and his edited collection of film essays, Reel Rebels, is due out this fall. Linsey Abrams is the author of three novels, Charting by the Stars, Double Vision and Our History in New York. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at The City College of New York and is editor of Global City Review. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in many publications, including Glimmer Train and The New York Times Book Review. Daniela Gioseffi is the author of more than a dozen books and has published her work in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. A poet, novelist, playwright, writing teacher and performer, she won an American Book Award for her book Women on War. Her story "Daffodil Dollars" which employs magical realism, won a PEN short- fiction award and is in her story collection In Bed With the Exotic Enemy. Her poetry collections include Word Wounds & Water Flowers, Symbiosis and Eggs in the Lake. She won the 2007 John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Tamara Kaye Sellman has a number of specialties as a writer, including literary fiction, magical realism, food and garden writing, and freelance feature/interpretive journalism. Her fiction, poetry, columns, editorials, reviews and other writings have been published widely. She founded the electronic anthology Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism (www.magical-realism.com) and directs its new global interactive community, MRCentral.net. She teaches magical realism writing workshops online through Writer's Rainbow (www.writersrainbow.com).

Works Cited

Corso, Paola. "Does Your Fiction Need To Be Stretched?: Five Authors Describe The Magic Of Magical

Realism In Expressing Emotional Truths." Writer (Kalmbach Publishing Co.) 120.10 (2007): 19-23.

Literary Reference Center. Web. 1 Oct. 2014.