Imagine, me doing a literature lesson! Or a film review? Or both?
Well, you should have expected it sooner or later. The English teacher gene is a strong one. Besides, I have to say what I think I know before I forget what I do know or even how to think.
"Magical Realism" is the term coined by an art critic waaaay back in the 1920s to describe paintings that were different from those of the expressionists, but don't get me started on art because my competence in that field has never progressed beyond stick figures and happy faces.
You may have come across it in novels in translation from Latin American writers such as Isabel Allende or Márquez. Here's Gabriel Garcia Márquez writing about his introduction to the form of magical realism upon reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis:
"The first line almost knocked me out of bed. It begins: 'As Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.' When I read that line I thought to myself I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago."
He also cited the stories told to him by his grandmother: "She told me things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and them write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face."
Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Isabel Allende are others I know about. There's dozens more as Wikipedia will tell you but I haven't read them and that's not the point here. There's a drama series of Márquez's famous novel out now on Netflix and it does in cinematography what that author's granny did in her stories "with a brick face".
Fantasy movies and novels advertise well in advance that there will be fantastic elements. Expect dragons and magic rings of power and dwarves and elves and orcs and distortions in space-time. All those elements are tools of the sci-fi or fantasy writer. Tolkein's advice to writers of the realm of magic was to be consistent. Once a rule has been laid down - rings entrap the wearer, incantations produce fire, animals speak to humans - then it must remain a rule throughout the narrative.
Magic realism however, is inserted as a discreet hiccup in a down-to-earth story where no one at the reading politely notices the hiccup or just accepts it to let the real story unfold. You may find yourself thinking there's something a little strange in the narrative but it'll probably all be explained in the next paragraph and besides, it's a good story. So what if Kafka's protagonist wakes up as a giant insect. What's next?
At this point, you gotta watch the series - or go back and get that book from the library. And here's some great movies to check out.
Poor Things It should have swept the Oscars last year but it still did fairly well. For a new feminist take on the Frankenstein theme, this one is excellent. (Says a guy)
Life of Pi Take a kid and a lifeboat and a tiger and set 'em adrift. What can go right?
And take time to peruse these books:
Midnight's Children
100 Years of Solitude
Life of Pi
Night Circus
The Tin Drum
Ishmael
All of these exhibit that "with a brick face" narration of Marquez's granny. How did things get to be the way they are? Let's have a sentient gorilla called Ishmael explain it all and see if you don't find it consistent with all of the archaeology you ever knew - frighteningly so in this day. If you ever wanted a less musical version of Brigadoon, then you'll want to read Night Circus.
And I tried a few on a much smaller scale. In a writing class I took a few years back we would get a prompt to use as an ideas springboard and then put pen to paper and see what flowed. I went off that springboard into the deep end of the narrative pool. Lookit what I did in those evening classes even, or because I was, without any scotch to lubricate my fertile (febrile) brain.
Whistle a Dance
Whistle a while away and the next thing you know you are waltzing like all the Matildas at Gallipoli with waves of brave lads going down before you off the boats and into the stuttering dance of dying until you know No! No! No! Just dance; dance to the music of poppies and roses and all things red as red dresses tight on terrifyingly taut nipples, red lips on cigarette holders and red red leather of Astin Martins jet trailing dust to some dark Morris-printed clandestine rendezvous, parlez-vous Madamoiselle from Armentiers, Parlez-vous la langue d’amour, de la morte — of my own childhood’s so untimely death, and dance on the graves of children lost in Poland’s ghettoes, Holland’s winter of hunger, China’s great famine and the high alluvions of Peru’s Cordillera Blanca with the dancing red queen on the chess board of destiny, hopscotching high lest you break Mother’s back, and dance your skeleton-rattling mazurka of demon madness into the wake-up wide-awake startled face of your dowager-dimpled life.
Seasonal Dress
The winter her body no longer fit had inched its way off her hips, peeled itself down thunder thighs and puddled at her ankles before she extricated surprisingly tiny feet and kicked its frosty ass across the solstice into the wastebasket of seasonal neglect. Spring, that saucy nymph, floated from the garment rack of forever-young to drape her shoulders, caress the nape of her neck, tongue her ear and enfold her with prurient enthusiasm. Summer merely squatted on the back porch of high noon, listlessly applauding the dust devils impishly billowing the colourful skirts of autumn.
Blanketed 1945
On a summer 4 year-old Tuesday I sit on the backyard blanket trying to find the jet plane high up and out at the limit of sight way ahead of its roaring tail while Mother goes to get the milk and the cucumber sandwiches from the kitchen of the new house my father has built with the pump at the sink and cistern underneath where the roots of the poplar tree that shades me will be slowly dying of exposure in the hot-dry-sun in the next door excavation where a new neighbour will soon begin to build, tearing out those roots that stitch our land together in our little country village, all of whose homes I will come to know on my paper route, the fussy impatient ones and Christmas-tip-generous souls, entering myself into the fabric of a wider social blanket of 1950s Ontario just at the edge of Toronto so soon to burst out of its Hogtown corral and smother us all in its busy quilt of strip-malls, billboard ads and farmland-hungry subdivisions where there will be no time for cucumber-sandwich picnics on blankets under backyard shade where Mother’s time is all my own.
Fun, isn't it. And I couldn't really call any of those pieces magical realism; they're just riffs on a writing prompt, more properly in the same league as my poetry glosettes, which book I promise will be forthcoming this year.
Before we part, give me something to watch or read. I have been deep into too much political text lately and I need an reprieve. Even Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which was my homage to approaching Int'l. Women's Day was not uplifting, confirming as it did so much that is wrong with the present state of the world. Sometimes magic can be an antidote for realism. Hit me with your best shot.