CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Magical Realism and the Space Between Spaces
This thesis project culminates my sincerest efforts to engage with magical realism in literary fiction both critically and creatively. I have prepared five original short stories in the tradition of magical realism, which I will define and explore in this critical introduction. Each of the stories is patterned to exemplify a theme of recurring, subjugated metaphors for “vacancy,” “deficiency” and “prosthesis” which I use to express the conventions of magical realism, namely mimesis, derealization, defamiliarization and fabulation. Each of these terms will be fully defined in later
sections of the critical introduction.
Pinning magical realism down to a neat, condensed definition has been the most difficult process of compiling this work. And, frustratingly, I see the crux and key of it now with such clarity I'm convinced I overlooked the definition a dozen times because it appeared too simple and perhaps too reductive. As will be discussed in later sections, magical realism is essentially constituted of its two parts: the expression of magic, or the impossible, within the conventions of literary realism. Of course, both are terms that require further explanation, especially since they are diametrically opposed to one another. For that explanation I will rely on a few of the most prominent critical theorists of the genre including Angel Flores, author of El Realismo Magico as well as several critical essays, many of which are compiled by included authors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, editors of Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, of magical realism. Other authors whose works appear to define the genre are Matthew C. Strecher, Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki; Stephen M. Hart and Wen-Chin Ouyang, A Companion to Magical Realism; Scott Simpkins, “Magical Strategies: The Supplement of Realism,” Literary Semiotics: A Critical Approach, and editor of Studies in the the Novel; and of course Franz Roh, the man who first coined the term magical realism and the author of In Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerie (Post-Expressionism, Magical Realism).
Magical realism in literary fiction is slathered with controversy. Literary critics like Angel Flores insist a Latin American exclusivity to the genre, suggesting that it lived and died with a handful of authors of the Latin American Boom. Others, like Matthew C. Strecher, are less rigid with their treatment of the genre, asserting magical realism as a Post-Modern commodity, recognizing its influence, progression and re-utilization as adopted through translation and practice by contemporary writers, Latin American and non-Latin American alike. In order to address this controversy, I will first establish magical realism as an extension of the realism movement, then trace the term back its source, to 1925 when Franz Roh, a German art historian first used the term to describe the Post-Modern works he saw replacing the Expressionist movement.
In order to discuss the true nature of magical realism, it is necessary to examine the conventions of realism, its mother genre. According to The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism, realism is a mode of writing that values empiricism and objectivity over former Romantic notions of writing; the point is to create art that is as true to the human experience as possible, effectively establishing the literary equivalent to anthropology, ethnogrophy and linguistics (Barrish 3-4). Realism doesn't tolerate the conventions of telling yarns or tales that divide the world into heroes and villains, nor does it necessarily create environments where the just are rewarded and the wicked punished. It doesn't seek to artificially glorify bravery or morality; in fact it seeks to debunk such motives for writing, keeping everything on the page truer to life off the page (4-5). Magical realism, despite its inclusion of the impossible, retains the realist motive at its core. In fact, it includes the impossible in order to further explore the mundane, not in an attempt to destroy it. Franz Roh is perhaps the best voice to include on this subject, as he was the first to comment on magical realism's ability to venerate the quotidian through the examination of the incredible.
Roh remarks that Post-Expressionism, or magical realism as he later named it, embodies the “calm admiration of the magic of being, of the discovery that things already have their own faces” (20). It seems that through a quiet observance of the everyday, artists of Roh's time were discovering a hidden excitement that embodied the otherwise prescriptive and banal objectivity that preceded Expressionism. This idea that objects have their own faces suggests also that they have their own identity, history and perhaps even goals or desires, that Roh detected a new energy springing out of contemporary art that centered on a certain curiosity about the identity of the artist within an atmosphere that already had its own identity. It seemed the rising trend in art was no longer to express history, time and environment through the wavy lines of their essence that underlay their definite frames, but to crack open those frames and examine the effect that the underlying essence has had on humanity, to facilitate a space where that essence was free to push back on the artist's easel or mound of clay. In effect, Roh identified the crux of magical realism; it is the treatment of the quotidian as a product of the astonishingly inexplicable.
Roh further states that magical realism:
offers us the miracle of existence in its imperturbable duration: the unending miracle of eternally mobile and vibrating molecules. Out of that flux, that constant appearance and disappearance of material, permanent objects somehow appear: in short, the marvel by which a variable commotion crystallizes into a clear set of constants. (22)
Roh's described world is one where the definite is substantiated by the indefinite, where solid form takes shape out of the chaos or “flux” of “eternally mobile and vibrating molecules” (22). Roh has described an underpinning value that permeates the heart of magical realism: perhaps it is difficult to afford the term any prescriptive definition because it defines itself as that vibrating essence beneath the solid form, that swirling vortex that practitioners of magical realism insist fills up the space between spaces and ejects the material from the immaterial, forming a stable yet still volatile composite of the two. The magical realist's expression through art is one of hybridity, a fusion of confused polarities wherein anything is possible because, to the magical realist, no conceivable fantasy is more miraculous, nor phenomenally impossible, than the empirical, material components of everyday existence. It is an expression that invites the reader to consider the laws of the natural and the chaos of the supernatural as two systems that spring up from the same science, that the real and the magical are not divorced concepts, that they both occupy the same space without discrepancy and without exception.
To repeat a phrase I used earlier, magical realism, in its most crystallized form, is a genre that follows the tenets of realism and treats the quotidian as a product of astonishingly inexplicable. This understanding is the guiding star for any uncertain reader. If other genres or modes of writing bump up against magical realism to create confusion, let this standard be the rule for weeding out the impostors. If the genre does not follow the tenets of realism, in that it does not seek to strip away the romantic from the narrative, and if its inclusion of the incredible, or the magical, or the impossible derives from a motive to replace reality, rather than explore it, it is not magical realism (22).
Stephen M. Hart and Wen-Chin Ouyang acknowledge the assertion that magical realism grafts the fantastic onto the realistic, but it is worth considering that, to the magical realist, the opposite is equally true: it is not the sole task of the artist to bombard the material with the mystical, but also to tag the ears of the mystical with material markers and direct the reader's attention to the occasional out-cropping of the impossible from the surface of the mundane (19). To a degree, the genre insists on superstition, and since Latin American culture is steeped in superstition and a folkloric acceptance of the supernatural, Hart and Ouyang propose a kind of inevitability behind magical realism's migration to its early, Latin American writers (3). It's as if they were meant for each other.
Given a name and a spotlight from Roh's work, magical realism--this new descriptor--spiralled into other forms of art until it was scooped up by writers such as Borges and García Marquez who adopted it as a literary genre, reappropriating the term for good. Whether their response to this new genre sprang from the roots of their culture or from the apex of their intellect is a separate argument entirely, but regardless of what drove Latin American writers to shape their art under the scruples of magical realism, the point remains: the literary genre is a Latin child.
This indisputable truth pushes certain theory purists such as Angel Flores to insist that magical realism in literature is a Latin American product, and that it shouldn't be considered viable outside of Central America after the 1960s. He defines magical realism as a “continuation of the. . .realist tradition of Spanish language literature and its European counterparts” (Zamora and Faris 110). But, in reading from his text, El Realismo Magico, Flores isn't shy to reveal a native, literary identity with deep-seeded contempt for a U.S. point of view and theory, expressing wounded pride at a comment made by Dudley Fitts, an American theorist and prolific translator of foreign texts between the 1930s and 50s. Fitts expressed how “depressed” he felt for the “ineptitude, insecurity, immaturity, histrionic sentimentalism” and above all “the boring” character that permeates Spanish fiction narratives, particularly those of Hispanic America (Flores 19). Flores relates that Fitts recalls the “amusing despair of John Peale Bishop,” an American poet between 1920-44, “who spent months studying Hispanic American novels and short stories” which he “found at once beyond recovery, and noted that the Spanish genius, at least in this hemisphere, only spoke convincingly through verse and with rehearsal” (19). Given this harsh, judgmental brow-beating from an American poet, it isn't difficult to surmise why Flores would seek to guard magical realism so jealously against foreign practitioners, especially since Fitts went on to add that, his distaste for Hispanic American literature aside, “there must be an exception to the Argentinians Jorge Luis Borges and Eduardo Mallea: their narrative fiction is paired with the best” (19).
I can’t necessarily fault Flores for shaking his fist against a U.S. reappropriation of his native literary genre, demanding that magical realism remain where it began. Flores himself acknowledges the struggles that Latin American writers have had in the past due to a more difficult and taxing quality of life not typical to U.S. or French citizens (19). Latin America is storied with writers denied the luxury to lie in bed all day and muse about a social meander through the town square. Latin American fiction rose to its elevated status, achieving the crown of magical realism with its jewel, the Boom, on the backs of field-workers and soldiers. It is important to acknowledge Latin America's literary history and respect its achievements, but magical realism is a Post-Modern product, as Roh described, and with Post-Modernism, nothing is sacred or impervious to adaptation. Magical realism, as a literary genre, emerged from Latin America, but it's outgrown the constraint of national borders and entered a globally inclusive space. Therefore, beyond Flores's call for vindication against John Peale Bishop, I exclude the viability of claims that declare otherwise, that seek to dog-ear 1950s Latin America as the page in history when magical realism happened and then disappeared.
Despite Flores's doggedness to codify magical realism as a Hispanic American property, or perhaps because of it, he has brought to light some of the most indicative and irrefutable definitions of the genre. Through further inclusion, examination and appreciation of Flores's critical work with magical realism, it's possible to deduce just what the literary genre is, what it is not and whether or not it persists today through contemporary writers.
I defer to Flores to examine the mission of the genre's fantastic elements, detailing how certain contemporary fantasy writers seek to sabotage that mission. As will be made clear, the fabrications at play in magical realism operate with different motives and achieve different effects than those at play in the fantasy genre. The desire to lump magical realism into fantasy is not uncommon, particularly among New York Times Best-Selling authors like Terry Pratchett who says, “magical realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish” (Richards). Also Gene Wolfe said, when interviewed on her writing, that magical realism “is the polite way of saying you write fantasy” (Wolfe and Barber). These are two writers who seem to declare that differentiating magical realism from fantasy is a matter of splitting hairs, but who also seem eager to glue those split-ends back together, as if the act will imbue one with the properties of the other. But such is not the case. Fantasy differs from magical realism in many ways, but first and foremost in this way: fantasy excludes the tenets of realism. As will later be discussed, fantasy pushes for an acceptance of an alternate world, whereas realist writing seeks fidelity with real life. In the case of fantasy, the fantastic is included to divide reality from the fantastic, and in the case of magical realism, the fantastic is included to better demonstrate reality through metaphor or contrast.
Magical realism defines itself in an indefinite, nebulous space--that curiosity to explore and question the physical properties of the material world, keeping one ear open for the activity and inclusion of the mystical. So if magical realism is in fact this indefinite thing, how can it be separate from other things, like fantasy? Angel Flores would have us recall the realism in magical realism, saying that realism is so broad and inclusive of other styles that they begin to form flanges stemming out from the root. But that root, that source of magical realism's magical properties, Flores reminds us, has a definite, immutable home: “Despite realism's wide ambition, the continual point of reference is this world” (16). Magical realism is territorial in nature. It stakes its claim on this world and refuses to venture beyond the limits of accomplished human conquest before inserting its magical elements. Stephen M. Hart declares that the fantastic “in magical realism is grafted on reality and in fantasy [it is grafted] on a never-land” (19). This genre’s bond to this world suggests an exploratory desire that supersedes fantasy's predominant escapist desire.
To press further on the subject, fantasy seems to typically operate within an archetypal system where plot and character follow the rigid rails of expectation outlined by The Hero's Journey as defined in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a text on comparative mythology and narrative. Predominantly, these stories inevitably pit a noble, learning protagonist against a daunting antagonist, and in the fallout of their contest the protagonist is victorious and assumes the new role of hero. Any supernatural occurrences in such stories largely play supportive roles that ultimately lift the protagonist to a state of capability necessary to accomplish his task. The rules for such narratives are very neat, and more often than not the end is predictable from the beginning. Flores reminds us of the unpredictable, and often dissatisfying nature of magical realism as compared to narratives in these sister-genres which adopt similar elements. He draws our attention to Kafka's Metapmorphosis, a short story that contains, perhaps, the most famous element of fantasy ever recorded in fiction. Flores wants to impress upon the reader magical realism's acknowledgment of the conventions of mythological story telling, and also its refusal to satisfy those conventions with unyielding tribute:
The transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach or bedbug (Kafka uses the imprecise “monstrous vermin”) is not a matter of conjecture or discussion: it happened and it was accepted by the other characters as an almost normal event. Once the reader accepts the fait accompli the rest follows with logical progression. The practitioners of magical realism as if to prevent “literature” from getting in their way, as if to prevent their myth from flying off, as in fairy tales, to supernatural realms [construct a] narrative [that] proceeds in well-prepared, increasingly intense steps which ultimately may lead to one great ambiguity or confusion. (Zamora andFaris 116)
Here Flores shows us a few key, elemental truths to the genre. First he discusses
Samsa's transformation as an actual event that occurs in the narrative, “not a matter of conjecture or discussion” (116). This puts the story in a mystical space, similar to stories from other genres. However, what follows, distinguishes magical realism with certainty, with a broad yet definite brush, from most other, perhaps confusingly similar, forms of writing. Flores notes the genre's affinity for ambiguity and confusion. These are an extension of a method of storytelling that does not follow a system or an archetype--the fundamental framework for most other narratives involving the mystical and/or the impossible. These are also an extension of the genre's loyalty to realism. At its core, magical realism is trying to express as well as question an understanding of the real world, and in the real world, rarely do acts of nobility amount to a logical balance, and rarer still do corrupt structures of power fall apart due to injustice. In reality, most acts, most interactions, most things in general do not amount to anything of obvious clarity. If I pick up a penny early of the street early in the day, it is not required I find a use for it come nightfall, or even the end of my life. Whereas in most “literature” as Flores puts it, everything included is suggested a role and an expectation to fulfill that role. Often, with magical realism, the role suggested is to create space, maybe to promise something larger and then fail or refuse to fulfill that promise, offering ambiguity or confusion instead. It is a method of storytelling that mirrors our understanding of reality and the consequences of time, but at once questions that understanding, putting the reader in a space where, as Flores puts it, “time exists in a kind of timeless fluidity and the unreal happens as part of reality” (116).
Matthew Strecher defines magic realism as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe” (267). How then does one differentiate “something too strange to believe” from something reasonably improbable given the limitations of technology? The answer is perhaps so simple that it becomes a difficult one to assert, especially when discussing the distinction between magical realism and Science Fiction. SF is simple to define, but troublesome to discuss as most have misappropriated the term for years. Many associate the definition of Science Fiction with the proximity of scientific apparatuses to an inciting incident. To such readers, if something impossible happens in a castle it's fantasy, and if something impossible happens in a laboratory or in space it's Science Fiction. This sloppy standard for definition makes it easy to confuse an impossible occurrence for an improbable one due to the mask it might have on at the time of conception.
Believe it or not, Science Fiction, as the name defines, depends on an element of science, meaning the empiricism of research and discovery. Popularly, the genre appears in two forms, Hard and Soft Science Fiction. Hard SF is the form that is closest to reality, operating on scientific theory more than scientific hypothesis. It constructs fictional circumstances wherein the technology and/or theory (not hypothesis) of today play a crucial role and provide key source material for the conflict. Soft SF is further removed from reality, tentatively connecting speculative circumstance to scientific hypotheses; however, what must be remembered here is the need for empiricism. A scientific hypothesis, however improbable and far removed from current, human, technological capability must retain at its center an unmoving scientific truth. Hypotheses are the extension of theories. They are not a license to pretend or invent or disrupt physical laws as we understand them.
Adam Roberts, professor of English and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and three-time nominee for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, says that Science Fiction “requires a material, physical realization, rather than a supernatural or arbitrary one. This grounding of SF in the material rather than supernatural becomes one of its key features” (5). Even when the inciting, fantastic incident includes a loose proximity to a scientific impetus, the resulting phenomenon, if impossible to explain as anything other than supernatural, removes the text from the Science Fiction genre. If the impossible came from a laboratory, as in the case of The Incredible Hulk, or if it flies through space with brightly colored lights emitting from its “engine,” like the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, it remains a manifestation of the impossible and is therefore fantasy not Science Fiction, regardless of setting. And ultimately, the above examples showcase narratives that seek to replace reality with a new setting; their representations of earth and/or humanity are offered in substitute to what the reader already knows and expects. They fail to offer a mimetic representation of reality in the same manner that magical realism does.
As suggested by critic Scott Simpkins, if there is a singular, ultimate, unifying thread throughout magical realism, it is likely mimesis--the literary process that imitates the world, its peoples, and, more often than not, its political and social ideals (140-154). Magical realism utilizes traditional mimesis in order to explore perceptions of the visual and the real; however, it often evolves and complicates the tradition through its trademark examination and inclusion of the impossible. This process often culminates in a totalizing, grandiose view of history and memory as represented by the author's imagery and language. In a sense, a mimetic representation of the world is super-imposed, but not substituted, over the reader's traditional understanding of reality, frequently demanding a re-examination of the empirical world and of the text itself. This principle operates on the same foundation as a parlor magician's act, which, if successful, leaves the reader wondering and questioning what he sees outside the theater. In magical realism, the reader is always based in reality as he understands it, and is never asked to abandon that reality. The author introduces illusions into that reality, and the success of those illusions depends on a type of prestidigitation, a deftness of skill to pull them off and put the audience in a space where the possible and the impossible co-mingle without conflict. With the literary genre, the result is a new, mimetic representation of the familiar world that invites closer examination and discussion on the solidity of the material and physical law.
Simpkins, as well as several authors of the works and essays collected by Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, agrees that recurring aspects that crop up in magical realism, perhaps to reveal the bones in an otherwise ghostly form, are derealization, defamiliarization and fabulation (163-190). It's important to acknowledge and define these terms in order to further define magical realism and defend that definition. Derealization is an expression of the author's aforementioned prestidigitation. It is the ability of language to create a sensory experience through mimesis wherein the world is ultimately represented as an altered place, somehow changed from the reality the reader knows before beginning the reading. Just like when a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, previously expected to be empty. Often this alteration denotes a sentiment that something has been lost or corrupted. To continue with the magician metaphor, what is lost when the rabbit comes out of the hat is the notion, and perhaps the security in knowing that such things are not possible, and what is corrupted is the viewer's understanding of physical properties. Ultimately the goal, in the case of magical realism, is to represent a more deeply-seeded truth originally hindered by the superficial appearance of an already perceived reality.
Defamiliarization is the literary, artistic expression of alienation, of making the reader feel somehow apart from the world. Often, in magical realism, this is done by introducing something mystical and revealing the world as something unexpectedly unfamiliar. The magical realist constructs a setting that mirrors a, perhaps, unorthodox world view, and often, before the reader is able to accept that new setting, he must be displaced and broken of habit--like breaking bones in order to reset them.
Fabulation is simply the practice of telling fables, chiefly understood as stories that involve talking animals. However, unlike the familiar, formulaic fables used more often as tools for moral instruction than as art, fabulation through magical realism attempts to express the complexities of the world, of its politics and history, by artificially condensing them. This seems contrary to the tenets of realism, and perhaps when executed by writers who believe magical realism is essentially fantasy, they do contradict realism, but, as always, the magical realist employs fabulation in order to explore reality, not escape it.
As examples, I bring back Kafka and offer up Italo Calvino as well. By converting Gregor Samsa into a literal bug, Kafka introduces a metaphor for human nature and the world outside that is simply teeming with baggage that the reader can open and examine--a much more effective and affective way to engage the reader than with the treatise of a mission statement. And by attributing names and speaking roles to the forces and materials that existed before the world's creation and continue to exist today, Calvino creates an interpretative space in Cosmicomics where the reader views the creation of the cosmos free from the hang-ups of science and religion, a separate, third option that ignores the previous two and focuses exclusively on the already-magical properties of matter.
Given that the use of metaphor is not intrinsically bound to magical realism, the realms in which the genre's metaphors typically operate (derealization, defamiliarization and fabulation) are paramount to help distinguish magical realism from other literary genres. In the case of Gregor Samsa, his transformation into a bug showcases each of the three aspects listed above; fabulation in a quite a literal sense given that Samsa becomes a talking, non-human creature, and also because his new form compresses the issue of his life and behavior before the transformation. Defamiliarization is achieved through the intimate proximity of the reader and the Samsa bug. Instantly the reader is unaware of his surroundings, uncertain who or what might get transformed next. Derealization comes through with every sentence that convinces the reader Gregor Samsa has in fact become a bug, that he is no longer human.
Understanding now that magical realism draws most of its water through the metaphors implemented through its use of the impossible, it becomes easier to spot and discern the genre from typical, escapist fantasy. Utilizing this understanding I now turn the lens away from magical realism in general to focus it directly on the short stories that comprise the creative element of this thesis. I will discuss my use of metaphor and how collectively these form thematic occurrences and reoccurrences throughout the work, and how these themes resonate with the three previously listed aspects.
There are three thematic linchpins suspending these collected short stories and I've ascribed a term to codify each of them: vacancy, deficiency and prosthesis. I use the term “vacancy” to describe the theme of emptiness that permeates the bulk of my writing, with a predominant presence in this thesis collection. Vacancy typically serves as the pivot around which my stories revolve: some missing piece of information, identity or physical substance that drives the action of the characters and the progression of the plot. Often, in my thesis, the attempt to fill this void serves as an act of futility or even self-destruction. Only rarely do I represent holes that can actually get filled. This habit reflects a certain outlook I have on humanity. In attempt to make sense of our environment, often we impose ourselves and our understanding onto it in hopes to close certain gaps between us and society, whether they are emotional, psychological or even physical gaps. This dissection of humanity serves as key source material for my thesis and is often interpreted through the characters in my stories who seem to create, or hopelessly shovel filler into, bottomless holes.
I often showcase the theme of vacancy by constructing a defamiliarizing physical space in my stories. Sometimes this constructed space is larger than it appears, and other times surprisingly claustrophobic. In the case of my opening story, “The City Proper,” the physical setting is purposefully shrouded, with only pieces and city blocks revealed with strategy and used to create a synecdoche of a larger, more global space. What physical space the reader does see is shrouded by a mask of impossible imagery swimming (quite literally) across the surface. This is done in an attempt to make the reader feel excluded from the setting, apart from the lives and circumstance of the citizens of St. Joan's. That feeling of exclusion is meant to combat the wonder that takes place there; one of the goals of this story is to make the reader aware that he stands apart from the setting, and to entice further inspection and desire for inclusion--something that, contextually, dovetails with the plot of the story.
“Deficiency” is the term I use to describe the condition of being insufficient to close the aforementioned vacancy gaps. I find human-beings precious by virtue of their faults, their inability to repeatedly, and reliably, meet the demands set for them by their peers, by their loved ones or by themselves. The stories in my collection focus almost exclusively on people who embody (and perhaps exaggerate) this behavior seeking to expose the human condition as one comprised of deficiency, but also to celebrate the freedom attached to being unreliably sufficient and sufficiently unreliable. In my stories, the characters never seem to be, independently, up to the task ahead of them; this is a deliberate assertion to examine human-beings as something defined and ratified by incapability. I believe that our humanity often is, and ought to be, validated by our propensity to be invalid.
In one of my stories, “Eat She Said,” the target character is teeming with deficiency, much of which is relegated to a damaged psyche. The way she thinks and perceives the world is grafted into the narrative in a way that prevents the reader from seeing or experiencing the world outside of the way she does. This type of forced perspective confines the reader to the interpretative space of a character who interprets the world in a way that is highly contrary to that of the reader. This filtering process serves as a method of derealization, of repackaging the world setting in a way that makes it appear altered or free of the temporal and dimensional confines that the reader might typically expect. I forcing the physical topography of the setting through the mental landscape of this character, what comes out the other side for the reader is a character interpretation of time and physical space. I use this new, filtered environment to create a setting that more closely resembles one Roh's might describe. There is space on the page, and solid form, but they seem to shift and wave through time in an unconventional way, in a way that suggests a set of conventions different from those that govern a more natural setting.
The tools, people and philosophical reasoning we employ to remedy our insufficiency as human-beings make up the term “prosthesis” as it pertains to this collection. Prosthesis is a thematic thread that at once compliments and complicates my original assertion that humans ought to be defined by their disabilities. As a species, we actively seek a crutch to remedy incompetence, to counter deficiency so that we, in turn, can fill up the vacancies that surround us and permeate us. This acknowledgment to remedy our shortcomings threatens to change the discussion entirely since, before, I defined humans through disability, but through prosthesis, humans are defined by competence based on dependency. But it is the element of dependency, intrinsic with prosthesis, that keeps the discussion focused on disability and deficiency. A person who is individually unable to accomplish a task, who is later made competent to do so through support of machinery, family or philosophic application, is ultimately indebted to the subscribed support received. My collected stories seek to explore the consequences of those subscriptions, and the fallout of prosthetic dependency. My introductory story showcases an assertion that sometimes the implementation of prosthesis can develop a new strength in weakened areas, that dependency can build toward independency and the competence to address deficiency. Other stories in my collection show prosthesis as a self-destructive thing or at the very least an unsustainable answer to the terminal disability of the human condition. Often our prosthetic dependency leads to more dependency since, as human-beings, we almost unfailingly remedy deficiency with an inappropriate substitute, equivalent to using a spoon for an asthma inhaler, or in the case of one of my stories: a donut for a satisfying identity of self-worth.
The prosthetic elements of my stories more often than not occupy the role of fabulation, since, above all, they are not meant to solve the problems of the central conflict, but to comment on them and complicate them. In my story “Portable Hole,” a literal hole--with uncanny qualities--serves as prosthetic remedy to a more figurative emptiness experienced by each of the characters in the story: for one it is the emptiness of romantic (and Romantic) nonfulfillment, for another it is the emptiness that follows not knowing the truth of his familial circumstance, and for another the emptiness is the lure of new, undiscovered territory. In the case of this story, the complexities of each character are condensed into the visual representation of the Portable Hole, and their interactions with the Hole reflect the grieved mind-set of each. Essentially, the Hole is speaking for them in a way they are incapable of speaking for themselves, and ultimately they venture through hoping to recover what they seem to be missing on this side of it. In each case of prosthesis as it appears in my stories, its role is to condense the circumstance and complicate the environment through its physical presence, visual description or the metaphoric language surrounding it, and, in this way, open up a discussion or new interpretation of something familiar as it has been invaded by something alien.
Magical realism provides the writer with a certain tool belt exclusive from other genres or modes of writing: the ability to penetrate the real world where we all live with elements both fantastic and mystical and to draw a mimetic representation that can ultimately clarify reality, choose to cloud it, or express a certainty derived from uncertain origins by displaying the impossible and then denying the reader an escape to a substitute world. The genre dares to insert the incredible, at times challenging the reader to prove it wrong, at times inviting a revelation in its acceptance, and still other times frustrating the reader by insisting confusion and ambiguity as material or mimetically material elements of an otherwise clear-packaged existence. Magical realism in literary fiction points to a specific method of interpretation, a kind of dogma that, without promising any certain conclusion, opens up reality into a more inclusive space, and at the same time restricts all mysticism and miracle to an already familiar, material law.
But all of that lives and dies on the page. When the reader looks up from the written work he is immediately met with straight lines and complicating truths of this reality, and it is difficult to propose that what the reader sees outside the page, and what is seen within it, might in fact exist in the same space. Perhaps this is another reason why magical realism is often boxed in with fantasy and seen more as escapist than exploratory, given that reality follows a trend of growing harsher and harsher with age. There's no way around that trend, but still, for those who claim that magical realism is simply an extension of fantasy, then irony as well as academic controversy heaps around the genre. Fantasy is set to the task of creating a new world, and magical realism is devoted to mining into this one. Were the reader of magical realism attempting to escape, his efforts would land him back in his own world.
Regardless of where the genre originated, magical realism has adopted a new value, like a coin from a former empire whose monetary worth is measured now in the currency of the time even through its appropriate system of commerce has vanished or bankrupted. In a Post-Modern era, perhaps the only thing left that counts is interpretation, and interpretation is quite literally the act of transforming source material from its original confines to bring it under a new regime of contemporary stipulations. Magical realism, if only an interpreted permutation of its original form, exists today in many literary writers who, some admittedly more often than others, employ the genre's tenets in their novels and collections--writers like Anthony Doerr, Story Prize winning author of Memory Wall and the man who dared to remember the happy ending; Dave Eggers, Pulitzer Prize winning author of How We Are Hungry and editor of McSweeney's, a periodical that challenges the physical standard of magazines and which frequently includes works like “Fox 8” by George Saunders, O Henry Award winning author who reminded us that animals govern with politics and write their memoirs on typewriters. And of course, magical realism persists through the author of Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser, Pulitzer Prize winner and master of the impossible.
These, and many other contemporary authors, keep the tradition of magical realism alive and draw their readers into a space where the impossible becomes possible and not for the sake of sensationalism, but as a rite of inquisition. Magical realists recognize the framework of reality: that matrix of facts and ideas including each reader's thoughts, and the way those thoughts manifest through symbols. More often than not, their writing shakes that framework, and we're left to ask what might come from the shaking? These authors assert with their works that the quotidian is a product of the astonishingly inexplicable, that there exist windows looking into Roh's “flux” which reveal the “variable commotion [that] crystallizes a clear set of constants” (Roh 22). These windows require a reordering of attributes and symbolic ascriptions to understand,and rarely do these authors provide us with the cipher. But it's not the job of magical realism to provide all the answers, just to do the shaking and admire what emerges from beneath the solid form.
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