Writing: Realism is a Trick Mirror

 When I decided to take up again serious writing, there was this question about realism. The reality of my existence included more than the piling on of facts as did Theodore Dreiser, or the merely psychological as in Virginia Woolf. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism made as much sense as Ernest Hemingway's stripped down factuality.  I wrote about this also in Does Realism Include Reality?.

“Books Want Things for Themselves”: A Conversation with Alice Elliott Dark Mark Labowskie interviews Alice Elliott Dark shows to me another who finds realism might not be enough for reality,

To call a form of fiction “realism” makes it sound as though the authors are trying to mimic reality, when they are really fashioning a trick mirror. Those novels are, as you say, purposeful exercises in artifice toward an end of making an argument about what people are like or how the world works, an argument that is convincing because it is constructed to portray a recognizable facsimile of events and persons we know. Careful orchestration can end up feeling lifelike, as we all similarly organize our own memories and life stories. Plots and subplots, repeating images and themes, characters who aren’t wildly inconsistent, significant settings — all these elements can create a convincing and memorable world that feels real but is far from it.

How about the limit being our imagination? I had not realized this 40 years ago. 

sch 8/25/22