Writers: Magical Realism

 Like I suppose many people, magical realism came to me from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Joel C recommended the novel while we were both at Fort Dix FCI. Since then, I have found magical realism elsewhere. It serves as an answer to a question that came to me when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to write and how to write my stories - namely, the limitation of the realist novel. Even more specifically, where does imagination and dreams and the culture into which we are immersed belong in a realistic novel? Magical realism showed me how it could fit all of those parts of us beyond the reach of the "facts only", journalistic trappings of the realistic novel. When I came to re-read Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County, I found he, too, had a few elements of magical realism. Everything had come back to Indiana, to me being fifteen years old.

From YouTube:

Why Magical Realism is a Global Phenomenon (It's Lit): provides a simple, but not simple-minded exposition of the tenets of magical realism.

The World According to Haruki Murakami: If you can resist the temptation to sleep, the presenter is so mellow, you get a tie into magical realism.

This video brings us back to Colombia, discusses the confluence of history and film, as influencing literary magical realism; it seems to me to approve of letting the weirdness all hang out, and that seems like a good idea to me:

Pardon this slight intrusion:

What is MAGICAL REALISM? Gives us a wide-ranging reading list, corresponding to my own thoughts that magical realism is not exclusive to South America (for all it is a fecund source).

I keep coming back to it as an answer to a question I came up with while in prison: how do I get into a novel the ideas that feed my imagination? Excluding imagination reduces the realistic novel to journalism. If I can look at a plot of land and see Native Americans and pioneers and escaped slaves and modern Americans intersecting, even conversing with one another, as the reality of the place, how else can I put it into a story without magical realism? I want to think of imagination as magic,

Another reading list showing the expansiveness of magical realism (and that imagination as magic is not limited to South America).

Among the many problems of prison is being sequestered from ideas and information. No Google, no Wikipedia. I would also add now no YouTube. One can have ideas and not have any idea if they are shared, if they have any validation outside one's head. These posts about writers and writing are me catching up with ideas I had in prison about writing and about the writers I did read. Salman Rushdie was one writer I finally caught up with in prison. He was also one of the first who pointed out to me that magical realism was not limited to South America. YouTube kicked this video out to me (the mysterious algorithm strikes again!), which answered a question or tow for me. It also validates my own interest in magical realism - that the truth may escape the realistic novel.

Another intrusion, but just trying to make a point here about imagination and the magic of reality:

If magical realism extends across continents and has a history before Marquez, then it is because humanity shares an imagination encompassing a sense of wonder exceeding the literal. We imagine freedom, and freedom lives on in our imaginations. Impoverish our imagination, we lose our freedom. Which is why I close out with the following from Cleveland Review of Books - Gregory Jones-Katz's Imagination is a Battlefield: Elon Musk, Techno-Fascism, and Dungeons and Dragons.

Musk’s contempt for marginal members of American society is typical of techno-fascists. Now the most prominent billionaire contributor to an international far right movement spanning the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Musk has, in so many tweets, called for a “defense of liberal values” against critical race theory, the “woke campus,” and cancel culture. In March 2022, Putin compared the West’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the left’s cancellation of J.K. Rowling. Ultimately, Musk’s fantasy to buy Hasbro is part of the global far right’s attempt to seize, remake, and control our imaginations. They act with the understanding that the kind of imagination nurtured by D&D has the potential to undermine foundational hierarchies and binaries. 

What does freedom and imagination do other than undermine the clichés and restrictions of literal reality? Consider what the naked sphinx is doing in the Post Office at the start of Raintree County?

But as troubling as D&D’s past remains, the most fantastic power of D&D is precisely the one that, I believe, threatens Musk and the techno-fascist imaginary: D&D is a co-conjured stage upon which players co-imagine boundless possibilities. With an open game licensing concept implemented in 2000, which allowed independent developers to modify D&D as they saw fit, playable races and character classes have long proliferated: over 200 races and 54 base classes, in contrast to the four races and three character classes of first edition D&D. “Dark MAGA” Musk’s attachment to a foundational iteration of D&D is at one with MAGA fixations on past glories of America, such as the auto, steel, and oil industries, which, not coincidentally, were, like D&D, made in the Midwest; but D&D’s player base has, for many decades, extended far, far beyond that space to galaxies far, far away. More than all that, though, D&D “workers” not only create an imaginary world but guide its development and growth. D&D “rulebooks” are in fact guidebooks, and Gygax himself was fond of reminding players to ignore whatever rules they disliked. “Workers”  could therefore change the system if they so wished. While geekdom has been appropriated by mainstream America, D&D and the imaginative play it nurtures can function like a pluralist democracy in miniature. Musk’s attempt to de-wokify the game is rooted in a dream of restricting the game’s diversified play and democratic imagination.

Fantasy and imagination that emboldens and embroiders the literal real enriches our lives.

...My students also tell me that they have completely abandoned the use of moral alignments, a categorization of the perspectives of characters. Their characters’ elaborately imagined backgrounds instead serve as the guidelines for the decisions they make, offering a freedom that I never considered when playing as a teenager. Still, my students also understand that imagination provides the possibility that myth, narrative, and metaphor might rescue humanity from the nightmare of destruction regularly justified by rationalistic claims; they unanimously expressed outrage to me about Musk’s Hasbro tweet. 

And what more can any of us say that better encapsulates the purpose and effect of imagination? 

We need to write; we need to imagine; we cannot let humanity be degraded any further.

We need to let it all hang out. 

sch7/2