A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order.. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 6/15/2025]
Why I did not read Gabriel Garcia Marquez before prison is a question I ask of myself quite often. Truthfully, the question also applies to Cormac McCarthy. I knew of both, but chose not to read them. I can say novel reading never me as much as history or biography. My disinterest only increased after giving up any plans for writing. See, Marquez makes me want to write.
For years we couldn't talk about anything else. Our daily conduct, dominated then by so many linear habits, had suddenly begun to spin around a single common anxiety. The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance event sthat had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren't doing it from an urge to clean up mysteries but because none us could go on living without a exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez inverts the chronology of a murder in "A Death Foretold" like Tarantino in did in Pulp Fiction. Except Marquez does this in a more complex manner, told in an off-hand way, so that the technique beguiles rather than startles.
In the opening novella, "Leaf Story," Marquez tells the story of an unknown stranger's life during the time waiting on the burial order for the man's body. Three interwoven points of view - grandson, daughter, and grandfather. While also telling most obliquely the effects of bananas on the town's economy. I admit I like the oblique effect. It is precisely this obliqueness, telling more than one story at a time, I want for my "Only the Dead and the Dying" stories.
What makes Marquez inspiring to me is how he makes me interested in people and life.
Love in the Time of Cholera still lies ahead of me. I think that exhausts the prison's collection of Marquez's books. Meanwhile, I put Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day on the list as a substitute for Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Back to writing "Mike Devlin's Homecoming" tomorrow.
I credit Gabriel Garcia Marquez with giving me the idea that kept me going when I got to prison: lucidity. There had to be something besides mere sobriety, and Marquez gave me the word I had been needing. This came to me while reading Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I knew of Márquez without ever reading him. When I did read him, I saw a different way of approaching fiction. The Atlantic's How One Hundred Years of Solitude Became a Classic captures someof my own reaction:
Between 1967 and 1969, reviewers argued that One Hundred Years of Solitude overcame the limitations of these styles. Contrary to the localism of indigenismo, reviewers saw One Hundred Years of Solitude
as a cosmopolitan story, one that “could correct the path of the modern
novel,” according to the Latin American literary critic Ángel Rama.
Unlike the succinct language of social realism, the prose of García
Márquez was an “atmospheric purifier,” full of poetic and flamboyant
language, as the Spanish writer Luis Izquierdo argued. And contrary to
the formal experiments of the nouveau roman, his novel returned
to “the narrative of imagination,” as the Catalan poet Pere Gimferrer
explained. Upon the book’s translation to major languages, international
reviewers acknowledged this, too. The Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg
forcefully called One Hundred Years of Solitude “an alive novel,” assuaging contemporary fears that the form was in crisis.
And yet these and other reviewers also remarked that One Hundred Years of Solitude
was not a revolutionary work, but an anachronistic and traditionalist
one, whose opening sentence resembled the “Once upon a time” formula of
folk tales. And rather than a serious novel, it was a “comic
masterpiece,” as an anonymous Times Literary Supplement
reviewer wrote in 1967. Early views on this novel were indeed different
from the ones that followed. In 1989, Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom
solemnly called it “the new Don Quixote” and the writer Francine Prose confessed in 2013 that “One Hundred Years of Solitude convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school.”
Nowadays scholars, critics, and general readers mainly praise the novel
as “the best expression of magical realism.” By 1995, magical realism
was seen as making its way into the works of major English-language
authors such John Updike and Salman Rushdie and moreover presented as
“an inextricable, ineluctable element of human existence,” according to the New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani.But in 1967, the term magical realism was uncommon, even in scholarly circles. During One Hundred Years of Solitude’s
first decade or so, to make sense of this “unclassifiable work,” as a
reviewer put it, readers opted for labeling it as a mixture of “fantasy
and reality,” “a realist novel full of imagination,” “a curious case of
mythical realism,” “suprarrealism,”or, as a critic for Le Monde called it, “the marvelous symbolic.”
Uh, huh. It is all of that. Thank you, JC for telling me to read Marquez.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: His greatest inspiration was his grandmother. One
of his relatives was combing his hair, and his grandmother warned him
not to comb his hair at night because it would cause a ship to be lost
at sea.
RAFAEL ULLOA: I think that his greatness lies in his imagination. An
imagination with which he reveals things to the world that appear to
be improbable, but people like them. It’s the way he puts them. A
metallic grasshopper, for example, that leaps from town to town along
the banks of the Magdalena River. Connecting technology with
grasshoppers. Gabo has some marvelous ways about him. Not long ago I
was talking with some friends and we were reminiscing about the paid
mourners. These are women brought to wail and weep for the dead. Gabo
remembered one called Pachita Pérez, who was the champion of all the
mourners. He says that she was so powerful a mourner that she could sum
up the corpse’s life in one shriek.
Until the other day, I never heard of Yan Lianke. Turns out he has been a favored candidate for the Nobel. I live in Muncie, Indiana, and that could work as an excuse. Better is that I have been too busy, too lazy, too pre-occupied to keep track of these things.
So, in the midst of packing and moving and starting during lunch, I googled the writer. The attention given him seems deserved.
Yan’s
body of work includes 17 novels and more than 50 books of stories,
novellas and essays. Almost all his works are banned, officially or
unofficially, in China. A resident of Beijing, he is both celebrated and
renounced at home, even as his books – some of which are published in
Taiwan – are quietly removed from Chinese bookstores. His novels
continually change form, as if attempting to both escape and unmask the
ever-perforating realities that are contemporary China.
The plot of Hard Like Water
is straightforward: in 1968, Gao Aijun, a 26-year-old People’s
Liberation Army soldier, returns to his remote Henan home. Study
sessions in the army have purified his heart so that it is like “sheets
of paper on which one could draw something beautiful”. Arriving in
Chenggang Village, Aijun meets Hongmei, a married woman with dreams of
leading the ongoing Cultural Revolution. Aijun and Hongmei embark on a
sexual adventure fit for their epic love, an affair they believe will
propel them to orgasmic heights as well as to high-ranking positions in
the Communist party. The Cultural Revolution, entering a stage of
intra-party warfare, offers them a stage and opportunities: Aijun will
“revolutionise my way into the position of town mayor or district
commissioner”, and neither will be treated “as if we were merely made of
mud, straw, or paper”.
***
Yan’s knowledge and appropriation of revolutionary language – Mao Zedong’s poems, slogans and most famous directives, plus a heady array of literary texts, songs and propaganda from the Chinese and Soviet revolutions – is formidable. Large sections of Aijun and Hongmei’s speech are borrowed words. But Hard Like Water is neither mockery nor satire; it is a sharp, desperately moving analysis of the logic of ideology. Its mashup of literary and political texts poses the uncomfortable and timely question: how did each of us arrive at our certainties? Language is wielded by Aijun sometimes as a liberatory force, sometimes as a weapon. Driven by vengeance, thirst for status and the understandable desire to “rise high in the sky”, to feel more than ordinary life permits, he and Hongmei nurture the belief that justice is enshrined in their very bodies. As they begin to control the life and death of everyone in their village, their bodies attain, through sexual ecstasy, what feels to them like the limitless yet insatiable power of the immortals. The engine of revolution is fed by bodies like theirs; for the pleasure of the engine, therefore, they are permitted everything.
In Hard Like Water, the individuals who place the basic needs of the rural poor over party dogmatism suffer the most cruel and horrifying deaths. The mass tragedy at the heart of this novel is not satirised or exaggerated; it is all too real. Early in his adventures, Aijun tries to counsel his impoverished mother: “Mother, you don’t understand revolution. Once you get on this ship, you can’t get off, because if you do, that would make you a counterrevolutionary.”
Exploring the emptiness of soldiers in the Chinese Revolution and the cost of China’s supposed progress has earned Yan Lianke, 66, the nickname “the fearless Chinese writer.” His books include Dream of Ding Village — which delves into humanity’s insatiable greed, Hard Like Water — a satire on the revolution, and Lenin’s Kisses — about the downfall of a village in the face of promises of a glorious future. He has won international awards such as the Franz Kafka Prize, been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker International Prize and is repeatedly mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Question. In the epilogue of Dream of Ding Village, you apologize to the readers for causing them pain.
Answer. In China, people were experiencing the happiness of development. Many people were unaware that others were suffering from the AIDS epidemic, which is what the book portrays. Chinese literature has long focused on the positive aspects, it has been like a hymn to the beauty of society.
Q. Why is it important to feel pain?
A. There was very little literature that paid attention to the problems we were facing. Those realities were hidden. That’s why Chinese readers found Dream of Ding Village so incredible. I wrote an epilogue apologizing for interrupting their happiness.
Q. Would you describe the literature of Chinese Nobel laureates like Gao Xingjian or Mo Yan as escapist?
***
Q. “Everyone in China was afraid: the poor were
afraid of uncertainty, and the rich were afraid of losing comfort
because they knew their money didn’t come from hard work.”
A.Those who have money fear
losing it. And those who don’t are worried about their children’s
future. There’s also a fear shared by rich and poor alike: the fear of
pesticides, the fear of the air we breathe.
Franz Kafka. Leo Tolstoy. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yan Lianke?
Mandarin readers may love Yan for polemic novels like Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, and The Four Books.
English language readers might gravitate toward the first three
literary giants. What about a book by this popular Chinese novelist
about the future of realist fiction? In Discovering Fiction, Yan Lianke exegetes 19th and 20th century European and Latin American literature in order to define mythorealism — the genre he sees as the next step in China’s literary journey.
***
So, what is mythorealism? I’ll give you Yan’s
definition since I’m still a little fuzzy: “…[M]ythorealism is a
creative process that rejects the superficial logical relations that
exist in real life to explore a kind of invisible and “nonexistent”
truth…” (99). What makes this definition murky is the fact that Yan’s
just spent a great deal of time analyzing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which debuted the genre of magical realism. It’s not the same as mythorealism.
Every nation has its dark chapters and scars. But Chinese novelist
Yan Lianke noted that Korea's writers are able to face those shadows
openly.
"In China, there are certain wounds left unspoken,
something a writer cannot face,” Yan said on Thursday during a press
conference in Seoul ahead of the Seoul International Writers’ Festival,
which kicks off Friday at Ground Seoul.
“So Chinese literature is
under certain constraints. To write in China demands tremendous effort
and sacrifice," the Beijing-based novelist added.
The acclaimed
Chinese novelist, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and twice shortlisted
for the International Booker Prize, is known for novels sharply critical
of Chinese society — many of them banned at home.
***
“I would put ‘the truth of humanity, the truth of literature.’ A
writer’s experience, like human experience, is limited. But the truths
expressed in literature are infinite. Literature must capture the
infinite through the finite,” said Yan.
Yan Lianke wrote
My 1994 collection Summer Sunset was also banned in China,
but while this work is significant within the context of the genre of
China’s military literature and its contemporary tradition of realist
fiction, it is less significant if considered within the context of my
overall oeuvre. The broader the context, the harder it is to specify a
work’s significance. Of all my banned books, I hope that people would
read Dream of Ding Village and Lenin’s Kisses,
not those earlier works. Similarly, when people discuss me, I prefer
that they refer to me simply as an author, not as China’s most
controversial or most censored author.
My entire life, I have simply sought to produce good works and to be a
good writer, and certainly have not aspired to become China’s most
controversial and most censored author.
***
Time, age, reality, and the environment have left me feeling empty,
vain, and ponderous. I no longer assume that China’s contemporary
reality can be significantly improved, and I certainly don’t assume that
literature will be able to change that reality. Even if I can’t change
reality, at the very least I hope that reality will not change me.
Regardless of how hard I try, I’ll never be able to change reality,
although at the same time I recognize that reality is constantly
transforming me, my literature, and my literary perspective.
Virtually all my friends and colleagues praise my works from the period in the late 1990s when I wrote Streams of Time, Marrow, and The Years, Months, Days,
and they ask why I didn’t continue writing in that manner. To this I
laugh and reply, “As the saying goes, after you pass that village, you
won’t see that shop again.” Why is this so? It is because China’s
current era is no longer the one in which I wrote those works, nor is
China’s current reality the same as it was then. My reality and state of
mind have changed, and one’s writing must necessarily be grounded in
one’s current reality and state of mind. The issue is that reality has
changed me and my literature, not that my literature has created,
shaped, transformed, or maintained that reality.
***
Second, controversy and censorship are not good things, but they are
also not necessarily bad. If an author is controversial, this
demonstrates that at least he possesses integrity and magnanimity. To
the extent that some authors have integrity, we should preserve their
works. On the other hand, given that authors don’t have the ability to
alter society or reality, their works are ultimately less influential
than a single remark in an official document or a gesture by someone in
power. Given that an author’s writings cannot change reality, we must
simply ask that reality not change the author. We must try to help
ensure that the qualities of integrity and truth in the author’s works
might endure.
Third, as for an author’s ability to endure, one hopes this will not
result in the author’s becoming increasingly distanced from society, the
environment, and most readers. Sometimes persistence is not merely
persistence, but it is also an opposition to a consolidated position. I
have gradually come to understand that because you persist and don’t
want to change, you must continuously be the object of controversy. If
you persist but find that the controversy around you has stopped, that
will be because it was not you but rather society itself that has
changed. But that is such a distant eventuality! It is as difficult to
imagine as a scenario where an egg and a rock collide and the egg
remains intact while the rock shatters.
Think about it. I think he is onto something important.
I jumped into magical realism after reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. A novel I think everyone should read.
Of Long River Review's 4 Must Reads in Magical Realism, I have read only Marquez's novel, but I did see the film version of Like Water for Chocolate. The writer defines magical realism as
...Magical Realism uses its fantastical elements to ground you further in
reality, defying “the real world” while representing it perfectly. It
brings poetry to the novel. It paints a surrealist mural with only
words...
I am not sure how far we can take the realist novel as a journalistic venture after reading Marquez. Without adding in the imaginative, I think we miss a key component of reality.
All three defy easy plot summaries - I did not even think of trying in my notes but then I was more interested in the means of story-telling than telling about the story-telling - but the website does an excellent job of providing short summaries. I like what he says about all three, do not disagree with a word since I feel the same way. This is one paragraph of the summary of One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Not only is this book García Márquez’ masterpiece, there is a very good case for declaring it the masterpiece of twentieth century literature. It is a book that everyone should read – it is available in numerous languages – both as a literary wonder but also to show, for those that do not know, that the boundary between reality and fantasy is thin at best. It is impossible to summarize the plot of this novel. Firstly, there is no plot and, secondly, like many great novels, what makes this novel is not the plot. It starts with the hero, if he can be called that, Aureliano Buendía, before the firing squad, though a lot happens before we get back to the firing squad.
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'sImagination 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.
I await the big snow storm. Everybody at work but me discussed the approaching storm and whether they would be at work. My bus driver says the buses will be running tomorrow. One of the honchos at work said she would understand if we did not come till Monday. (Til Tuesday is a wholly different matter.) If the buses run, if I can make it to the bus stop, I will go to work. I need the money.
I left early today. Really early. See, I had a phone interview for a new job at 3:30. I thought this I could do here rather in my current employer's parking lot. Especially since it started raining since this morning. Whatever is lacking in the stores for puzzles and silverware is not my fault. I put them on a pallet. Whatever happened after that is not in my job description.
Part of why I could leave early was that we had run out of boxes to put on pallets. Maybe this is a sign of troubles in the global supply chain?
I started these notes back in 2010. I have not seen those notes in the papers my sister brought me. KH saw them, did not like. He said they read like a person detoxing. They were that. They were coming from my madness of self-destruction into my finding some way of coping with that self-destruction. They were meant as an apology to family and friends and whoever else might read them.
I meant to kill myself. I had been angry at myself, I hated all of existence so much, I wanted out, and I also wanted no one to mourn me, no one to eulogize me in anyway that would, could, portray me in any way but the bad example I felt myself to be.
Then news came to me of someone threatening suicide. I thought if I proceeded with my plans - to put myself to death because I had put myself in a position where I had no choice - this would fuel his suicidal thoughts. About then I realized what I done to myself. It was a WTF moment.
I may have had a complete breakdown during my pretrial detention. For the longest time I did not get off my bunk except to eat. My neighbor got to play Scrabble. I know that I could not add up Scrabble scores before I left for prison.
I took a 151 sentence because I expected the lungs not to last that long. Just because a person is not suicidal does not mean he has any interest in staying alive. Coming back to Indiana was the worst case scenario.
Part of me, maybe the part I was most angry with myself, reared itself after reading United States v. Dorvee. That I was getting more time for pictures when a child molester would get less time angered me in its Congressional mandated madness. My feelings seem to have been shared by this article comparing the substance of my crime with crack cocaine. (My government mandated monitoring software let me view this law journal article.) I got away from the law only to be dragged back.
Apology turned into journal which in time became therapy.
Before going to prison KH suggested I go back to writing fiction. As I had tried very to drive away my friends and he was one who would not go away, I thought in the circumstances I should do as he requested. CC told me she could not write about Muncie, that gave me a subject.
In prison Gabriel Garcia Marquez pushed me towards lucidity. I took lucidity as being beyond merely sober. All the writing - journal and fiction - kept me towards several goals.
The first goal was to do something useful with my time. I was in different writing groups during my prison stay. I hoped to encourage others to commit creative acts rather than criminal ones.
The second goal came after being mauled by Marquez and recalling Albert Camus's The Rebel took the position fighting nihilism by creative acts. I had doubly embarrassed myself - by my crimes and then by not committing suicide - I needed to find a purpose if I were to stay alive. Depression led me into nihilism and nihilism fueled my depression. I had let the ugliness that I saw in the world overwhelm. I had been weak, a chickenshit, by not taking a stand against the ugliness and mendacity that I saw in realtime and online. Writing had let me do what I can to say, No we do not need to turn ourselves into garbage just because the world seems to want us to do so.
Lastly, I had placed myself under my obligations to KH to keep writing. I had trashed too many obligations in the year or so before my arrest. My staying alive had not paid off those obligations. The more lucid I became, I may have found more obligations. Atonement got lodged in my brain.
I am on supervised release. There is sn order telling me what I cannot do. I have a probation officer who seems to think I am s mix of Professor Moriarty and Hannibal Lecter. When we first met and I told him I was writing, he asked if I were writing erotica. I was shocked but then I realized I had set myself up for this kind of reaction. When he came to see me and I showed him the one novel's manuscript I had eith me, there was something like terror in his eyes. Whether that came from my suggesting he read some of it, or he had never supervised a writer, or from a suspicion of criminality lurking in my handwritten pages, or some combination of the above, I do not know. Would that I had not been clumsy and broke my laptop. I would have a lot of work done by now. He has told me approving the laptop is not a high priority of his. I assume this is his way of exerting control. It probably also his way of making sure I do not turn into a maniac and begin committing more crimes on the internet.
E worried that my coming back to Muncie, I would fall back in with the crackheads. I never understood this. I have lost all interest that. I made a choice after making a public ass of myself to stay alive, to do something useful with what time I have left to me in this world.
My supervised release order forbids things I have no interest in doing. But the order says nothing about me doing anything positive for the world. My own plan is to do something worthwhile with my time; that something being my writing.
Depression was a problem. I hope anyone reading these notes (which will need wait for the laptop) will have the sense to get treatment. My recent experience with Zoloft reinforces the idea that if I had had the sense, the energy, the support, to get treatment then I would have avoided prison. There will be more articles about this under the Depression label.
I hope that any readers wanting to indulge in criminal activity will see there is nothing to be gained from a prison sentence.You can find more articles under the Prison life label and the Halfway House label.
I am sorry if I have duplicated what can be found under the Supervised Release. I have been preoccupied lately with the difference between the government's ideal of keeping confined in the shall nots of its supervised release order and my ideas of atonement and obligation.
It could be I am as delusional as any lunatic. Could be I am a lying sack of bull manure. If do here is my public statement to use against me.
Well, I have been at this for hours. And you have been more than patient with the length here. Bear with me a few moments.
As I said, I left work early. Since I had time, I went my doctor's for my covid booster. After that it was back to my room by way of McClure's. Arrival at the room was 2 hours after I left work. I called KH. My phone rang a few minutes after that. It was a call from food stamps. Then I got the ball rolling on the colonoscopy. I then called about my lung scan. Finished off with a call to the mental health counselor. What I did not get was a job interview. Some problem with the number. I did get an email from the interviewer so all might not be lost. I fixed dinner and started writing this.
[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 10/14/2025]
With having read so little Joyce Carol Oates, I think you might question the effect she has on me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Hardy have also hit me as hard. She makes me wish I'd kept writing fiction — as does all the other three. At the same time, Oates makes me wonder if I can ever write as well as she does — like Marquez. Her tales of western New York surprise and encourage me. Surprising me by setting them not in the more glamorous cities, like Jonathan Franzen. But small towns like Hardy and William Faulkner. Encouraging me with my own stories of no — where Indiana. She chills how she handles the most horrible of events (here: the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl) without flinching or overplaying the event in melodrama. Is this not Art? Is not this steadiness to be found in Oedipus Rex and Anna Karenina? Surprisingly, the prison's leisure library has more of her books (three, I seem to recall). I put them on the next reading list.
While reading We Were The Mulvaneys (Plume, 1997), I thought of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. There the gets raped, mutilated, and murdered; father executes his revenge. Therein lies the tragedy. In Oates' novel, the father cannot execute his revenge; society protects the rapist. The father and sons dwindle through impotence. The daughter, sent away, becomes figuratively mutilated and somewhat dead. The family splinters. Only when the father dies — away from the family but after reconciling with his daughter — does the family begin to heal. I see now what We Were The Mulvaneys shares with Franzen's The Corrections is the changing role and ineffectiveness of the American patriarch and the family. Oates has in her novel characters in some state of healing. Not a “Hollywood ending” but a hopeful one.
Tough, serious-minded, and the hardest novel I've read for a while. Oates made me think too much of my own life, my own family. I am actually looking forward to War and Peace.
Why is there not the same touting of Joyce Carol Oates for the Nobel as there is for Philip Roth?
I want to leave with a sample of Oates' writing. The problem is one of selection — length, its durability as a quotation, are troublesome here. She packs tightly.
So in the end Mike did walk his ravaged old rubbery-legged dad up the filth-encrusted stairs to the furnished room above the Golden Pavilion Chinese Pavilion and Takeout. The pigsty room you wouldn't want to examine too closely. Poor Mike biting his lower lip, nostrils pinching. He pulled off his dad's laceless shoes, a few items of dirt-stiffened clothing, laid him onto the stained rumpled sheets where at once he began to snore, snort, wheeze, his head lolling like the head of a broken-necked goose. Waking a long time later to discover only six twenty-dollar bills stuffed in his pants pocket — a hundred twenty when he'd had a wild hope of five hundred at least. So the ravaged old man had humbled himself in the eyes of his eldest son and in his own eyes for so little, after all.
sch
[Checking out the internet for the information denied me in prison, I found the following items.
I could write more about what happens, but I can’t be bothered to, which sounds dreadful, but that’s how the book made me feel by the end. There was so much detail, so many interwoven stories…and it was all rather unbelievable. While there are precursors to what happens in the pasts of Corinne and Michael, from the way they are described at the beginning, their actions are just not convincing for their characters. I didn’t believe that the people they were described as being would possibly act in that way. Judd is a rather weak narrator; Oates doesn’t seem quite sure what she’s doing with him, and digs into the minds and hearts of other characters in a way Judd could not possibly have done. How could he know in minute and graphic detail, what his brother was feeling or thinking at a particular time, for example?
On top of that, it’s a heavy book, with allegorical and Biblical overtones; the setting in Mt Ephraim is, I’m sure, deliberate, and the failures of fathers and betrayals of sons and so on and so forth, as well as the frequent mentions of religion and forgiveness and atonement etc, all gave it a weight that the flimsy story could not carry. It started out very promisingly, but it ran away with itself and became far too complicated and convoluted. The essential themes of the rupturing of the myth of the all American family; the questioning of the appearance of perfection; the ease at which families can be torn apart, by any number of seemingly trivial reasons that trigger a fault line already there, under the surface, are all excellent, and intriguing, and promised a great deal. Ultimately, however, I felt Oates tried to be too clever; to introduce too many strands; to say too much. The trite, twee ending was the final nail in the coffin. To give her due credit, her writing is wonderful, and I stayed with the book regardless of my doubts because her prose is so good, and drew me in despite the weakness of the tale she was spinning. As such, I haven’t been put off trying her again, as other reviews suggest this is not her best work, and I’m sure another one of her books might strike a better chord with me. Has anyone got any recommendations?
There are 41 comments, I scanned several, and they are interesting.
The old questions: “How good is Joyce Carol Oates?” and, given an oeuvre so vast, “Where can you begin to find out?” These questions have been reinvigorated in recent years. Oates’s reputation had always been precarious, marred by a critical suspicion of her copiousness and of her bestseller-adjacent tastes and interests. It seems to have crested in the 1980s and ’90s—that Toni Morrison usurped Oates’s Nobel Prize was the opinion of even one distinguished black novelist, Charles Johnson—and then to have waned in the 2000s. But in the last decade, and especially in the last few months, thanks to the controversial film of her Marilyn Monroe novel and to a sideline in Twitter shitposting almost as accomplished as that of the former president she so abhors, Oates has seemed to stand at the apex of her vanishing generation. After the deaths of Updike, Roth, Morrison, and Didion, and amid the more sibylline reticence of her remaining peers (Ozick, McCarthy, DeLillo, Pynchon), isn’t she the last lioness of American literature?
***
But this summary of male violence and female victimization makes the novel sound more agenda-driven than it is, when in fact it is less didactic than Roth’s book. In Oates’s fiction as on her notorious Twitter feed, we encounter an exoteric politics at odds with an esoteric aesthetics. She is officially a feminist, but her criticism hints that she finds the classic female domestic novel insipid, is bored by the enlightened domestics Austen and Eliot, and considers herself the heir to fanatic, fascistic Dostoevsky and Lawrence. As in Dostoevsky, her characters seethe and roil, actuated by unconscious manias and half-uttered desires; as in Lawrence, she sets the human drama in its natural frame, amid animal heat, stony cliffs, sucking bogs, killing winds, as if to say that we are a part of nature—of its hideous violence as of its pastoral beauty or poetic sublimity—and shouldn’t fool ourselves otherwise. One of Judd’s earliest visions is of a doe chased by a pack of hounds: rape rising right out of the earth.
***
Why, then, the controversy about whether or not she’s a good writer—even leaving aside the irrelevant question of how much she writes or of the popular-feminine genres she often favors? Bluntly put, the relevant problem is the prose. We find no fine writing, no will-to-style, no singular voice in Oates (neither in this book nor in any other work of hers that I’ve read): nothing like Updike’s lyric pointillism, Roth’s eloquent rage, Morrison’s scriptural orature, DeLillo’s mediatic staccato, McCarthy’s Biblical cadence, Didion’s knowing minimalism. Instead, there are clichés and imprecisions and redundancies, my favorite being an early reference to “animals and fowl,” as if the latter category were not included in the former. There are exclamation points, italics, interjections, sentence fragments, strangely-deployed quotation marks—all adding up to an urgent anti-style. I am ungenerously reminded of the apocryphal line about the similarly astylistic Dreiser: he had no talent, only genius. It is in retrospect bizarre—truly an instance of racial ideology—that anyone suspected the Swedish Academy of choosing Morrison over Oates for the 1993 Nobel Prize on the grounds of “political correctness” when I imagine that even a Swedish translation must convey which of the two writers is the exceptional stylist, the poet of prose.
Oates accomplishes her fiction’s very real emotional effect with sheer accretion and insistence; the novel is like the wind that batters High Point Farm, a constant unglamorous roar insinuating itself through the walls of your mind. Her major characters—in this novel, the fluttery and formidable Corinne, “Protestant to her fingertips,” is a particularly glorious creation—seem hacked with a claw hammer out of stone. This, too, is an inheritance of Dostoevsky and Lawrence, as well as of Charlotte Brontë, one of the few writers named in this impressively un-literary novel. I think it is a legitimate way to write fiction, if superficially less commanding than the line-by-line vigor of a Morrison. For these anti-poetic writers, the novelist uses language to surpass language, to strike through to the core of reality—psychological, natural, and spiritual reality—over which language decorously draws its ornamented veil.
I would not draw a comparison to Dreiser. There is a point here that I did not see ten years ago: the effects created by sheer accretion. But Oates works more nimbly than Dreiser — in my opinion, and you determine the worth of that. I like Dreiser — even though I fear his style adhering to my own. He lacks the cutthroat eye of Oates. Well, maybe not in An American Tragedy. This feels like quibbling, so I will go on.
Review: We Were the Mulvaneys (The Literary Omnivore, 2009) makes a point I had not seen elsewhere, one that I do not recall, but may need to be added here. I do recall one character's arc, the son, did seem dull.
Oates’ aggressively leisurely pace can drag at times, but it’s also useful for playing up suspense, mostly in the parts of the novel dealing with Marianne. It can be hard to care about Judd, our narrator, when the stories of the rest of his family are much more interesting–the lion’s share of his involvement in the main story is intertwined with Patrick’s story. Oates, like the best of mothers, devotes equal time to all the Mulvaneys. I will readily admit to flipping ahead to check where Marianne or Patrick were at any given point.
So I woke before the alarm, which is a good thing ince I forgot to set the thing.
Firefox crashed and I am doing this in Chrome.
I started the day with The Ramones:
Then I went to work on what I forgot last night and my email.
What I forgot from last night:
S.G. Goodman – one of the singers I brought back from Philadelphia with me. Out of Kentucky, and not sure how to pigeonhole her – country, folk, rock? Doesn't matter, just give her a listen.
Margaret Atwood Gets Personal - The Millions - I like Atwood, I read everything there was to read of her in the prison library. Now she has a new collection of short stories. This intrigues me:
Contrasting with the tidy, realist narrative of Nell and Tig’s marriage, the stand-alone stories in the mid-section of Old Babes are wildly far-flung, though they riff on related themes. In “The Dead Interview,” Atwood herself interviews George Orwell‘s ghost. The transcript consists of lovely repartee as they touch upon disparate topics such as anti-vaxxers, the January 6th uprising, social “cancellings,” and Orwell’s disappointed father, who lamented that Orwell had “thrown away [his] advantages” by becoming a writer. Later, the world-weary ghost of Hypatia of Alexandria opines in “Death by Clamshells,” “Many in your world have the idea that there has been progress since my day… I don’t know how anyone who has been paying attention can hold such a view.” Ventriloquizing Hypatia, Atwood asks if progress truly improves the human experience, or simply moves the old problems around.
Maybe I should get it for KH.
The Lupine Anxieties of ‘Wolfish’ - another review from The Millions; if I had time for a book on wolves, this would be the one I bought.
Beyond Shame: The Beauty of Lucan Poetry - okay, I thought Lucan meant something else. I skimmed when I saw it was not. Lucan refers to a region of Italy. Interesting when I got past feeling like an idiot (okay, I never quite get past that feeling!)
Firefox crashed, so I am seeing if I can understand what is going on using Chrome.
Black History Month is over, but DeSantis persists in censoring Black history. So do the Republicans (and anyone knowing American history ought to know that is the ultimate in irony). Therefore, let me point you to Boston Magazine's The Black Scholars Ron DeSantis Doesn’t Want Students to Read, and let me ask you to think about these two questions:
Is not Black history, American history?
Why are the MAGA Republicans scared of these writers?
Interesting Literature published The Best Short Stories by Latin American Writers. Of the writers, I have only read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I am not sure if I have read the stories mentioned in the article. I have read much of Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, and think I have learned much of writing from them. Do not be scared of the foreign writers!
From The Scottish Review I found the following:
Stuart Hannabuss's These are hard times indeed; a review of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century' by Helen Thompson (published by Oxford University Press, 2022):
Helen Thompson, in her book Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, suggests that to 'careen between the ideas of a technologically-driven salvation and an inescapable Gőtterdȁmmerung is a hopeless response'. For her, the key challenge is to look hard at the impact and future prospects of the energy revolution. This will be unavoidable geopolitical conflict, and involve Western democracies in real sacrifices (we can see that already with energy price hikes and environmental choices). This, she argues, could precipitate political disorder, and already has done if we think of populist conspiracy theorising, the rise of rightist coalitions, and climate denial and terrorism.
If we add to the agenda that we should worry about and face up to the many ways in which reliable, authoritative and objective information (the basis for all reasonable decisions) is now widely regarded as contestable, and that opinion substitutes for factuality, the topic of books like Sophia Rosenfeld's Democracy and Truth: A Short History (2019), then it seems difficult to imagine constructive consensus for policy-making and national welfare, the very thing democracy most depends on. The very denial of losers at the ballot box in the US and Brazil strikes at its very heart.
In the midst of all these cross-currents for Thompson lies the availability of energy resources, above all oil. All three of the main resources – oil, gas, electricity – are in danger of depletion, for a long time have been fought over, and as such deserve to come to the centre of popular debate. However diluted and simplified for a lay-person, economic and financial issues remain complicated (because they really are complex). Studies like Thompson's own Oil and the Western Economic Crisis (2017), along with similar works by writers like Vaclav Smil and James Barr, are not everyday reading, for all their importance.
Thinking on subjects we Americans are not (Transgender kids threaten the American future? Really?), and the reviewer is not optimistic:
Historians often like to reassure us by saying that we've seen it all before, and of course, unlike Pangloss, we don't really live in the best of all possible worlds. There is constant deconstruction and reconstruction. Let's call it 'disorder' and examine the causes and effects of what's taking place in the world. Thompson does this in a clear and comprehensive way – the book is for both the specialist and the general reader, even though it operates at quite an abstract level once we reflect on 'what we can actually do about it ourselves'.
Knowing clever Soviet/Russian energy initiatives in the past won't help us deal with modern tyranny. No surprise to learn that Italy is divided north and south, and that its ephemeral coalitions speedily shift from technocrats to populists, nor that monetary sovereignty will shift from the all-powerful dollar to China's renminbi and yuan by 2030, urged on by new geopolitical and economic alliances like Xi's Belt and Road initiative, China's new economic (and cultural?) hinterland. You can see how such tours d'horizon as Disorder can induce a helpless despair in any small nation, let alone one persuaded to believe that small is beautiful if only it is feisty and efficient as well. Hard times indeed, with Darwinian overtones. Dystopias always make us think hard.
Thinking seems to be in slight demand in these United States; politics seems to be pandering to adults never having escaped being toddler.
Wreckless Eric stopped in from next door.
Am I wrong thinking that the style and the content of Joseph Farrell's The two forces in statecraft is not what we would find in a general interest American publication? The subject is the end of Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland's First Minister. (You may also want to check out A watershed moment for Scottish politics)
There are other deeper views expressed by Nicolò which, in the light of her recent decision to step down, Nicola might find it sobering to consider. These concern a wider view of life, not only regarding the exercise of power. There are, Machiavelli writes, two forces in statecraft which bring a person to power or prominence but are also decisive in the course of social and individual life as such. These forces he identifies as virtu or fortuna. The former certainly does not mean virtue, but it would appear Nicola has exhausted her store of both.
In earlier times, virtu could have been translated as manliness, but that notion will not pass muster today. Perhaps charisma, individuality or even personality render the idea more clearly since the term indicates the purely personal qualities which a man or woman possesses, or fails to possess, and which will make them a success or failure in life. These are qualities of mind or character and would include intelligence, shrewdness or foresight but could equally indicate cunning, ruthlessness or brutality. They could be the virtues of a saint but equally the vices of a scoundrel or even psychopath. They certainly did not require to be moral, although that is not excluded.
Nicola's virtu has in recent years faltered, especially over gender recognition and the de facto referendum issue. Nicolò thundered against flatterers, and Nicola expended her own credibility pushing through the gender recognition reform, listening only to her own advisers and ignoring public concerns.
But these leadership qualities will only permit an individual to go so far unless they are buoyed by fortuna, which is easier to translate and does indeed designate fortune or luck. The circumstances permitting a person to rise in life or in their career have to be right, and they can be controlled only to a certain extent. Those who rise to power by luck will find it easier to attain authority, but will have the devil's own job to maintain it. Liz Truss? There was a vacuum which she filled, but since she lacked virtu and believed in fairy gold, or something ethereal called 'growth' to pay for unfunded tax cuts, her days were short. Her career will be subject to critical, or derisive, scrutiny for years.
I will bring it all back home with saying Trump may have had personality but he lacked foresight or intelligence. This guy still wants to play footsie with Putin.
Nor would we find anything like Manfredi La Manna's Revelations and hoaxes which takes on organized religion. It is logical, it is cool-headed, and it may be right - logically. As another Scotsman recognized a lot time ago, religion is not rational. I quote the ending, the whole argument needs read and shrinking it into quotes is not easy. I did have to look up Kate Forbes.
Notice finally that logically there is absolutely no necessity for a true revelation to imply the establishment of a class of people whose task is to manage the effects of the revelation itself, but the creation of a priestly hierarchy is the very essence of a successful fraud.
Perhaps the problem with the Kate Forbeses of our age is not so much their abhorrent views on equality and on women's rights, but the very fact that acting on evidence-denying beliefs is not considered sufficient ground for disbarment from public office.
The same writer also wrote Vermeer's power to move, a review of an exhibition. Which probably sounds dull, but the writer enlivens the thing to where it should be read:
I should come clean: I am a near-complete ignoramus of art history and cannot draw the simplest of objects, but I do have a deep if unexplained passion for Vermeer. My hope in visiting the exhibition was to try to find out what exactly in Vermeer's work stirs feelings in me like no other painter. My track record for this journey of self-discovery is poor: why does Mahler's 5th Adagietto move me in ways none of Beethoven's symphonies do? Why do Don Giovanni's opening three chords inexorably make my heart beat faster? I have tried to answer these questions with a singular lack of success.
What follows is the honest account of my personal quest for an explanation of Vermeer's power to move.
I suspect the exhibition's curators had a difficult decision to make: whether to show Vermeer's paintings in context by juxtaposing his work with his contemporaries' or to let them speak for themselves, unadorned. Luckily, they chose the latter, dispersing the 28 paintings across nine very large and high-ceilinged rooms, mainly in chronological order. This decision does not imply that little can be gained by comparing Vermeer's works with other Dutch masters, but that this comparative analysis is best carried out beyond the exhibition walls (for example, using the excellent and bulky catalogue that accompanies the show).
I did not expect a history of women aviator's from Mary Simpson's See the world differently, but it was quite entertaining and I did not know of Winnie Drinkwater.
Back stateside, The Drift's ninth issue is out. Same with Unlikely Stories, a new edition is out. I just don't have time to read them in detail.
The Reverend Horton Heat brought over a friend:
The email inbox is down to 8. Two are videos of sermons.
Ever since I started reading again ina serious mannter, I have been wondering why did I not know of certain writers. Yes, there was no internet back then, so there was a limited amount of information sources. But Gabriel Garcia Marquez was famous by the time I graduated from high school. It may be that I was not paying enough attention - or was not motivated enough to pay attention.
These thoughts, however, got me thinking about gatekeepers and groupthink.
What supports my own fault in not having discovered Marquez or Thomas Mann or Joyce Carol Oates is that I had gone through a similar discovery with music when I was younger. A friend told me about Lou Reed, Matt the Hoople, and David Bowie even though the radio ignored them. Creem, and Rolling Stone told me about others. Searching through record store bins with a sense of curiosity brought The Clash and The Cramps into my life. Maybe I wanted to be a musician more than a writer.
Spotify also wouldn’t speak to me on the record; this lack of information from all sides makes it hard for anyone to consume music on the service in any kind of informed way. A representative for a major label told me they don’t think their label actually uses discovery, despite speculation that they do, a fittingly oblique response for such a mystifying topic. The promise of the internet was that it would allow us to cut out middlemen and buy music direct from the artist, but the reality is that quite the opposite has happened – we’re faced with an even more infernally complex system. Spotify users remain in limbo, left to guess how much of their feed is what essentially amounts to undisclosed advertising – and how much, at the other extreme, is totally randomised.
Lift up your eyes and look around. Be curious. Explore. The world needs to be experienced, not curated.
No, I have not yet watched One Hundred Years of Solitude on Netflix. It is subtitled, which means I need to watch it and not merely have it running in the background. I am not good at doing this with TV. Especially not when there is so much else that needs to be done here. On the other hand, doing anything else than watching it exclusively seems to me as being disrespectful to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Ayoung man follows the bloody trail of his CIA father, through Paraguayan torture chambers and the sites of Andean massacres. An Ecuadorian artist fantasizes about running a scalpel through the tongue of her mute twin. In a Buenos Aires cemetery, teenage fans devour a rock star’s rotting remains.
These grisly scenes – and many more like them – populate the pages of Latin America’s recent bestselling fiction. From the Andes to the Amazon and to the urban sprawl of some of the world’s biggest cities, a ghoulish shadow has been cast over Latin American literature.
It’s a dark departure for a region often synonymous with magical realism. Since the 1967 publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude the region’s writers have often lived in the shadow of Macondo, the novel’s tropical and fantastical Colombian town, decrying the expectation – usually from western editors – that they deploy the “magical realist algorithm” in their work.
Now, a new generation of writers are striking a much darker tone. They take their inspiration from the dictatorships and terrorism of the late 20th century, the poverty and violence of the region’s modern cities and the most sinister elements of the region’s rich but neglected folklore. Macondo has turned macabre.
Interesting to me, maybe to other Americans is this passage:
The current mood represents a resurgence – rather than an emergence – of horror fiction in a region long steeped in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, said the Peruvian novelist Gustavo Faverón Patriau.
“Poe was incredibly influential in Latin America, but the renaissance of the gothic in Peru started with [leftist rebel group] the Shining Path in the 1990s. The guerrillas and the military response generated so many bloody and cruel stories that many writers felt they had to return to the language of the gothic to tell them.”
We never can quite get away from Edgar Allan Poe. Could it not be that we Americans may also rediscover the value of the gothic? I don't know. Poe is how I know the gothic and although I adapted his "Masque of the Red Death" into a play, I did not think I was doing so in terms of the gothic.
I believe reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude gave me the idea of lucidity that I latched onto as a goal and solution to my despondency. Likewise, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books showed me there was hope in writing far away from the literary center. The first taught me of magical realism. The second showed me magical realism could exist in northern climes. Both showed me that social realism does not capture all of what I see as reality.
This
week, I’ve been mulling a question that came up in some recent literary
discussions: isn’t magical realism just urban fantasy by another name?
This
is a question I’ve seen a lot. And there’s a common claim that works in
the magical realist/surrealist/fabulist zone are “really just fantasy”
for literary snobs. Or as Terry Pratchett once put it, “a polite way of
saying you write fantasy.” To the degree this is critiquing artificial
barriers to bar certain fantastic fiction from “real literature,” I
agree. I read and write SFFH (science fiction, fantasy, and horror)
alongside so called “literary fiction.” So I certainly agree many great
fantasy-shelved writers have been unfairly overlooked by literary
critics.
But
if we’re trying to illuminate fiction—to understand how different
storytelling styles operate—then the claim that magical realism is
simply urban fantasy by another name doesn’t seem right to me.
Especially since this claim often comes with its own snobbery. A few
years ago, I was discussing this with a SFF writer who insisted magical
realism was really fantasy yet in the same breath mocked it as lazy
writing by authors who “don’t think through their worldbuilding.”
Suddenly magical realism wasn’t just fantasy by another name but bad
fantasy by another name. I’ve heard this a lot and, well, disagree.
Magical realism operates differently, not in the same way yet worse.
Increasingly,
I’m inclined to think less in terms of “genres” than “modes.” Something
about genres promotes a partisan mindset where the goal is to “win” by
either declaring the superiority of your preferred genre or claiming
territory from other genres. This writer is “really” science fiction,
that writer has “transcended” genre, etc. It’s more obfuscating than
illuminating. If you want to argue surrealist and magical realist work
should be shelved with fantasy, or that fantasy should be shelved with
literary fiction, that’s fine. I’m not arguing about that here.
***
Magical
realism’s lineage is different. The predecessors (or early examples if
you prefer) include early 20th-century writers like Franz Kafka and the
Surrealists. Latin American magical realists such as Borges, Carpentier,
and Márquez spoke openly about their influence. (Márquez on Kafka’s
“The Metamorphosis”: “When I read that [opening] 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.”) Scholars also
tend to say magical realism flourished in Latin America as a rejection
of Western realism as well as a fusion of European literature and
indigenous mythology. There’s also an influence of earlier experimental
Latin American literature. From these influences you can see magical
realism’s political dimension as well as its focus on estrangement
through unexpected and original magical elements akin to Surrealist art.
More on that below. With the boom period, magical realists like
Márquez’s became world famous and their influence is obvious in certain
strands of postmodernism (e.g. Barthelme and Rushdie) and fabulism (e.g.
Russell and Calvino).
So how do these differences manifest on the page?
***
In urban fantasy, the magical is typically hidden within the mundane. In works like the Vampire Chronicles or the Dresden Files or American Gods,
magical and supernatural entities are common yet secret. The magical
may influence or even control our reality—hidden councils of fairies or
wizards are behind our wars, disasters, and triumphs—but the average
human is unaware. The life for most people is our life. Thus the reader
enters with our understanding of our reality, then is granted a peek
behind the veil. This concept, used in other SFF genres as well, is
sometimes called “the masquerade.”
Outside of the hidden magical world, the real world operates like ours.
NYC is NYC, unless you’re one of the select few that know the fae dwell
in Central Park.
***
In
magical realism, the magical isn’t hidden or separate from the mundane
but rather completely intermingled. The magical events that appear in
the works of writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and
Karen Russell are features of the world. Any character living in
Macondo, say, will witness and may be involved in the magical events.
There’s no masquerade. At the same time, the real world itself becomes
magical. NYC isn’t just NYC. The subways are pulled by giant rats and
billionaire’s park their helicopters in the clouds, or whatever. This
happens both at the “worldbuilding” level and at the stylistic level,
with authors describing banal events in magical ways and vice versa. A
classic example might be found in the opening of Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,”
where everyday banalities like rain and a beach are described
wondrously—“The world had been sad since Tuesday” and “the sands […]
glimmered like powdered light”—while the on-the-surface astonishing
appearance of an angel is described rather unmagically: “There were only
a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his
mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took
away any sense of grandeur he might have had.”
Go for it. Write to the capacity of our imagination, and open the imaginations of others. Do not think yourself fitted for a straight-jacket of tradition. Tell the story as the story needs to be told. Most importantly: write.
