Dear Reader,
Today I’m sending you a distillation of thoughts on a topic I’ve come to hold at arm’s length.
I’m often asked about my relationship to magic realism; a literary register that’s frequently reared its maned head in my writing, but is not something I’ve ever sought out. Rather, I’ll be working on a piece of fiction and an off-kilter component will come to the surface. Thereafter, it inflects or accents the prose. Whether it’s entirely outlandish or only slightly unhinged, it’s always something completely unforeseen and it always ups the emotional stakes. Which is to say: the characters are more alive—their desires more potent, their heartaches more eviscerating—for living in a strange world.
Generally defined as ‘a literary blend of realism and surrealism’, magic realism heralds a vein of fiction that integrates elements of fantasy into an otherwise realistic setting. Its surreal tenor is a result of this fusion: the improbable being rendered as probable, the unlikely rendered very likely indeed. Though it’s a genre that has tinged both of my novels to date, and while it hems the work of such heavyweights such as Haruki Murakami, Isabel Allende, Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as the years go by I’m finding it to be something of a leash. I think this is because whenever a contemporary novels deviates from what we might call ‘straight realism’, the critical and conversational focus falls unevenly on world building and metaphor—rather than, say, prose style and character.
This is not to say there isn’t a sizeable, commercial appetite for books classified as magic realism. In particular, books by women that cast a stranger light on cis female experiences of menstruation, motherhood and menopause—this staggered triptych we’ve inherited à la de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex—while leaving the interpretation as metaphor very much open.
Within novels like The Harpy by Megan Hunter or Chouette by Claire Oshetsky, for instance, magic realism is wielded as a feminist tool to make fresh or lucid what gets obscured or co-opted by patriarchy. In these novels (both of which I adored), we see female characters screaming their truth into the void; again and again they state their trauma, their oppression, and again and again they’re disbelieved or ignored. Eventually, their subaltern status edges into a kind of pathology: motherhood, monogamy and the nuclear family become rife breeding ground for psychosis. Empowering transfiguration, corporeal transformation, confused transubstantiation—every strangeness winnowing through the prose nods toward metaphor: everything we read might well be unfolding in the protagonist’s head and in that dark space alone. In a kind of double act of feminist fairytale and feminist critique, there is always a metaphorical backstop: what the reader is witnessing is a portrait of a coping mechanism and an inevitable psychotic break.
I’m using these novels to make a point that magic realism is expected to function with quite a clear remit in mind—feminist critique, literary metaphor. You see this kind of discourse with science fiction, too: what can science fiction tell us about the ‘real world’, what does dystopian fiction tell us about the realities we’re moving toward?
I’m interested in why these genres outside of ‘straight realism’ are held to a particular standard of knowledge production that feels legitimising and sanitising, and very limiting. It seems that magic realism is seen as serious or productive when it’s in the service of something else, something very quantifiable, rather than as ‘art for art’s sake’.
When I first compiled the below notes it was for a lecture—a kind of masterclass—on how magic realism has shaped my work. By way of reference to Maryse Meijer, Samantha Hunt and Kiki Smith, I hope you’ll see how it has played out for me as offering something much more fugitive and slippery than metaphor. Something uncanny, ambivalent, querying and often deeply—productively—unsettling.
Wishing you many a sun-soaked read now that we’re turning the corner on summer. As always, I love hearing from those of you trying out the prompts—keep them coming!
Sue
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The woods: a psychologically charged pocket of arboreal entanglement.
Their enduring appeal for the fictive imagination lies, I think, in their combined fecundity and density. There is always something happening on the far side of the tree line, and any warm body that ventures across it risks being enveloped by an ecosystem expert in making quick, diminishing work of creatures that lie down (only to rest, only for one moment) on their side.
A woodland is a hungry landscape, and one that can keep a secret.
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