Randomness about Magical Realism
I am absolutely fascinated by it. I don't know of a more perfect mode of writing. Magical realism seems to catch all the things in my peripheral vision, giving me a more complete idea of the world around me. I'm not sure that it's possible to get at the truth by looking directly at it. It's like the sun--if you stare at it, you'll be too blinded to see anything else. And I feel that since there are thousands of truths, it's important to be able to see the peripheries.
And to marvel at them. I feel that one of the most beautiful aspects of magical realism is its invitation to marvel--at the fantastic, the grotesque, the ordinary. And this marvelling seems also to contribute to the overpowering sense of "yes" that I feel when I read.
posted by Vickie @ 1:23 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Hey Vicki! Holla back when you get a chance.
I love this post--you are dead-on about marveling!
Here's a quote I've saved from The Virginia Quarterly Review, from an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
"Probably Kafka's The Metamorphosis" was a revelation . . . It was in 1947 . . . I was nineteen . . . I was doing my first year of law school . . I remember the opening sentences, it reads exactly thus: "As Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." . . . Holy shit! When I read that I said to myself, "This isn't right! . . . Nobody had told me this could be done! . . . Because it really can be done! . . . So then I can! . . . Holy shit! . . . That's how my grandmother told stories . . . The wildest things, in the most natural way."
That's the best definition of magical realism I can imagine, and even the master is marveling.
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