Rebecca Brams

The Talking Dog:

A Writer’s Journey Down a Magically Real Path

I think magical realism has such a pull on our collective imagination today because it exists in the confluence of two worlds. One, the magical, is what many of us feel we don’t get enough of, and reading about magical happenings allows us to feel a connection to a sense of wonder, that relic of childhood that so rarely penetrates modern-day adult life. The other, the real, we get plenty of. Yet cynical readers that we are, we need the presence of the real to feel grounded, to feel that the characters – their struggles and decisions – have relevance to our own lives. Readers who don’t need the grounding force of the real have whole sections of fantasy fiction to choose from. For the rest of us, good magical realism can provide escape while still giving us an opportunity to reflect on our own lives through fiction.

I say good magical realism because I believe that magical realism techniques can be used to make a good story shine with unusual ferocity. Or they can be used to cover a story that’s not working with a thin sparkling veneer that seems to say – this story doesn’t have to make sense or have a point, it’s magical. From some of my admittedly sparse reading on the subject, it seems that the hey-day of magical realism in the U.S., when the Isabel Allende-Gabriel García Márquez-Like Water for Chocolate crowd could do no wrong in the eyes of American critics, is ending. We in America like things to be new, and the book reviewers seem to be getting a little worn out by all the magic in the air. This makes me sad, not only because I love to see how far writers’ imaginations can stretch, but also because I want to be able to experiment with the fantastic in my own fiction without worrying about whether employing the full range of my imagination might be a strike against me in the publishing world.

That magical realism is about the confluence of the magic and the real might sound obvious, given the title of the literary genre. However, the best magical realism literature draws its strength from its realism, not just the magic. What do I mean by this? Of course magical realism deals with the extraordinary, the unusual, the fantastic. But, just as importantly, it deals with a familiar and identifiable reality. As Robert Kroetsch defines it: “[Magic realism is] not about a uniform fantastic world but about a collision of two worlds” (Spark). Magical realism is distinct from fantasy in that it attempts to anchor fantastical occurrences to the real world of the story, a world that has enough in common with our own that we as readers can accept it and feel grounded in it.

One of the huge tasks for a writer of magical realism is to combat the skepticism of the reader (not to mention the book reviewers and the critics!) – that moment when the reader comes to a fantastical incident and a voice in her head says that couldn’t happen. Instantly she is pulled out of the story. Now she is in her head trying to figure it out – could that or couldn’t that really happen? – while the story chugs along without the benefit of her full and undivided attention. When the reader is a critic, she might sigh and make a note to herself – does everyone now have to have talking dogs in their stories – and plow on. When the reader is a normal everyday reader, she might sigh and put the book aside, to be picked up later. Or perhaps to collect dust around the edges, buried under a stack of historical fiction and romance.

However it is possible for magical realism to pull the reader in so tight she flies seamlessly by the fantastic, accepting it as she accepts the stack of laundry sitting in her bedroom closet. Gabriel García Márquez is a master at convincing the reader to accept magical situations as real without breaking the spell of the story. In Of Love and Other Demons, the reader might be skeptical that Bernarda could really be addicted to chocolate and fermented honey. However, in the world of the story, these substances are drugs, just as addictive and eventually detrimental to the health of the addict as heroin is in our world. Inside the confines of the story, García Márquez treats Bernarda’s experimentation with these drugs so realistically that I started to wonder whether these substances might really exist:

She was already addicted to fermented honey, which she had consumed with her school friends before she was married, and still consumed, not only by mouth but through all five senses in the sultry air of the sugar plantation. With Judas she learned to chew tobacco and coca leaves mixed with ashes of the yarumo tree, like the Indians in the Sierra Nevada. In the taverns she experimented with cannabis from India, turpentine from Cyprus, peyote from Real de Catorce, and at least once, opium from the Nao of China brought by Filipino traffickers. But she did not turn a deaf ear to Judas’s proclamation in favor of cacao. After trying all the rest, she recognized its virtues and preferred it to everything else. (46)

By comparing chocolate to a variety of drug substances that we know actually exist, García Márquez increases the realistic feel of Bernarda’s experimentations, though the substance that she experiments with is not actually on par with the others he lists.

García Márquez also increases the realism of Bernarda’s addiction by selecting foods that already have associations with altered states and sensual pleasures in our minds. Chocolate is known to produce pleasure and possibly even a hormonal reaction similar to orgasm in women. Honey is associated with pleasure and ease (rivers flowing with milk and honey for example). And we know that the process of fermentation changes the chemical nature of many foods – grape juice, for instance – to create an intoxicating effect on the body. It is not illogical that it would produce a similar change in the effect of consuming honey. The familiar properties of these foods make it easier for the reader to accept that they have morphed into a different form in this different but parallel world. So even though we might know in the back of our heads that there is no such thing as magical chocolate or fermented honey, we see the characters’ acceptance of them as drugs and are willing to suspend our disbelief and go along on the ride. A character’s addiction to magical brussel sprouts probably would not feel as seamlessly believable to us as readers.

Bernarda’s addiction is one of the first elements of magical realism we see in the narrative of the story, not including the prologue. Her addiction is introduced at the very beginning of the story and the actual drugs she is addicted to are mentioned in a matter of fact way: “In a few short years, however, she had been erased from the world by her abuse of fermented honey and cacao tablets” (8). Immediately, we see the physical effects her dependency has had on Bernarda: “Her Gypsy eyes were extinguished and her wits dulled, she shat blood and vomited bile, her siren’s body became as bloated and coppery as a three-day-old corpse, and she broke wind in pestilential explosions…” (8-9). While not all of these physical effects mirror what we think of as the effects of drug addiction, they establish that the dependency is real for the character and thus, for us. Once we accept Bernarda’s addiction, it forms the basis for a suspension of disbelief that allows us to accept other fantastical elements of the story that are grounded less in references to the reality of our world, such as the lightning bolt out of a clear sky that kills the Marquis’ first wife.

García Márquez uses the prologue to set the stage for the story in a way that authenticates the story’s reality. In the prologue, he describes going to see the exhumation of bodies from the chapel of the old Clarissan convent as it is being torn down in 1949. The fact that he goes to the chapel as a journalist creates authenticity. Did the workers actually find a tomb filled with over twenty-two meters of copper-colored hair attached to a small skull? I am not at all sure whether this incident is invention or some freak but real occurrence that sparked García Márquez’s idea for the novel. But his authoritative tone, as well as his role at this time as a news reporter rather than a fiction writer, convinces us that what he describes, magical or not, actually did happen.

Now let’s look at the rendering of magical realism from another master writer and different geographical region. While Fred Chappell is not from Latin America, the acknowledged birthplace of magical realism as a literary genre, the term has been used to describe his work: “Chappell creates a sort of magical realism set to fiddles” (Gene Lyons, Newsweek). Designating Chappell’s writing as magical realism is controversial. Some believe that magical realism is so closely tied to a unique Latin American psychology – the product of the intermingling of indigenous, European and African traditions, customs and mythologies – that the term should only be used to describe the work of Latin American writers. Others believe that many, and perhaps all, geographic regions have their own distinct cultural phenomena that could foster an artist’s ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. The American South has been singled out as one of the areas that contain a unique mixture of culture and mythology that make it ripe for a magical treatment of reality. And Fred Chappell’s novel I Am One of You Forever is certainly based in the particular heritage of the American South.

Chappell uses magic in a very different way than García Márquez. García Márquez uses magic to pepper a story based in the first place on myth and legend, though told relatively straight. In contrast, I Am One of You Forever leaps directly from the extremely real locale of a “scratchankle mountain farm” (27) into spurts of images so fantastic that I read right past the first one, set at the end of the prologue, mistaking it for a grand and lovely metaphor. On my second go-around, I realized that this incident, when the narrator’s mother sheds a giant tear that envelops first his father and then the narrator himself, is meant literally as well as figuratively and represents the first fantastical incident of the novel. However, on my first read, I was left with the disconcerting feeling of having magic suddenly sprung on me, in the form of Uncle Gurton’s irrepressible beard, one-third of the way through an effortlessly engaging portrayal of a very particular reality.

While García Márquez establishes a relationship to the fantastical right from the outset, Chappell uses magic like an alarm clock – we’re never quite sure when it will go off – and when it does, it is wonderfully loud. His descriptions of the fantastic show the splendors of an imagination that must make even the renowned Latin American magical realists turn a little green. A shining white beard that spews forth mermaids, whales, hawks, sharks, and even Indians paddling a canoe over a slick hairy falls (59). A tower of lightning that contains “shoals of creatures we could never have imagined. Shapes filmy and iridescent and veined like dragonfly wings erranded between the earth and heavens” (72). A telegram, alive with heat and cold, that disappears and reappears and even creates its own weather patterns (94). In all its incarnations, Chappell’s magic is formidable, lyrical, and irresistible.

Chappell complicates his use of magic by playing tricks with reality that make the reader think she is heading down a magical path, only to realize suddenly that the path is actually very real. Chappell sets this up from the start by making his three main characters pranksters who like to play practical jokes, thus they are not always to be trusted. When Johnson starts to tell Jess a fantastical jungle story, we think that we might be heading down the magical path. But Jess’s response is to turn on his side and fall asleep “in utter disgust” (16). And we as readers are snapped back to sharp reality. Clearly our narrator is not always easily seduced by the guise of the fantastic. However, there is another instance where the narrator and reader are alike in heading down the wrong path. Johnson and Jess are out to play a practical joke on the vet, Doc McGreavy, when they find Doc in his kitchen, feeding his horse, who is also in the kitchen, soup. This surreal situation turns magical when the horse begins to talk menacingly. Jess runs away in terror, certain that death is imminent. We as readers think that we are seeing another instance of Chappell’s marvelous magical realism. But both Jess and the reader are mistaken. Johnson is playing a practical joke on Jess, and Chappell is playing with the expectations of his readers.

García Márquez and Chappell also differ in how “real” magical incidents and conditions are considered inside the text by the characters themselves. García Márquez’s magical realism gains power from the characters’ casual acceptance of the magical. For instance, the characters in Of Love and Other Demons take the fantastic elements of their world in stride. In fact, it is the real world that has the capacity to unnerve them. Sierva Maria’s brush with rabies is much more unexpectedly disturbing to her father than is the sudden and mysterious death of his first wife Doña Olalla. While the Marquis spends a lot of time trying to figure out whether or not Sierva Maria has rabies, he seems to accept the death of his wife fairly quickly (though he is changed by it) and the townsfolk explain it in terms of punishment for sins committed.

In Chappell’s I Am One of You Forever, the characters do not accept the fantastical occurrences of their lives quite so casually. For example, the voice that the men hear when they see the tower of lightening is awesome and frightening to them. Johnson refuses to speak of the incident afterwards. Jess and his father finally do talk about it months later and, even then, it is too powerful to discuss: Jess’ father retreats to humor in the face of it. While Chappell’s characters might be more fazed by the fantastic elements of their lives, it is important to note that they do accept them as reality. When Uncle Gurton’s beard takes over the house, the men are in awe, but they believe what they see. They take refuge outside the house, where they find the grandmother, voice of reason throughout the book. She authenticates the reality of the incident for the reader when she scolds the men for unleashing the beard, now grown to epic proportions.

So where does all this discussion and analysis of the masters leave me in my own attempts to use magical realism in my writing? The short answer is a) inspired yet b) cautious.

A) Inspired

Now we come to the talking dog. The creative response that I wrote after reading Of Love and Other Demons was inspired by the writer’s ability to not have to accept the norms and limitations of the world we know. Instead, we can create a world with parallel realities, a world in which magic sometimes doesn’t even appear to be magical, except in that it allows us to extend our reach beyond the plane of what we can already imagine. In my first draft of a short-short story titled “Home Coming” (attached), the main character Lindsay has a dialogue with a character that represents a source of wisdom from her childhood – in this case, the dog she grew up with and who died when she was sixteen. The dog, Panda, speaks back to her, a magical condition that is presented matter-of-factly by the narrator and accepted by Lindsay (Lindsay comments only on the fact that no one told her Panda was staying in her parents’ garage). Using this magical condition allows me as the writer to have Lindsay engage in a conversation that she couldn’t have with anyone else. In my revisions, I hope to have Lindsay reveal more of her vulnerabilities and doubts about her future and the choices she’s made than she could with a person, even someone she is very close to. Panda’s magical “otherness” takes her out of the realm of judging Lindsay’s life, while the reality of their shared history balances the strangeness of the situation and grounds the reader in something they can relate to – the relationship between man and dog.

At least that is what I hope to accomplish, which leads me to…

B) Cautious

I can see how this story could very easily become a story dominated by the fact that it contains a talking dog. The device could overshadow the subtlety of real human emotion; it could feel gimmicky, like the thin sparkling veneer I referred to earlier, a sheen attempting to mask a story that doesn’t really work on its primary level. The temptation is to make too much out of Panda’s talking, to let her simply explain interesting things about her magical incarnation (as is the tendency in this first draft) rather than doing the hard work of developing Lindsay as a character to be cared about – a woman with her own particular wants, desires, and conflicts. While explaining how Panda’s world has changed (she can now eat whatever she wants, she can move easily, she can travel freely) might be engaging to a point, it cannot take over the story. This is the danger, and capitulating to it would make the finished version of this piece, if it was ever seen by the larger world, something that might help to fuel the view of magic realism as the writer’s panacea for the uninteresting.

I intend to follow inspiration, keeping in mind the points that caution raises. The masters have taught me a few lessons: 1) the story has to be able to stand on its own, even without the allure of its magical elements; 2) magic is most powerful when balanced by an engaging and identifiable reality; 3) how the characters react to the fantastical in their lives sets the tone for how the reader will react. The best magical realism writers, and in this category I include both García Márquez and Chappell, marry the magical and the real so that they compliment and add to each other, so that they illuminate each other, and so that it is impossible to imagine how the story could exist without both. And so the journey begins, the choice to step down one path and not the other, the choice that the writer gets to make all over again with every blank page.

Works Cited

Chappell, Fred. I Am One of You Forever. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

García Márquez, Gabriel. Of Love and Other Demons. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Lyons, Gene. Newsweek. Quote taken from the back of I Am One of You Forever.

Sparks, Debra. “Curious Attractions: Magical Realism’s Fate in the States.” AWP Chronicle. December 1996.

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