American Magic

In the Seventies and Eighties there was a brief surge of American ‘magic realism.’ Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow,’ Helprin’s ‘Winter’s Tale,’ Delany’s ‘Dhalgren’ — all three of these books have been characterized on occasion as science fiction and/or fantasy, but I consider them neither; magic realism is essentially a sort of surrealism.

You, of course, are free to disagree. It doesn’t much matter whether any of us are right or wrong about it. All categorization is ultimately arbitrary.

I was much more impressed with these novels when they first appeared (and I was young and at least a little less experienced). They feel somewhat contrived now, exercises in literary theory. That does not prevent them from being still worth reading.

And though you find little surrealist tendency in my work, that does not mean I in any way object to it. I would consider Woolf’s ‘Orlando’ as good a work of magic realism as any of those I named, as well, perhaps, as a more enjoyable read.

Surrealism drops in the unexplained (and perhaps unexplainable) and treats it as simply the way things are. It does not create a true self-contained world with its own logic and laws as does speculative fiction (i.e. fantasy and science fiction). It is intended to jar the imagination with the illogical.

Unfortunately, that sometimes results in mere silliness, in whimsy, in tricks of illusion performed purely for their own sake. It can become conceptual showmanship with little true substance, an exercise in self-indulgence. Not that other sorts of fiction are immune to bad writing!

Of the three novels mentioned above, I find ‘Dhalgren’ to be by far the best. Again, you are free to disagree. Delany makes the unreal feel real, which is the point of magic realism. There are echoes of real cities in his abandoned Bellona, and of real people in the vivid characters who roam its empty streets. It is both familiar and unfathomably strange. And the author knows how to tell a compelling story, even if there is not exactly a real plot.

I suppose it — as Pynchon’s work — would also be pigeonholed as ‘literary fiction.’ It is certainly more literary, i.e. informed by literary theory, than the average popular novel. Ultimately, only time will decide whether any of them are great novels. And even time is known to change its mind.