My Love Letter to Magical Realism

 Still from Pan’s Labyrinth

I love magical realism.

I think I read my first magical realism book in middle school. I got “Green Angel” by Alice Hoffman from my sister’s bookshelf and ended up crying because of how much it lingered with me. My heart ached not only for the characters, but the beauty created in their sorrows. I didn’t know what magical realism was, but I couldn’t get the writing out of my head.  

If I were in a magical realism book, it would be obvious that my life was all falling together for me to become a total MR nerd. Without knowing, I was drawn to the genre in so many forms of media. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is one of my favorite movies, partially because I can’t explain it. I don’t understand the world completely, so I keep learning more about the bizarre world director Guillermo del Toro created. I love not completely knowing, because then I continue to want more. Rule #1 of writing: don’t give the reader everything.

After discovering this “weird in-between fantasy and real” was a common theme, I started researching the actual term.

I had two questions:

“What’s magical realism?” 

And

“Where can I get more?”

Art by Tomek Setowski

I read what I believe was my second magical realism book, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton, after I graduated high school, and discovered the term “magical realism” for the first time. I found so much vulnerability in the poetic language, as if I were being shown the deepest secrets of the author’s mind through their words. I felt intimate with the world they found in this genre. I was one of the only people in my course who liked Bless Me Ultima (my third known encounter with MR); the majority of the class argued that it was “too weird” and “didn’t make sense”, while I argued this suspension of reality is what we search for in literature.

My next encounter with magical realism was in graduate my class Theorizing Queer Adolescent Literature when we read “When the Moon Was Ours” by Anna-Marie McLemore, a book about a young girl with roses growing out of her wrists, and (spoilers!) a young trans boy who eventually is transformed into the body he always desired, and all I wanted was for that to be true. I wanted to see this beauty in real life. My heart strings were tugged, and my mind begged for more. At this point, I knew I loved magical realism. I love the suspension of reality, the focus on the beauty of language. Most of all though, I loved the magic.  

At this point, I started researching more books in the genre.

Falling into Gabriel García Márquez showed me an inkling of why I love it. First, before knowing about the background, I was just immediately drawn to the beautiful language.

Although I fell in love first and foremost with the actual language and books of magical realism, there was more that drew me to it. I loved learning of the connection between magical realism and Spain. I am Spanish, but not super connected to my culture; my Spanish grandmother lives across the country, I refused to learn Spanish until tenth grade, and let’s be honest: I don’t “look Spanish” according to people, (or stereotypically Spanish, which is another issue on its own) and my love of magical realism has been questioned because of that. This made me think more about why I love it.

Hearing inklings of my family’s journey moving to America from Spain captivated me, and I saw this genre as a tiny way to be more connected to my culture across the ocean. I felt transported.

I read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by the king of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez. While I was carrying the book around, my mom told me it was her favorite book, and reading it made me feel a little bit closer to her as well. Everything was just falling together. Finally, I started researching the actual genre of magical realism, also known as magic realism, marvelous realism, or fabulism.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, magical realism is a “chiefly Latin-American narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction”. Although Latin-American, its roots are in Germany, and the term “magic/magical realism” was first used by German photographer, art historian, and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 (Slemon, 9). Although it is most popular in literature, it can be found in any form of art: paintings, movies, et cetera.

As Maggie Ann Bowers beautifully puts it in “Magic(al) Realism”, the genre “magic realism” is “the concept of the ‘mystery [that] does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” while “magical realism” is “commingling of the improbable and the mundane” (Bowers, 74). I love this mystery that doesn’t need to be explained. I’m okay with it hiding and never truly being discovered.

There is some contestation whether the term “magic realism” should only apply to Latinx authors, but the issue in this requires each author to disclose their identity, which if they want to is great, but I really think that’s another issue in this: a policing of the genre, by all identities. This policing forces some authors to validate their writing and divulge potentially personal information, which for some is perfectly fine, but in general, I think that’s pretty weird to insist upon.

Why is their background your business?

For some authors, they don’t want their identity to be central to the reading of the novel, or simply they don't want it as a public fact in general, and that should be respected. Varying identities in authorship is amazing, and something I would love to see more of, but an author, like myself writing this blog, should not have to immediately preface their work with their identity. But I do.

Nonetheless, I still love the genre, and writing about it.

My journey in this genre has helped me discover more about my family, myself, and the world.

Magical realism for me has become an escape from the world. In times where I felt like life didn’t make sense, everything fell together in this genre, because things didn’t have to follow the logic of our world. When life didn’t make sense, when I stared at the hate in our world, I wanted just a glimpse of beauty. Beauty was found in times of hate and oppression in these books.

Magical realism is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I want to emphasize something: It is for everyone, no matter their background. I think everyone should at least try it, and I think those of any age or identity should at least experience it once. If you love it, read about it, research it, honor the background and roots of it. It is not only beautiful; it is necessary to be accessible to the world. The whole world. For some, it can be an escape, an exploration. A reader can escape this world and explore another one more fantastical, more beautiful, more magical. A world like in When the Moon Was Ours where flowers grow from wrists and a trans boy born in the body he doesn’t align with can have the body he always should have had with a drink of a potion. A world like that.

There’s something so beautiful about that. The possibility.

Magical realism is full of possibility.

For me, reading magical realism is a reparation of some of the darkness in life, by seeing that reparation happen in books. This can be seen in When the Moon Was Ours, when a trans boy can magically transform to have the body he always desired. Magical realism brings light to my world, and I think it can bring light to others. This escape that I found, this suspension of disbelief, became a way of coping, because for a little while during my reading, I could believe that anything was possible.

I was right.

Anything is possible. It doesn’t matter if that anything is in a book, because a book is real to me.

-SS

Sources:

“Magic Realism.” ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, https://www.britannica.com/art/magic-realism.

Slemon, Stephen. Magic realism as post-colonial discourse Archived 2018-04-25 at the Wayback Machine. In: Canadian Literature #116 (Spring 1988),pp. 9-24, p. 9 http://canlit.ca/canlitmedia/canlit.ca/pdfs/articles/canlit116-Magic(Slemon).pdf

Dr. Mary Galbraith’s “The Deictic Imaginary: Literature as Creation”

On Wednesday, October 30th, The National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at SDSU had the honor of hosting Dr. Mary Galbraith for her talk, “The Deictic Imaginary: Literature as Creation.”

Our director, Dr. Joseph Thomas, began by thanking all who have made the event possible: the library (especially Linda Salem and Markel Tumlin), the graduate assistants (Sofia and Ashley), and Dr. Mary Galbraith herself. He then introduced our guest, saying she is a woman who works to “respect the child” in her research. The full text of his introduction is included below:

Dr. Mary Galbraith has always struck me as the prototypical SoCal woman. A salient exemplar, really. You see, Mary grew up in Los Angeles, shuttling between her Southern California home and a home across the sea, in London. After finishing high school, Mary headed a little south to UC Irvine, attending that legendary school during its first year. Afterwards, she left her SoCal home for Berkeley, where her worldly, cosmopolitan, SoCal grooviness was enriched and complicated by the student protests going on during 1969, the high-water mark of the 60’s youthful, utopian hopefulness. I’m put in mind of the famous passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . .

But on that cresting wave came, as Mary explains in an interview, “tanks on campus; helicopters flying over dropping tear gas.” She got out, had a kid, lived her life, returning to school in the 80s, eventually settling at SUNY Buffalo, a spot that couldn’t be more different than SoCal.

But Mary flourished there, working as a graduate assistant for the Cognitive Science Graduate Group. She worked on her doctorate in English while taking courses in philosophy, psychology, computer science, child language acquisition. The searching intelligence that came of age traveling back and forth between London and Los Angeles, primed for difference, for unexpected confluences and concatenations began developing the interdisciplinary approach we’d come to call “Childhood Studies,” a theoretical and practical academic approach that puts into conversation the resonant insights of literature, psychology, history, anthropology, and neurobiology as a means of better understanding childhood, a time in which the child’s varied experiences of the world has yet to calcify into rigid categories. Although I wouldn’t call her a Romantic (not to her face), she does respect the child and its novel experience of the still-new world, Wordsworth’s “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! […] “whose exterior semblance” (if you’ll forgive my shift into second person)

[…] doth belie

Thy Soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet
dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the
blind,

That, deaf and silent, read’st the
eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal
mind[.]

Mary’s ranging, complex, and groundbreaking scholarly work serves the interests of – as she puts it – “feeling from the other side,” of understanding as best we’re able, the child’s existential situation from the child’s perspective, a critical paradigm suggestive of what Peter Hunt would come to call “childist” criticism. Mary’s work is marked by a desire to articulate the child's experience as rigorously as possible using all the theoretical and scientific and literary critical tools available to us. Today, we’ll get a taste of that project.

But first, knowing how important students are to Mary’s work (she exemplifies the scholar/teacher model) I’d like to invite one of her students, Ashley, to the front of the room, to give Mary the kind of introduction I’m unable to give.

Graduate Assistant Ashley Nguyen then took the stage to describe her work under Dr. Mary Galbraith: 

It was my honor to be Dr. Galbraith’s student last fall in her English 501: Literature for Children course. Professor Galbraith’s class was my first encounter with the study of children’s literature. The theme was “fantasy and a touch of the real,” which highlighted the authorial background that underlies the fantastical aspects of familiar texts such as Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. She showed us how children’s literature provides a place for authors to work through childhood traumas, reimagine difficult relationships, and create alternative narratives in which the child character has unprecedented agency. This course was also my first scholarly encounter with Asian art and critique; we utilized Japanese aesthetics to analyze picture books and Hayao Miyazaki’s movies. 

Dr. Galbraith is stunningly dedicated to her scholarship. As a student just barely entering the children’s literature field, I was shocked at the complexity of her research and how much time and effort she gave it – on top of all of the courses she was teaching! Even so, she always gave her students her full attention, meeting us where we were and yet challenging us to push ourselves further, to think critically about even our most cherished childhood stories and movies. Furthermore, she taught that while academic critique is valuable, we can still appreciate texts for the affective responses they evoke. These insights affirmed my interest in studying children’s literature at the graduate level, and now I focus my research on Asian American children’s literature that reflects the lived experience of its authors and readers. I owe much of my growth as a scholar to my experience in her classroom, and it is a huge honor and privilege to introduce Dr. Mary Galbraith!  

Dr. Galbraith's lecture clearly communicated her stunning dedication to research as well as teaching. Her passionate discussion of the deictic imaginary eschewed the markers of a conventional academic lecture, more closely resembling her work in the classroom. As rigorous as she was clear and convivial, Dr. Galbraith began by explaining that deixis precedes language while language allows people to create transportable or translatable deixis.

In the deictic imaginary, Dr. Galbraith reminded, a storyteller invents and the listener (or reader) collaborates in that invention. She explains this concept further: “It is important to note, fiction is not untrue at all, since fictional narration is a creation, not a statement. Only statements can have truth or untruth.” Dr. Galbaith emphasizes that fictional language creates imaginary presence. When we read, we create these stories, and often children are much better at making an imaginary world than adults are. Dr. Galbraith feels that “imagination is, in my mind, the most precious thing the human race has made”. She praised readers for the ability to mentally envision entire worlds, following an author’s “very long conversational turn that ends whenever you decide to stop reading.” 

Come Away From the Water, Shirley by John Burningham

Dr. Galbraith used an image from Come Away From the Water, Shirley to emphasize the bifurcation between adults focused on settling on the beach and sipping their coffee, and the child who views the ocean with limitless possibility. She noted that the child is constantly forced to repress her curiosity. Dr. Galbraith went on to describe poetic narrative theory and quoted that “a fictive reality ‘is’ only by virtue of its being narrated” (Hamburger 136). 

Dr. Galbraith had prepared her 1989 dissertation abstract to share with us, but was unable to due to time constraints. She explained that much of what she had written about then was relevant to what she is doing now. She looks forward to meeting up with the “twenty other people in the world who are really focused on [deixis]” at an international conference in the coming year.

According to Dr. Galbraith, mimesis is the flip of deixis. She gestured to a chair, indicating that while an author captures presence in words, the reader imagines by turning words into presence. Deixis is the author’s performance of presence in words, and mimesis is the reader’s following of “the outstretched finger” through imagination. 

Dr. Galbraith explored The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen creates a compelling and heart-wrenching story of this “Little Match Girl” who after suffering from abuse by her father is sent out into the cold world with nothing but the clothes on her back and a few matches. Set in the time of many children dying, the young girl’s experience outweighs the narrator’s comments on the text. Dr. Galbraith emphatically takes the side of children in stories such as this. She notes that the only other person with any real personality is the boy who steals the girl’s slippers. 

Illustration from Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

Andersen’s book is vital for background in a study of children’s literature, as he is considered the first author actually writing for children and representing the voices of children. Dr. Galbraith argues that “The Little Match Girl” is not didactically aimed towards children, but rather condemns adults, who in the tale do nothing to help the dying girl.

The event concluded with a Q&A session during which students asked about the pedagogical repercussions of this topic, about further resources, and how to better assist students with learning disabilities.

Dr. Phillip Serrato and Dr. Joseph Thomas pose with Dr. Galbraith.

The NCSCL is grateful to all who helped make this wonderful event possible. We especially thank Dr. Mary Galbraith! For an audio recording of the full talk with images and presentation slides, please see the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_mbtnPGCL4

-(SS) and (AN)

Dr. Michelle Abate's "Out of History: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the 1980s, and the Reclamation of a Lost Past

Please join us on Wednesday, February 20^th at 4 pm in Room LL430/431 for “Out of History: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, the 1980s, and the Reclamation of a Lost Past,” a talk by Dr. Michelle Abate, Professor of Literature for Children and Young Adults at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Abate will be presenting on Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s critically acclaimed and prize-winning LGBTQ+ young adult novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Sáenz's powerful historical novel is set in the 1980s. However, it lacks any mention of the AIDS crisis, one of the major crises consuming the United States and the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s.

Abate argues that although the absence of AIDS may initially appear to be a historical oversight, Sáenz is actually offering empowering insight on a completely new way of looking at queerness in the 1980s. Instead of deliberately ignoring AIDS, Sáenz is creating a parallel timeline without the oppression of the existence of AIDS. In doing so, Aristotle and Dante are in an environment where they can live and flourish being queer without the growing stress of the AIDS crisis to create an environment without homophobia-fueled neglect, fear, and apathy. 

According to Abate, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is not to be analyzed as a historical novel, but instead that it ought to be analyzed as a new type of queer speculative fiction in an era otherwise full of fear and misunderstanding towards the queer community. This new insight will allow us to understand this beloved novel in a new and innovative light.

We can't wait to see you at Abate's talk!

(SS)

Introduction to Literature: Personal Accounts (II)

For this installment of my Introduction to Literature Series, I will be featuring Sequoia Stone. She is a second-year M.A. student in SDSU's English and Comparative Literature department, with a specialization in Children's Literature. This is her first semester teaching and her English 220 course is entitled "Reimagining Canon: Literary Confrontations, Adaptations, and Subversions." The following entries are from Sequoia herself!

X  -  X  -  X

I'd had the idea for my syllabus knocking around in my head for a while, ever since I'd read one of my course texts (The Song of Achilles, a queer re-telling of The Illiad) right after reading The Illiad in a course during my senior year of college. While I knew I would have enjoyed The Song of Achilles on its own, reading it on the heel of The Illiad was a deeply illuminating experience. I understood The Illiad better (I read TSOA in six hours the night before my midterm or the course--whoops!), and I was able to approach The Song of Achilles with the tradition and history of The Illiad informing my reading. As I thought about becoming a professor in the far-off future, I thought I'd love the chance to put The Illiad and The Song of Achilles in conversation for my students. When I was presented with the opportunity to teach 220 here at SDSU, I took this initial parting and poured over the books in my library and memories of my undergraduate years in order to create my syllabus based around the idea of reading a "canon" book with a "non-canon" one. Some of these pairings were direct adaptations, while others were simply two texts that echoed similar themes and ideas.

1. What Children's and young adult books or texts were included in the reading list for your course? How were these texts received by the students?

I have eight course texts, four canon and four non-canon. All of my non-canon books are young adult novels: Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker, and Scott Westerfeld's Uglies. I have gotten mostly a positive response to these books, and they are often just as intellectually challenging to my students as the more dense canon texts. Something I would hear often is that reading the YA companion book made things we discussed in the canon text more accessible, as students were able to use more "relatable" texts as a way to retroactively understand things that might have been more austere in older novels.

2. What other texts lended themselves to discuss childhood and adolescence in nuanced ways that were either unexpected or surprising? 

Something that was surprising and delightful to me in my course was how concerned my students were with the interiority or backstory of a character. When reading Lord of the Flies, a student proposed that maybe Jack was so violence because he had a childhood, or was abused. Similarly, in Great Expectations in my class wondered if the villainous figure of Mrs. Joe was more so a product of her upbringing than anything else. While I like to steer these observations back into textual analysis, I enjoyed seeing my students approach these characters as so three-dimensional that they asked themselves, why are they the way they are? It seems that the importance of childhood, the impact of how one is raised, was at the forefront of my student's minds even when we were reading texts not specifically aimed at children or young adults.

3. How does your class's theme carry over to the matters of childhood and adolescence?

Something my class has emphasized throughout our semester has been the importance of familial bonds, and how the family unit impacts the way one grows. Many of our main characters have had abusive parents or families that encourage negativity, and a lot of our discussion has been based around following these characters as they navigate the repercussions of abuse, of cruelty, or of neglect. We have also talked a lot about found families, the family one creates that provides support or love, and how this constructed family illustrates the importance of things like kindness, generosity, and loyalty. As we've moved through our texts, we've also looked at the various ways in which society pressures children and young adults to conform. Whether this manifests as discouraging queerness, encouraging apathy, or dictating beauty standards, my class has talked extensively about the different ways the characters in our novels face crushing dominant ideologies, as well the ways in which it is possible to resist them.

X  -  X  -  X

Thank you so much to Sequoia Stone for the robust commentary and amazing engagement with themes of childhood and adolescence!

-A. Elliott

Following up on Dr. Angel Daniel Matos's Talk

On Wednesday November 7th 2018, Linda Salem organized an introductory lecture for the recently curated Juvenile Collection display on queer young adult (YA) literature. This talk, entitled "LGBTQ+ Representation in Young Adult Literature, Then and Now" was given by Dr. Angel Daniel Matos who presented a historicized understanding of how queer themes and characters appeared within adolescent literature and the recent developments occurring within the field. Dr. Matos focused on highlighting the complex affective implications that are present within the genre of queer YA literature, but how incorporating positive interventions and critiques can generate more productive discourses surrounding these novels.

Dr. Matos began his talk with explaining how optimism and hope operate as critical points of focus within YA literature, but this positive affect was complicated upon the introduction of queer narratives into the genre. Because queerness worked against heteronormative societal structures, discussing queerness with positive affect was deemed as incongruent with the realities possible for audiences. Moreover, queerness within the genre was often posited in opposition to the optimism and positivity that was possible for heterosexual people, thus making it an unreachable possibility for early queer characters. 

When queerness challenged these societal structure, it often led to the death and demise of queer characters in early YA novels. These deaths, as Matos argued, often only worked to challenge and develop the characterization of straight characters in novels, which further confirmed that happiness and future-oriented thinking was not accessible for queer people. This sense of unhappiness, nonetheless, became a political act that more contemporary works challenge and expand upon.

Matos argues that thinking optimistically in a negative world, especially when regarding young audiences, can help foster potentialities of happiness and futurity. He highlighted contemporary queer YA novels that present adolescent characters within positive ideologies that still works towards embracing aspects of futurity for young readers. He advocated for the need to foster connectivity, kinship, and diverse representation within the genre in order to better represent queerness and further develop the field of queer YA literature.

***

Dr. Matos shared several novels that revolutionized the genre starting with John Donovan's 1969 novel I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth The Trip--the first YA novel to appear that grappled with homosexuality for its protagonists. He also discussed Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind, which is the first novel to have a positive depiction of lesbian characters for young adult audiences. For a contemporary example, Matos shred David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy, a novel that works to present queerness within a utopic setting that normalizes diverse expressions of gender and sexuality.  

If you'd like to know more about Dr. Matos's suggestions or ideas just follow him on Twitter to see his syllabi and other projects (@ProfAngelMatos). Thank you to all that attended and to Dr. Matos for providing so much information. A special thank you to Linda Salem for organizing this event and working closely with the NCSCL.

-A. Elliott