MAKING MAGIC BELIEVABLE

By Bonnie Stanard

Magical realism (MR) incorporates the unbelievable into the world as we know it. In other words, we writers convince readers that magic is as ordinary as life. After recently reading The Erasers by AlainRobbe-Grillet, known for his ability to mix fact and fantasy, I took notes on how he did it.

TheErasers is a mystery novel about a murder. Descriptions wander with the perambulations of the protagonist—a police inspector named Wallas who has been called in to solve a murder. As he walks from the post office to the police station to what may or may-not be a murder scene, his gets lost, goes in circles, or in one case, ends where he began, which I admit, tests your patience. These geographic twists and turns are accompanied by a vague time line, though the entire story takes place in 24 hours.

Signals crop up suggesting there never was a murder. Witnesses provide vague answers to questions. The description of the murder suspect fits that of Wallas, the investigator. A clock stops at the beginning and starts up at the moment of a murder, which may or may not be the one being investigated. Ambiguity requires us readers to supply our own facts along with what is given. We think we know what's going on, but do we?

WRITING TECHNIQUES TO NORMALIZE THE FANTASTIC

Ideas I've taken from The Eraser that blur the lines of reality.

—Suppositions. As the inspector summarizes the situation to a police officer, we realize that his facts are actually presumptions. Nonetheless, the inspector takes action based on presumptions, though the question persists about what is real.
— Conditional verbs, e.g., could, may, might. In most fiction, these words are dead-weights that slow down the action, but in this instance, they add an element of unreliability.
—Recurring adjectives. To describe different people and/or places using similar adjectives allows a range of uncertainty. Doppelgangers are good.
— Unemotional narrative voice. In other words, when the tone is cool, calm, and collected, the reader tends to believe... even magic.
— Point of View. Without bending the rules too far, a careless approach to free indirect discourse POV allows different characters to provide biased views, deconstructing reality. The POV may blink, but not so much as to dislocate the narrative point of reference.
— Unclear antecedents. This is annoying, but I can see the point of it. There are times when I underlined the word “he” because it could reference either of two different persons. Lack of clarity sidetracks authority.
— Character ID. A close relative to the previous point is to delay referring to characters by their names in describing a given situation. Grillet uses terms like the man, character, customer, pedestrian. This adds fog to the scene, which launches doubt about the identity and/or nature of the character.

My favorite magical realism book is Life of Pi. Yann Martel's masterful writing will have you believing a boy on a raft after a shipwreck can survive with a tiger on board. (The book is better than the movie, which is also good.) Other MR books I've enjoyed are Love in the Time of Cholera; The House of Spirits; and Like Water for Chocolate.

An informative definition of magical realism can be found on Neil Gaiman's Master Class notes.