The Plague of Doves: "Magical" Realism

Claire Massud writes about Louise Erdrich's new book:

there is no such thing as "magical realism." There are, instead, culturally specific experiences of the real which, when rendered in fiction, produce different results. Raised in an essentially Protestant setting, I had in youth absorbed, unawares, an essentially Protestant understanding of the world: one that strives for a rational grasp of events, one that espouses clarity, directness, and mastery. In fiction, this leads to largely linear narrative, in which the lines between cause and effect can be clearly traced, and in which, in spite of welcome complexity, there remains an underlying certainty of limits, boundaries, and order."

...Massud's grandmother's family subscribed to "a worldview unlike that to which I had been largely accustomed. Mystery, silence, downright oddity, the overdetermined symbolism of the artifact, of its presence, of its placement —this, I realized then, represented an alternative approach, a different way of experiencing, and hence of fictionalizing, the world."

The novel is The Plague of Doves. Reviewed in Blood Relations - The New York Review of Books. I'm ordering it from my local bookseller - I need to read this story of a mixed native American middle-class girl and her grandmother's tales.

I'm also interested in Massud's take on so-called magical realism. What is real depends on what your culture says is real. "Magical realism" is what you call somebody else's view of reality because it can't be "real" in your paradigm.

Comments

[arduous]

Hey, I was told to come back in September! September damn it!! Good for you for staying on schedule even if you are blogging here and there. I haven't the heart to give up on my novel, but I ain't writing it either.

[Leila Abu-Saba]

I know. I am powerless over my blogging addiction.

However I did two of my novel tasks today, including one I'd meant to do tomorrow. Now I'm going to print out what I've written so far this past ten days. And the Erdrich novel is part of research. (always an excuse).

[Leila Abu-Saba]

PS re writing your novel, Arduous - all you have to do is do a little something today.

Jane Smiley's book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel is a wonderful guide and companion to writing a novel of your own. She does say, rather heartlessly but with kindness: "nobody really wants you to write your novel but you, so you might as well just get on with it." I read her whenever I'm feeling stuck - there's something about her sensible advice and her loving analysis of 100 novels that makes me want to go work on one of my own...