c o l u m n
MAGICAL REALISM 101
a s k    t h e    p r o f e s s o r

BY TAMARA KAYE SELLMAN

~ Featured Educator ~

KATHERINE VAZ
Luso-American author, professor
The Azores & southern California

_____________________________________________________________

FIVE YEARS ago we had the extreme fortune of featuring fiction author Katherine Vaz, who teaches English and literary studies at the University of California-Davis. Her books, Fado & Other Stories and Saudade, perfectly capture the spirit and essence of literary magical realism. We've kept in touch since then; she's helped check some Portuguese translation work for us as well as hooked us up with other writers committed to the magical realist sensibility. Vaz is a generous, friendly writer who has done a lot to advance the interests of the Luso-American creative community, as well.

Recently we discovered she'd taught a magical realism course through the Harvard extension this spring, and I decided to ask her about her experiences with that project.

KATHERINE VAZ, ON TEACHING MAGICAL REALISM

Where have you taught magical realism previously? Where are you teaching it now?

I developed a grad course when I was an Associate at the University of California at Davis, and I taught a two-weekend abbreviated version of it two years ago at the New School in New York. This past spring, I offered it through Harvard Extension.

Describe your current teaching situation (what are you reading? what are students writing/learning? any stories from "the front" you wish to share?).

Right now I'm a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. I teach a beginning and an advanced writing workshop per semester. I love the students here—so bright and engaging, so astonishingly well read. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures and their writing reflects that.

Why are you interested in teaching magical realism?

Magical realism—emphasis on realism—is an artistic avowal that what we see in front of us—what we agree exists in the natural world—is blended with mystery and liminal areas, dreamscapes, daydreams, the inexactness of memory. Many of the so-called magical realists strive toward capturing how the invisible and visible worlds co-exist, inform each other.

I tend to speak casually about "getting" magical realism. It seems to me that readers either naturally understand it or they reject it, with very little middle ground. Is this your experience, as well? How would you apportion the numbers of your students who "get" it versus those who don't "get" it?

I actually think that students quite welcome getting magical realism once you've made the somewhat easy explanation that this isn't fantasy genre or sci-fi. They like that Gabriel García Márquez, for instance, characterized himself as a social realist. They like that Bruno Schulz—who is perhaps more surreal, more in his writing akin to the way Chagall painted—insisted that his brilliant technicolor imaginings were his factual autobiography. Students are hungry for that, I think; readers are hungry for worlds that speak to their own interior landscapes. No one is quite a picture-postcard or photo inside; it's more of a swirl of dreams, longings, memory, fragments of history. Many of my Harvard Extension students had never read any of these books before, and several of them remarked that it fed them to a depth they'd forgotten literature could provide.

Also, I think the area of study here gets too caught up in how to define it. I try to resist making inflexible categories and then reading a book and having us all decide where to shelve it, where we can be comfortable placing it. What I emphasize is that each person can construct his or her own writing—or life, or perception of life—with whatever colors in the paintbox that person might like, with whatever design elements that speak to the depth within us. So much of contemporary literature tends toward the analytical, the intellectual, and that tends to create stories we can hold at arm's length. What we need are stories that allow us to submerge ourselves. Stories that offer the ways we're stupid, the ways we are in pursuit of mystery. No one needs slick stories by know-it-alls.

A lot of energy certainly must go into the defining of magical realism—what it is, what it is not. I've seen class plans that ask for students to correctly "identify" magical realism. Is it really possible to accurately "identify" magical realism as a narrative category?

I addressed this in the above question, but—having said all that—I do think there are elements that we can discern that help qualify a book in this area. I'd refer people to the excellent textbook, Magical Ralism: Theory, History, Community by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, editors. They include essays discussing magical realism's roots in German painting, along with the seminal essay by Alejo Carpentier defining magical reality as simply accounting what exists in a true but marvelous way. He distinguishes this from surrealism—the juxtaposition of impossible things—by saying that magical real elements are the possible but not probable. Ghosts, for instance: You may never have seen one yourself, but we've all heard of stories by perfectly rational people as to their existence. So Morrison's novel Beloved becomes clear reality, a direct account of haunting.

Well, there are a lot of other elements to consider, but the main one is that magical realism eschews smoke and mirrors. Look at the world until it seems new, or strange. Report reality. For instance, someone related to my family when I was growing up thought in color. She was from the Azores, like the rest of my father's family, and she couldn't read or write. My father said, "She thinks in color," and, since she also couldn't identify numbers, he painted over her phone dial with different colors and made a posterboard with dots of color with pictures of the doctor, fire department and so on so she could dial the phone. That's a true story. I used it as a metaphor when I wrote my first novel, since it seemed, also, like a language of love. It's when people stretch too far into invention, ironically enough, that magical realism can fall apart. Even Gabriel García Márquez finally said that magic could tire people; it's an expanded notion of reality that we all want.

What would you say are your students' most common misunderstandings about magical realism?

Some students were adamant about wanting to define it with an iron-clad certainty, I suppose, but lots of them really didn't have what I'd call a misunderstanding about it. They found it quite eye-opening and said that the literature spoke to them in a way that hit their true emotions. One of them said that this was the amazing discovery; he'd thought it would feel less real.

Which magical realist authors have inspired you most as a writer? As a teacher?

Here are some of the authors we've read: Mrs. Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls; The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Requiem by Antonio Tabbuchi; Toni Morrison's Beloved; Miguel Angel Asturias's Men of Maize; The Palm of the Hand Stories by Kawabata; The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino; and Under the Frangipani by Mia Couto.

Because of my Portuguese background, this list is a bit heavy on the Lusophonic literatures, but I heartily recommend Mia Couto's book and also Tabucchi's (he's of Italian descent but writes about Portugal) to everyone. Some of my recent students said that Couto's book was a stunner; one put it on her all-time favorites list. I admit this list short-changes so many other possibilities; certainly Rushdie's Midnight's Children is conspicuous in its absence, along with the works of many other literatures. This course was meant as an introduction, a way of showing that magical realism is far more than simply a Latin American phenomenon.

Here's a variation on that last question: Which authors (in general) have inspired you most as a writer? As a teacher?

Certainly Gabriel García Márquez, but Toni Morrison inspires me to look with a fresh eye on my own American landscape. I like her insistence that American culture is not any one thing. But there are so many authors I enjoy, many of whom aren't magical realists. I love the work of James Salter, for instance, and Alice Munro. I believe in reading widely but especially deeply.

When you choose literature for your magical realism classes, what are some of the selection criteria you keep in mind?

I look for variety. Kawabata's stories, for instance, have ghosts in them, and quick transitions, but they also make a fine counterpoint to Carpentier's insistence that a baroque world requires baroque literature, or density, or cataloguing. Kawabata's spareness is no less evocative of a certain magic.

Do you think magical realism as a literature subject is more popular than, less popular than, or about the same as it was twenty years ago? Do you see any trends in magical realist literature at the university level? The popular level?

It probably hit a peak of popularity a number of years ago; I was glad to see the flood of enthusiasm for it. Now it's leveled off, but these trends come and go, while great books remain waiting for us to find them.

If you were to give any advice to a professor teaching literary magical realism for the first time, what would it be?

Start with the definitions of the uncanny as offered in the early 20th Century by Franz Roh and others (the Zamora and Faris textbook is a wonderful guide with all of this), and don't get too hung up on defining the subject. The important thing is to enjoy how the students react to literature that insists there are liminal and invisible worlds that deserve different modes of expression on the page. It's also fun—and revealing—to have students attempt to write some magical realism themselves, with an emphasis on realism. And try the Couto novel; that one struck such a wonderful chord.

To find out more about Katherine Vaz, visit our 2000 fiction feature pages.

Tamara Kaye Sellman is founding editor and publisher of Margin.
respond to this column

margin home | contents | links | reading list | marginalia | contributors | staff | guidelines | kudos | subscriptions | contact us

Layout, design & revisions © Tamara Kaye Sellman, Webmaster
Active home URL: http://www.magical-realism.com
(also: https://www.angelfire.com/wa2/margin/index. html)

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

TERMS OF USE: This site contains copyrighted materials, including but not limited to text and graphics. You may not use, copy, publish, upload, download, post to a bulletin board, include in any weblog or otherwise transmit, distribute or modify any elements of this site in any way, except that you may download one copy of such contents on any single computer for your own personal, non-commercial use, provided you do not alter or remove any copyright, author attribution or other proprietary notices.

Rev'd 2005/06/06