Realistic Fantasy and Fantastical Realism

I read an excellent essay by James Wood yesterday called "Hysterical Realism." Since I had heard of this essay before reading it, you can rest assured that this will not be the first time that it has been discussed. But discussing it isn't really my intention, although discussion is inevitable in any conversation to which we hope to add.

By hysterical realism, Mr. Wood means novels by writings like Salmon Rushdie, Dave Eggers, Tom Wolfe, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace. Novels which draw from reality but also are set apart from reality. It is almost like reality on speed. Mr. Wood says it better; he gives the image of a work of art that is in constant motion because it is too embarrassed to stop. That would reveal its own shallowness.

Mr. Wood's central assertion is that such fiction is insufficient because the sum of the improbabilities while conceivable in reality, cancel one another out when they are taken together. He uses one of Zadie Smith's characters from "White Teeth" as an example. This character, the head of a fanatical Muslim religious group called KEVIN, is the son of Presbyterians from the Caribbean who converts to Islam, studies the Koran in Saudi Arabia and moves into the London garage of his Mormon aunt. Mr. Wood argues (persuasively, I think) that any one of these details would have been acceptable if Ms. Smith had taken the time to show a connectivity between them, but that she never does. The reader is bombarded with a barrage of humorous details, but none of them is true.

Mr. Wood also argues that these novels are too closely related to reality to constitute Magical Realism (a movement which started in South America but is sometimes connected with writers like Rushdie) because they are too closely related to reality. I agree with this assertion broadly, but, in this case, Mr. Wood has missed an excellent opportunity to set the record straight. This is what I will try to do, though I am not a critic of any great ability.

One fact of which Mr. Wood is aware, I believe, is that Magical Realism is a sort of fiction which commonly has a mythological setting but is writes against the grain of that setting. (The village of Garcia Marquez's short story, "The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is not a village inside of time or history, but that does not prevent the old man from having insects and parasite in his wings that the chickens dig out of them.) Hysterical Realism, as Mr. Wood calls it, is a genre which is grounded very much in the contemporary world, but writes against the grain of that world, making the mundane fantastical. In that sense, the writings of Rushdie and Smith are the antitheses of authors like Marquez; they are the anti-Marquezes, not his heirs. But now for the point which I wanted to get around to: I believe that a better title for the Magical Realism movement would be Realistic Fantasy (I substitute "Fantasy" for "Magic" because the word "Magicalism" does not exist) and a better name for Hysterical Realism would be Fantastical Realism. To refer to a novel like "One Hundred Years of Solitude" as Realistic Fantasy acknowledges the fantastical base and content told in a realistic form, whereas to refer to a novel like "White Teeth" as Fantastical Realism delineates the realistic base and content while acknowledging the fantastical form.

Devotees of Realistic Fantasy (as I will now call it) will say that the setting of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is not fantastical; after all, is there not a real village of Macondo which Garcia Marquez visited on a trip back from school in his early twenties? Yes, but the universe of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a universe far removed from those which we occupy. It is a universe in which people live for hundreds of years and blood streams for miles to find the right person. It is a different universe with similarities to our own. The universe of "White Teeth" on the other hand is the same, although it has some differences from the one which we usually experience. The usefulness of the two terms, Realistic Fantasy and Fantastical Realism, lies in the fact that they acknowledge the two genres are not the same thing, but rather antitheses. But, as they say, two sides of a coin are never far apart.