This occurred to me a few days ago.<\/p>\n
I was pondering the kinds of of stories that I think of as Magical Realism, and I noticed something I think is worth bringing up. I’m not sure it’s a hard-and-fast rule, but then again the whole MR sub-genre is more than a bit hazy.<\/p>\n
It seems to me that these sorts of stories are, at some level, “self-aware” of themselves as<\/em> stories.<\/p>\n By that, I mean to say that there seems to be a common stylistic element in these sorts of stories – the style of a story being told to an audience.<\/p>\n I’m not sure if I can put it more concretely than that – I haven’t personally encountered a literary term that describes what I’m talking about – but there seems (to me) to be a readily-detected tone in these stories of “This is a story I am about to tell you.”<\/p>\n Or perhaps “Once upon a time…”<\/span><\/p>\n In some cases, it’s subtle, as with At the Mouth of the River of Bees<\/em>. In other cases, as with (for instance) Big Fish<\/em>, the storyteller is front and center and you’re made aware of that structure and style.<\/p>\n And yes, every<\/em> story is a story told to an audience, strictly speaking – what I’m talking about is the sense that these particular stories are framed<\/em> (either subtly or obviously) as a Told Thing: a shared object… and (just as important) at some level, they seems to know it.<\/p>\n I think, perhaps, it hearkens back to MR’s pre-war antecedents: fairy tales. Their origins \u00a0(even if you’re talking only about the south\/central american origins)\u00a0grow, more directly than most, from spoken tales.<\/p>\n Am I making any kind of sense, or it this just early-morning ramble?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This occurred to me a few days ago. I was pondering the kinds of of stories that I think of as Magical Realism, and I noticed something I think is worth bringing up. I’m not sure it’s a hard-and-fast rule, but then again the whole MR sub-genre is more than a bit hazy. It seems … <\/p>\n