Ask the Editors | Mo Yan, 2012 Nobel Prize Winner & the Magic Realism Debate

Dear Editors,

I workshopped my story yesterday. It didn’t exactly fit into the mold. Other students were not so nice, which I could have handled, except that they didn’t seem to know anything about magical realism or surrealism and then tried to tell me how to “fix” it, as if my story had a disease. The professor didn’t do anything.  I feel like a martian living in Salem 1600s. I’m ready to drop the program. Have you experienced any of this? I need help figuring out what to do but no one in my program, professors and such, seems to understand.

 

Dear Alien Writer,

This is what I would do and what you should do, too. First, say: Mo Yan, magic realist, takes the 2012 Nobel for Literature. Then write it at the top of each ms. Tattoo it on your forehead. Give out little Krishna pamphlets in the hallways of your dorm and classroom buildings. Begin naming writers like autism: Kafka, Borges, Woolf… Repeat the names in slow monotone. When people ask you why you keep spouting off these famous and revered writers’ names, you say, because they were magical realists motherfuckers!

I love that a magical realist writer has taken the prize. This is a literary confirmation many should heed, I think. Too many staunch traditionalists stuck on strict realism, snubbing anything else. MFA programs still doing the same. Too many fantasy/SF-ers who snub the magical realists, as if it’s too stick up the ass, not enough world building for them. Tsk tsk. Magical realists are often caught in the middle of this shitty sandwich and editors and publishing houses don’t know what to do with them.

First, encourage people to read more magic realism. Get on the boat, because it’s a really fun and deep ride. AND, please say this with me, magic realism isn’t just for South Americans. Yes, SA has a fantastic and reigning presence, but it’s all over the world. America, too. Spread the word, get stoked. Yes, I’m all hyped up on this. It’s true. This Nobel is very, very cool for two personal reasons:

  1. I had the honor of presenting this year for Iowa’s International Writing Program, a program I think is amazing, students and staff delightful and talented, and a program of which Yan is an alum;
  2. In face of traditionalism and even sometimes snubbing, I continue to write and edit magic realism. Why? Because magic realism can bring to light humanistic and socio-political necessities in creative ways that allow readers to really and fully engage more independently than realist fiction. MR is an abstract painting. The rules can be set more by the reader than the writer.

Mo Yan. You are a hero, sir, and you give us faith.

A note to readers: For anyone looking to read more magic realism/surrealism, here is a random list of authors to seek, off the top of my head. Truly, no order and there are many I’m leaving off this list, simply because I’m all excited about Mo Yan and his win and want to spread the word now rather than research my stacks for days and make a “numbered list.” Consider this just a smattering of good stuff, and it doesn’t include a number of fantastic authors, who veer into the magic, but are mostly realism. I’m trying to identify some of my favorite magic realism authors who fully embraced the form. I am leaving off a few iconic ones, because I simply don’t care for them as much:

  • Virginia Woolf
  • Gabriel García Márquez
  • Jorge Luis Borges
  • Italo Calvino
  • Nikolai Gogol
  • Franz Kafka
  • Vladimir Nabokov
  • Donald Barthelme
  • Toni Morrison
  • Virginia Woolf

A note on Woolf. She presents an interesting conundrum. A number of traditionalist literatis and MFA programs teach Woolf, most often To the Lighthouse.  Any respectable program does and should, in my opinion, but then I’m a Woolf fan. Any respectable experimental course should as well, but then again, I’m a Woolf fan. As a literature student, and then as editor and writer and creative writing teacher, I found and still find it interesting that Woolf, when referred to by traditionalist minimalists, generally receives attention for her stream-of-consciousness form, experimental for her time, but rarely for the magic realism in Orlando, which discussed gender in depth as a woven aspect of the magic realism — protagonist gender bending and all that. Also a worthy discussion, especially for, oh I don’t know, writers? What is this prejudice against magic realism in fiction and why exactly do traditionalists look down their noses at it, when in fact, they have celebrated authors who have embraced it? It is a complicated style, magic realism. It is not a form based on make it up as you go along flimsiness any more than realism is. It requires a great deal of thought and forethought, intricate weaving in order to make it work. I say, look to the Nobel as a guide. A program without magic realism is not a full writing program, in my opinion, and avoiding it is a disservice to students who may very well have genius in this style, but may never know it because they were told by their professors not to mess with that “magical stuff.”

I have more than once been emailed by students of other programs, asking for advice about writing magic realism and how to handle workshops where teachers and/or peers denigrated the form. I’ve been waiting and biding my time before bringing this poor dear and his question to readers. Most disconcerting is that this realism versus magic realism prejudice still continues in programs and workshops. Why? Perhaps it’s because too many programs do not tend to the style and too many teachers and students have no experience with the form. For staunch realism and prose traditionalists, magic realism might as well be poetry. And for idiots who don’t know any better, it is easier to make fun of and try to change than to learn and embrace such things as abstraction, surrealism, blurring of lines.

I send this out to “Alien Writer” and those students who feel misunderstood in writing workshops: you have officially, again, been vindicated. Now spread the word of our new Nobel winner, Mo Yan, and hold your heads high. Then write, write, write your voice, your style, and know you are among friends.

 


Rae Bryant’s short story collection, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, released from Patasola Press, NY, in June 2011. Her stories have appeared or are soon forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, BLIP Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, and Redivider, among other publications and have been nominated for the Pen/Hemingway, Pen Emerging Writers, and Pushcart awards.  She writes essays and reviews for such places as New York Journal of Books, Puerto del Sol, The Nervous Breakdown, Portland Book Review and Beatrice.com. She is the 2012 Patasola New York City Summer Writing Resident and has received fellowships from the VCCA and The Johns Hopkins University, where she earned a Masters in Writing, teaches multimedia and creative writing, and is editor in chief of the literary and arts journal, The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. She has also taught for Iowa’s International Writing Program.


Biography | Ernest Hemingway

ERNEST MILLER “PAPA” HEMINGWAY

Born: July 21,1899, Oak Park, Illinois

Died: July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho — Suicide

 

Ernest “Papa” Hemingway is the expatriate writer we love to hate and hate to love. He is the superhero/antihero equivalent of literary greatness with a Royal Quiet de Luxeon at his hip and a bottle of “grog” in his hand, shirt ripped open for the world to see his big, manly, hairy chest. Journalist, world traveler, fighter, marrying man, decorated WWI Italian army volunteer, sportsman, fisherman, big game hunter, Hemingway’s bravado made him infamous and a fine dinner guest. His contributions to the community of letters is unattested, bringing an understatement and simplicity of style to the modernist canon like none before him. John Updike and Joan Didion, and many more, claim him as a major inspiration. As likely to carry a urinal home from Sloppy Joe’s, his Key West bar hangout, as he was to write major literary works, Hemingway, the man, was sometimes larger than his work and made him the media eye candy of his time.

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

— Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21, The Paris Review
A Conversation with George Plimpton in a Madrid Café, 1954

Hemingway is arguably the patriarch of the Paris expatriates with Gertrude Stein his matriarch and F. Scott Fitzgerald his chum. Rest in Peace, Papa.


HEMINGWAY’S FIGHTS

Hemingway vs. Wallace Stevens (1936) Street fight, Key West, Florida
Hemingway vs. Max Eastman (1938) Max Perkins’ Office, Scribner’s, New York, New York

 

HEMINGWAY’S FAVORITE BARS

Sloppy Joe’s — Key West, Florida
Floridita Bar, San Francisco, Cuba
Dôme, Paris, France

 

HEMINGWAY’S WIVES

Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1891 — 1979)

  • Married 1921
  • Divorced 1926

Pauline Marie Pfeiffer (1895 — 1951)

  • Married 1927
  • Divorced 1940

 Martha Ellis Gellhorn (1908 — 1998)

  • Married 1940
  • Divorced 1945

 Mary Welsh Hemingway (1908 — 1986)

  • Married 1946
  • Widow

 

HEMINGWAY’S NOTABLE WORKS

“Indian Camp” (1924, Transatlantic Review)
In Our Time (1925, collection)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Death in the Afternoon (???)
“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)
Men Without Women (1927)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1935)
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936, Esquire)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
A Moveable Feast (1964)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
True at First Light (1999)
More Books…

 

HEMINGWAY’S AWARDS

The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction (Finalist, 1941) For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Pulitzer Prize in Fiction (1953) The Old Man and the Sea
The Nobel Prize in Literature (1954)

 


 

SOURCES

Heller, Nathan. “Hemingway: How the Great Novelist Became the Literary Equivalent of the Nike Swoosh.” Slate Magazine. March 16, 2012.

Lost Generation. “Ernest Hemingway Biography.” n.d.

Nobel Lectures. Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969.

Plimpton, George. “Ernest Hemingway: The Art of Fiction No. 21.” The Paris Review. May 1954. n.d. 

Rich, Frank K. “Hemingway.” Modern Drunkard Magazine. n.d.

 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

www.hemingwayhome.com

www.hemingwaysociety.org

www.pen-ne.org/news-noteworthy/penhemingway-award