Gabriel García Márquez - who’s become the most visible example of magical realism, and who also railed hardest against the designation - brought elements of myth and fable into the real world. Though often conflated, this is something distinct from the magical realism tradition of Latin America. The story, called “Marzipan,” ends with the whole family eating frozen marzipan cake, saved from the grandmother’s funeral. When the baby comes, however, it’s the woman’s mother, who died the year before. Shortly after, his wife learns that she’s pregnant.
Here’s an example of the genre, taken from Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: A week after the death of his father, a man wakes up to discover that he has a clean hole through his torso.
I first encountered what has since been described as “fabulism” in the work of Aimee Bender. Fairytales and fables have always been a way of working out or working through, of presenting what is complex and thorny in neat, allegorical packages that anyone can understand. But Bettelheim - or, more appropriately, Julius Heuscher, from whom Bettelheim allegedly borrowed most heavily - was onto something. The moral of this little fable is something like: Don’t trust a wolf just because he wears your grandmother’s clothing. Ironically, after his death, Bettelheim underwent something of an animal transformation himself: It was revealed that some of his practices had been fairly cruel, his credentials were forged, and much of his work was plagiarized (including The Uses of Enchantment, his most famous work, in which he gave Freudian interpretations of children’s stories). The Austrian-American child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim was among the first to suggest that fairytales had psychological use - that stories of violent stepmothers and animal transformations helped children work through the real existential problems they were largely too young to put into words.
0 kommentar(er)
