Magical Realism, Jung, Picasso & the Circus

Without the marginal or liminal world, we are not able to experience the numinous - the mystical experience, the feeling we are in the presence of the gods or a universe which fills us with awe and wonder. Often this happens in nature, sex, meditation and dreaming, but are also primary concepts in both art and the writing of Magical Realism.
The marginal or liminal world which exists outside of the constructs of society, has been named in the past in other cultures: the Celtic Sidh, the land behind Maya, the veil, in East India. It is the place between the real world and the ethereal realm, a magical world, where we confront archetypes, gods and spirits.  Both numinous experiences in liminal or marginal peoples and locations  are where we confront our own inner archetypes, the hidden inner gods, spirits and even the demon or the shadow, as Jung called it. In our dreams we meet dark and dangerous entities and helpful guides. But we can also encounter them in our waking life, by using our lunar mind in creating fantasies and active imagination; in writing, painting and meditation. 
Recently the Asheville Jung Center, presented a webinar called, Tending the Lunar Mind, by Dr. Murray Stein, a noted Jungian analyst who is also a professor at the International School of Analytical Psychology (ISAP) in Zurich, Switzerland, the same university where Jung taught. Dr. Stein spoke about two important aspects concepts of the lunar mind: the marginal and numinous.
 The liminal is the place outside of the practical, organized structured world, but it is real. Gypsies and Circuses both live marginal lives: moving from place to place, and it was interesting to discover that Picasso had an affinity for both, as well as a keen interest in primitive art, creating much along those lines in his sculptures and some of his paintings, but also in little fetishes he hid in his studios. By living as marginal life as a starving artist, not following conventional rules, he could enter the liminal realm, become very much in touch with his lunar mind. This highly evident, as if we had the visual images of his dreams, in many of his paintings where he evokes archetypal motifs: the most obvious the bull, which he felt represented himself, and which he learned to identify with form his youngest days when his father an art teacher, took him to bullfights. Picasso said that he at times, painted his women as the horses on which the bullfighter rode and who were sometimes sacrificed to the fight, as seen in paintings like Guernica, his anti World War II German Invasion of France painting. All of these searches, through the expression of his art, was his search for the Sacred Fire, that powerful act of revelation which comes through creative acts. Picasso's youngest son with Francois, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, claimed Picasso told him how he often didn't realize the symbolism in the images he painted were relevant to his personal life until later, a while after he finished his paintings, such as in Guernica.  
And so he could be close to the deepest depths of the liminal - in touch with the numinous, driven by his left brain/lunar mind thinking. To facilitate this, he chose other people to manage the practical side of his life, his many mistresses, eating in cafes and hiring managers to sell his art.
He was so fascinated with the gypsies who brought the circuses to his childhood home, that he often portrayed himself or others in Harlequin clothes. In the early 1900's in Spain at Carnivale and later to a lesser degree, in France, the Harlequin was not a funny clown, he was more Mercrurial, much like Hermes, whose jokes could often be sinister, cruel and confusing and sometimes even dangerous and terrifying.
Picasso called the circus,The Vague Terrain, as if he was already so entrenched in the lunar mind, that he could name it - a landscape which to him was another place and time.   
I found this all to be rather comforting, and revealing after I watched the brilliant video biography: Picasso: Magic, Sex and Death, which I found at the library. One of Picasso's close friends and his biographer, John Richardson, narrates and interviews members of Picasso's family, people he knew, and their descendants, as well as primary sources.

The books I write and am editing, fall in the category of Magical Realism. Parts of the books are based on fact: locations, politics and weather events (Katrina in Shaman Circus, the n'or easter and tornadoes in Mass. in Shaman Exile, and the flooding in Australia in Fireworks, Interference Equation. The magic is not full out fantasy, but a sort of an escalation, an exaggeration of real events which become magical, often, as lived and viewed by the characters. 

Jung discovered the lunar mind in the 1920's, when he began listen to the fantasies of a patient named Miss Miller, this was before neuroscientists found it in the laboratory and named it the left brain, which he found was emotional, fantasy oriented, and worked in childlike with images and stories. At first, Jung believed the lunar or right brain was inferior to the solar mind, the left brain, which was directed, organized, logical, practical, and followed the rules of society, as taught in the schools and lived in the cities. But as he worked with Miss Miller more and more, he discovered that the lunar mind was a story teller with purpose, it's ability to hyper associate, work in images and storylines, quite different from the real world, but relating to the real world, proved more informative and valuable to the sanity of a person. Recently, neurscience has confirmed Jung's interpretations of the lunar mind and found in clinical research that without sleeping and dreaming, people are be unable to thrive and even survive.Their health suffers, they are unable to regulate their body temperature, make decisions, judge other people as trustworthy, and be correct in the flight or fight syndrome when danger arrived. They end up with their immune system challenged, their anxiety high and become unable to handle their emotions.

I'd often wondered why I called my first novel Shaman Circus, since there's no circus in the novel. Just a rather confusing round of Shamans who can't quite figure out how to live their destiny and more often fail or are punished by circumstance for their failures or perhaps as tests of their commitment, but also manage to create incredible forces of power for good in unusual ways.  My second novel in the Shaman series, Shaman in Exile, does include plot aspects within the liminal world of the Circus in the countryside of France, on the outskirts of a city. I chose to include a circus, because of the amazingly bizarre circus we have in Greenville, SC called, The Inner Circus. Beside scheduled performances, stilt walkers, poi spinners, mimes and other performers dressed in odd, not conventional circus costumes, and sometimes frightening masks, often show up at the park, on Main Street, or art fairs and our first Friday Gallery Crawls in the Pendleton Arts district. When I lived in my studio in that area, 2007 and 2008, it was a highly liminal world. At night, due to crime at that time, the area was deserted, not a car parked anywhere, not a person in sight. This was when I was writing Shaman in Exile. At that time, I had no idea the circus was considered a liminal realm, or that appeared in Magical Realism novels.
 So it was an act of synchronicity to watch the Picasso video after the Tending the Lunar Mind webinar. Now I finally get some of Picasso's cubist works, not my favorite, I prefer his blue period, but now I understand more of what his paintings mean, but also why he kept morphing his style in more and more bizarre styles. Due to the way he felt inclined to paint himself in Harlequin costume, he allows his solar mind, his massive ego, to take the liberty of entering the lunar mind when he stepped in his studio. In fact, eve3n with his solar side, the Bull, when he entered the liminal realm in his studio, he became a shaman, and often thought of himself this way, according to his son, as unpredictable as the Hermes/Mercurial Harlequin.Pierrot. Picasso is one vibrant testimony, among the many in the artists and writers to lfind the lunar realm through creative acts, at the very time Jung was discovering the liminal worlds in the minds and dreams of his patients. 

Magical Realism III

Magical Realism III


So my personal journey into the hypnotic world of magical realism came through the British, came when I first read W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. After reading the book I was enthralled with the concepts and Hudson’s audacity to allow the magical world to encroach on the real world. For years I searched for other such experiences in the literary world. I wasn’t writing much at the time, mostly a weekly column for a local town newspaper, but I was hooked and the idea of creating and populating such real places with magical aspects took hold. But, I couldn’t find many other novels like Green Mansions. So, like with much of my writing, I tried to write the experience I wanted to encounter. I was unsuccessful at the first three novel attempts.

Then I read The Magus by British author, John Fowles. A book which touched me so powerfully, I read it at least once a year, and have given more than 30 copies of the book to other writers, poets and artists in the hope it will inspire them to believe anything is possible as it inspired me. Many papers and discussions on magical realism list The Collector by Fowles as his only magical realism book. But I disagree. Fowles, himself considered The Magus his magical realism novel (as he noted in the revised edition’s intro) and I wonder if the writers who include The Collector in their magical realism lists have actually read the book. I have a feeling they’re instead citing the title from previous publications or essays. To me The Collector is far from the field of magical realism as it doesn’t contain some of the most imperative aspects of this misinterpreted literary style.

When I undertook to write Shaman Circus, it was going to be a dark fantasy novel, but as it shifted and changed, by its own direction, magical elements crept in: ritual and carnival, political uneasiness and tragedy in both the community and in many personal lives, struggles between the established civilized order and the spiritual needs of a population very different form the rest of the US, and then there’s the magic in everyday life – the means to help people cope with events too big for the mind to grasp. Small everyday ways to be able to breathe when overwhelmed. The story evolved because of what the characters could or could not do. There was too much realism for fantasy and I wanted there to be hope and healing in the face of the horrors. I didn’t follow any format for magical realism and didn’t even realize it fell in that realm until three years after I’d finished the first draft and a couple of revisions. Previously I’d written some literary pieces, but mostly dark fantasy and psychological horror. So this was a switch. Most of it must have been subconscious. I only realized it fell in that character when trying to write the synopsis to seek publication. Strange things indeed.

And things they are a-changing again…

When I started searching on Duotrope – (an online data base and submission tracker of over 2700 print and online magazines) for publications which accepted magical realism fiction a couple of years ago, very few magazines opted to publish such stories. Now each day brings new magazines venturing into this often confused and not fully understood territory and a lot more of them came onboard within the last few months.

So you do the math…

What is Magical Realism?

What is Magical Realism - part I

Over the next few blog entries, I'm going to discuss the style of magical realism.  It's an illusive term, often confused and misinterpreted and I have my own interpretation to add.  It's not necessarily a scholarly one, but a personal approach, launched by all the books I've read since the mid 1970's that seem to fit the term.

As an intersting sidenote, Jennifer Mattison, a literary agent with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency,has written an entry on her website predicitng magical realism may be a field mined for the next big thing in YA books.While I don't write YA books, I find this interesting since the YA and adult markets often cross-reference. So you might want to check out her opinion.

so off we go on this magical mystery ride...
What is Magical Realism?

a very brief overview...

Readers may ask what is magical realism. This literary style conjures authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, thanks to Venezuelan, Arturo Uslar-Pietri who adopted the term. He used it to describe the work of  particular Latin American writers who wrote in a vivid style laced with folklore and the acceptance of magic in the everyday world.

.However, the term – magic realism - was coined many decades earlier in the writings of a German art historian. At the same time, in a Jungian synchronistic way, separately and without communication, an Italian magazine editor mentioned the term.

“Franz Roh in the 1920’s presented magic realism as a reaction to expressionism, and independently in the Italian journal Novecento, edited by writer and critic Massimo Bontempelli. It was adopted during the 1940's by Latin American authors who combined the theories of Roh and Bontempelli with French surrealist concepts of the marvelous, and incorporated indigenous mythologies within traditional mimetic conventions in their quest for the original Latin American novel. From the 1960's to the present, there has been a strong current of magic realism within the general movement of post-modernism, especially in British and North American literature.” -- the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

And while magical realism started out to first describe paintings following the expressionist period, when it turned to fiction, the shift was dramatic and took on more momentum in literature than it had in art. Franz Kafka, one of the first authors to be labeled with the term, was followed in later decades by English authors, W.H. Hudson and John Fowles in the humanist-realist 50’s movement, also called 'historiographic metafiction. This was also linked to late modernism's experimentalism, and then later with the 'fabulation' of authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie.

Granted, many changes and terms were thrown around in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s following the period of the deconstruction of the novel and dramatic new swings in all of the arts.  Latin American novels, along with the works of the likes of Rushdie brought magical realism to the bestseller racks and a renewed curiousity from the general reading public.

to be continued....

In the next section I'll discuss the various elements often found in magical realism which sets it apart form straight literay or genre fiction.