Living in the City

“Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”-Karl Marx

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities says that what makes up a city is not so much its physical structure but the impression it imparts upon its visitors, the way its inhabitants move within it.



Descending from psychogeographical techniques that started with the Situationist dérive, one now even finds artists measuring the Chi of their cities with giant acupuncture needles. Such attempts at urban holism however go back to ancient China, where feng shui was used not just to make sure one's room is copacetic, but to determine that the proper building place for every house, shrine, and tomb in the city was aligned to the entirety of the cosmos. Thanks to modern technologies we can now also map the psychology of locations.

Rewriting Reality

Yesterday I finished my classes for the semester, and despite the gorgeous weather drifting into the stuffy wooden room through the blue stain-glass windows, the students in my short story class were somehow excited to continue discussing the functions of literature. Debating Salman Rushdie's use of both magical realist elements and the English language in his collection "East, West" as a move towards a broader global perspective, one of my classmates asked why is any of this important to talk about, he's just a writer trying to make some money. Just a writer? Both my teacher and I had to bite our tongues, certainly one does not write in order to make money (just ask any aspiring author and many acclaimed ones). Something that we've been discussing all semester, through the writings of Poe, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, and Rushdie, is the way in which literature can present the expectations and conventions both of literature and of life itself back to the reader, reaching for ever larger perspectives on what it means to write, to inhabit a culture, to create reality. While not explicitly addressed in class I have been debating with my classmates over what I see as being one of the most important functions of fiction: that it can create reality, if even at the very least by suggesting new and other ways of being and perceiving the world and ourselves. If there's anything I've gotten out of this semester it is the recognition that writing has the power and responsibility to shape reality.

Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.

According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?

This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.

Synchronicity of the Fantastic

As I noted before, I've been doing a lot of research recently on the aesthetics and techniques of using the fantastic in literature, and as often happens when I'm doing a lot of research on the right subject that I need to be studying for my life, there is a moment when synchronicity takes over and it seems as if the universe is just throwing the right texts at me.

In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.

There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.

And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.