Sartre's characters are prisoners of war, they are spending the night in a jail cell together and have been informed that they are going to be executed in the morning. This news has put them in a removed state from all the everyday objects that surround them: "the bench, the lamp, the pile of coal dust," even their own bodies. In realizing that they are soon to be separated from their realities, environments, and bodies, they come to look at them from an objective perspective. They are alienated from the very things which constitute their selves, and thus they perceive them in an entirely new light. It is precisely this effect which we are trying to achieve in our efforts to force people out of cognitive inactivity.
Symbolism is a common literary and artistic device. It is used to enhance one's appreciation of the message being conveyed, or to express a concept in a poetic and artistic manner. A poet who means to discuss the birth of a child might talk instead about the rising of the sun: both events are a beginning, both inspire awe in those who behold them, and so forth. Many readers will be more appreciative of both events thanks to this comparison, having thought about how the two are similar, and also about how they are different. The genre of magical realism takes this power of symbolism and amplifies it, and it is precisely through alienation of concepts that it accomplishes this.
Gabriel García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude is a fine example of how this works. Examining symbolism is made all the more necessary when the symbol is absurd. In the story, both José Arcadio Buendía and his son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, discover the corpse of a large ship in the area near Macondo, about four days' journey from the sea:
"When they woke up, with the sun already high in the sky, they were speechless with fascination. Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an enormous Spanish galleon. . . . The whole structure seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. . . . Many years later Colonel Aureliano Buendía crossed the region again, when it was already a regular mail route, and the only part of the ship he found was its burned-out frame in the midst of a field of poppies. Only then, convinced that the story had not been some product of his father's imagination, did he wonder how the galleon had been able to get inland to that spot. But José Arcadio Buendía did not concern himself with that when he found the sea after another four days' journey from the galleon." (García Màrquez 12 - 13)
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a fictional story that nevertheless recounts a real history. It relates through metaphor and symbolism the tale of García Màrquez' home country of Columbia. Of course, the reader cannot help wondering exactly how that Spanish galleon did get so far inland, after all. And it is that wondering which leads us to the analogy of the Spanish people themselves. García Màrquez is trying to suggest that our confusion over the galleon is exactly the confusion of the Columbian natives over the arrival of the Europeans in their land. Where did they come from? How did they get here? How have they become so well entrenched? Why has no one noticed this before? Through the apparent incredibility of a galleon four days inland, we come to understand the apparent incredibility of the Spanish usurping of Columbian land.
Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones uses this technique to impart a philosophical rather than a political message. This is really the more difficult task: though the average couch potato will not need much convincing to see how politics can affect his/her life, philosophy is a discipline widely ridiculed and criticized as being too vague or ethereal, not concerned enough with tangible reality.
But to Borges, his philosophy is the very stuff of everyday life, it is the secret of that tangible reality -- it is the true reality behind the ostensible reality which most take for granted. In the Prologue to Book One of Ficciones, "The Garden of Forking Paths," he mentions quite seriously that one of the book's eight stories "is not entirely innocent of symbolism." (Borges 15) When one considers the fantastic events that transpire in the book, it is difficult to imagine that this comment is not meant to be tongue-in-cheek. But in fact, I believe that it truly is not.
Ficciones is a tour de force of magical realism. But Borges chooses to emphasize the term "realism" in his understanding of the genre. To him, reality is already magical enough. He uses sentences like "Late in February, 1939, something happened to him," (Borges 167) as if to say that the mere fact of a thing happening was exciting and fantastic in itself, and needed no adjectival crutch ("something strange happened to him," "something amazing happened to him"). What Borges finds frustrating is that his audience does not share the same mystical view of reality. He needs to show them just how extraordinary their ordinary world is.
The collection's first story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," accomplishes this expertly. Borges spends most of the story establishing an elaborate fantasy world whose commonly held philosophical truths are incongruent with our own.
"The nations of that planet [Tlön] are congenitally idealist. Their language, with its derivatives -- religion, literature, and metaphysics -- presupposes idealism. For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal, but not spatial. There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which is the source of the living language and the dialects; there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs. For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to moondle. The moon rose over the sea would be written . . . upward, beyond the onstreaming it mooned.
"The previous passage refers to the languages of the Southern hemisphere. In those of the northern hemisphere . . . the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky or some other accumulation." (Borges 23)
The very organization of thought required to exist in such a world is an assault on our sensibilities. Borges presses this attack, showing how the thinkers of Tlön reduce a materialist philosophy (closer to our own territory) to nonsense, demonstrate its inherent absurdity. Then he goes on to claim that objects on Tlön are created and exist solely by the power of suggestion -- they are a sort of consensual hallucination. These objects, called hrönir, the imaginary objects of an imaginary planet imagined by an imaginary country, are beginning now to invade our own world, he says -- our own "Orbis Tertius." How can this fail to make us question whether we ourselves are not truly imaginary? "English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet," Borges' narrator says. "The world will be Tlön. I take no notice." (Borges 35) His casual disposition toward the uprooting of our established patterns of thought leaves the reader with a chill.
The magic of Borges' ideas, of his storytelling, has not failed to take root. A recently published story entitled "Borges Rides the Cyclone" tells the fanciful tale of the author himself, in his old age, blind and wandering in a mystical haze around Coney Island, trying to discern why all passers-by encourage him to "Ride the Cyclone":
"‘Ride the Cyclone,' says a man from a wheelchair, scuffing Borges's wingtips, rolling brutal on his shifting feet. . . .
"‘Excuse me,' says Borges, this time not meaning it quite as much, wondering already (returning to walking, his walking stick tickling the buckled pavement before him like an insect), What is this Cyclone? A beast, after all, in the middle of this mess? A Grendel to the masses. . . ." (O'Brien 83 - 84)
In a dream, a doctor, a friend of Borges', has revealed to him in metaphor what the Cyclone is already -- what it really is, and what it will be to him. "A train within a church," he calls it,
"A train running through a thousand churches, each church housed within the other, no church any smaller, yet churches all within the same church, each identical but for the religion practiced upon its altar, each religion the same but for its different god." (O'Brien 84)
The churches, I believe, are people: their religions, those people's worldviews. The Cyclone is the vehicle which will carry Borges through all those people and all their unique perspectives, which are somehow all the same. In the end, Borges discovers that the Cyclone is, in fact, a popular roller coaster, and he manages to take a ride on it himself. And it does grant him a sort of transcendence, a rare ability to experience what others have experienced before, though he thought he could not. It also allows him to defy seemingly immutable law, as he has attempted to in his stories:
"And then the great beast awakes. The groggy Cyclone coughs, sputters, rises from the ground.
"Borges lifts into the sky. Thinks Borges, rising, What am I doing? If I could see, what would I be seeing? Climbing the sky like a Pegasus, the clack and thunder of this mechanical monster (could the Cyclone really be a monster? would a monster bring me so much joy?) lifting against gravity, against what is undeniable, against what is real. Thinks Borges, this is really quite fun." (O'Brien 93)
This, then, is magical realism: a sort of extreme form of symbolism, an exaggeration to the point of impossibility for the sake of driving home a metaphor, a vivid illustration of what the audience ought already to have noticed, though they have not. It is an art form which hopes to let us see what we have not yet seen, though it has been right before our eyes all along. I admire magical realism and its practitioners for their relentless pursuit of this worthy goal, and in addition for their beautiful and poetic execution of it.
But even greater in my estimation is the artistic form of surrealism. By this I mean a deliberate, sometimes calculated, incongruity within the work of art itself. Good surrealism ought to be jarring to the audience, at least initially; like magical realism, it should strike the audience with its unorthodoxy and unexpectedness, but unlike magical realism, it should only rarely suggest its meaning so directly. It must force the audience to tease its meaning out of it, or to arrive at their own meaning for it.
Antonin Artaud describes something like this in The Theater and Its Double, in which he describes what he calls a "theater of cruelty."
"To create art is to deprive a gesture of its reverberation in the organism, whereas this reverberation, if the gesture is made in the conditions and with the force required, incites the organism and, through it, the entire individuality, to take attitudes in harmony with the gesture. . . .
"I propose then a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of higher forces.
"A theater which . . . recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection." (Artaud 81 - 83)
Artaud is joined by many in claiming that art is not entertainment: its job is to make the audience take something away from it, to make them think something or feel something.1 But he is unique in being willing to go the extra distance and say that art must be cruel, that it must assault the audience, that they should feel its effects whether they want to or not.
Such is the case, for example, with Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot. I have spoken with very, very few people who failed to use the word "boring" to describe this play. I once sat through a showing of this play with companions who later said the experience was agonizing. But this is precisely Beckett's objective. The play is meant to be boring and agonizing, because Beckett's intent is to show us how our daily lives are boring and agonizing in just the same way. The irony of Godot is that Vladimir and Estragon have lived this way for years, and may continue to do so for years to come, without ever realizing, or in any case properly addressing, the futility of their plight, of their existence. But were they to come into the theater and watch the play, they would howl with laughter at the characters who were in fact themselves. So should we do the same: we must realize that Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky, and perhaps even the messenger boy, are us. It is we who are up there on stage, making fools of ourselves; we who sit in the audience, making fools of ourselves by laughing at ourselves making fools of ourselves onstage.
But surrealist art (of which Godot may not be the best example, anyway) need not be offensive in contrasting perception and reality. Much of the greatest surrealism is, in fact, quite funny. Allow me to reprint, in its entirety, one of my favorite surrealist works.
