Old School Style Magical Realism and Quantum Mechanics

by Christopher Agostino

This week I visited a couple of English classes in our local High School to tell some very old folktales. The students are studying the genre of Magical Realism in literature and film. They’d read authors such as Gabriél Garcia Márquez and seen films like Pan’s Labyrinth. I went a little more old school on them to tell a 1000 year old Japanese Demon tale  to get their attention (having just seen the Storytelling in Japanese Art exhibit I had to tell a demon tale). We discussed the universal belief of ancient human cultures in a spirit world and what we today would call magic, and how, from a storyteller’s perspective, modern authors include such elements in fiction to tap in to this ancestral understanding that the world is more than what it appears to be, using magic (or science fiction, for that matter) as a vehicle to open up the reader to new perceptions about their own lives.

It is an old device. When Homer wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey (the oldest examples of Western literature) he was already writing about a time that was mythic from his perspective, and using mythological stories as conceptual archetypes in the way a modern Magical Realist might. As a young actor I was in a version of The Odyssey that might be termed “Realist Magicalism” because it reframed the myth as psychodrama, making it the inner psychological journey of Odysseus from adolescence (reckless hero) to maturity (responsible husband) a la Joseph Campbell’s interpretations of hero tales via Freudian (or perhaps more accurately Jungian?) psychology.

Pan's Labyrinth

Image via Wikipedia

In one of the classes we came to a discussion of reality vs. magic, after I asked how they felt about the wonderfully ambiguous ending of Pan’s Labyrinth, was it all real or just an escape fantasy? That led to Einstein’s Relativity Theory (which has a philosophical implication that the universe changes depending on your point of view) and even more relevantly, Quantum Mechanics. The usual  argument against magic is that it doesn’t obey the laws of physics, but now, looking at the quantum level, we seem to have a physics that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, so what does that say about what’s magic and what’s real? (judging by some recent posts I stumbled across researching this, that seems to be a hot debate in the physics world, see related articles)

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