How to Write Magical Realism

/www.ehow.com/how_2159950_write-magical-realism.html

Mexican Traditions

Setting is an important element to this book. Laura Esquivel writes from what she knows. As she wades through this story about a woman who wants to seek out her passions, it is clear that she infuses her writing from her own background.

For more info on a biography of Laura Esquivel:
http://www.biography.com/articles/Laura-Esquivel-185854

Remember that Like Water for Chocolate is a flashback story. It begins and ends with the a woman telling the story of her great aunt Tita. This present day setting acts as a frame through the story.

The bulk of the story revolves around a young girl, Tita, fighting against the traditions and issues that are relevant during the turn of the twentieth century in Mexico.

So, what are those traditions?

I'd like you to work together to find background information about these five topics:

Food

Fabrics

Family/Women’s Role

Mexican Revlution/Flag

Cultural Rituals – Religion/Tradition

www.wallwisher.com/wall/likewaterforchocolat
Each of you should find one fact or website or youtube video about each of these topics and your contributions here:



So, the question is, How does YOUR background influence your writing?


MAJOR WRITING ASSIGNMENT:


1. An essay about your passions


or


2. A story in which you try your hand at magical realism


READ: Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings"
salvoblue.homestead.com/wings.html





As you begin to think about your next projects of writing about your passions or creative magical realism stories, your stories will be infused with your background. How can you elaborate on that and make it uniquely you?

Food is an important aspect in Mexican culture. What is important in YOUR background? How can you use that, like Laura Esquivel, to stabilize your and focus your writing?

Today's Writing Exercise:

Create a RECIPE for a real or imagined food, action, or PROCESS!!!

A RECIPE is a "How-to" description that includes "INGREDIENTS" and "PROCEDURES"

Magical Realism/Like Water for Chocolate

1. What is Magical Realism?
2. What have you noticed about the book so far?

Interested in more links?

Laura Esquivel's biography:

http://www.biography.com/articles/Laura-Esquivel-185854

IMBD about Como agua para chocolate:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103994/

Magical Realism:

Definitions of Magical Realism:

http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/resourcebank/definitions/

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/MagicalRealism.html

http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_mr.html

Last day of classes: Stories, Contests

Last day of classes for this marking period.

2nd person short stories are due.  Contest entries?

Good luck on all your exams.

Finish 2nd person short stories/Laura Esquivel

Today, FINISH your 2nd person short story.

Enter contests and sign the contest entry sheet.

HMWK:  For Monday, read January, February, and March in Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate: Introduction
First published in 1989, Laura Esquivel's first novel, Como agua para chocolate: novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores, y remedios caseros, became a best seller in the author's native Mexico. It has been translated into numerous languages, and the English version, Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies, enjoyed similar success in the United States. The film version, scripted by the author and directed by her husband, Alfonso Arau, has become one of the most popular foreign films of the past few decades. In a New York Times interview, Laura Esquivel told Manalisa Calta that her ideas for the novel came out of her own experiences in the kitchen: "When I cook certain dishes, I smell my grandmother's kitchen, my grandmother's smells. I thought: what a wonderful way to tell a story." The story Esquivel tells is that of Tita De la Garza, a young Mexican woman whose family's kitchen becomes her world after her mother forbids her to marry the man she loves. Esquivel chronicles Tita's life from her teenage to middle-age years, as she submits to and eventually rebels against her mother's domination. Readers have praised the novel's imaginative mix of recipes, home remedies, and love story set in Mexico in the early part of the century. Employing the technique of magic realism, Esquivel has created a bittersweet tale of love and loss and a compelling exploration of a woman's search for identity and fulfillment.

Like Water for Chocolate: Laura Esquivel Biography
Esquivel was born in 1951 in Mexico, the third of four children of Julio Caesar Esquivel, a telegraph operator, and his wife, Josephina. In an interview with Molly O'Neill in the New York Times, Esquivel explained, "I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room. The smell of nuts and chilies and garlic got all mixed up with the smells from the chapel, my grandmother's carnations, the liniments and healing herbs." These experiences in her family's kitchen provided the inspiration for Esquivel's first novel.
Esquivel grew up in Mexico City and attended the Escuela Normal de Maestros, the national teachers' college. After teaching school for eight years, Esquivel began writing and directing for children's theater. In the early 1980s she wrote the screenplay for the Mexican film Chido One, directed by her husband, Alfonso Arau, and released in 1985. Arau also directed her screenplay for Like Water for Chocolate, released in Mexico in 1989 and in the United States in 1993. First published in 1989. the novel version of Like Water for Chocolate became a best seller in Mexico and the United States and has been translated into numerous languages. The film version has become one of the most popular foreign films of the past few decades. In her second, less successful novel. Ley del amor, published in English in 1996 as The Law of Love, Esquivel again creates a magical world where love becomes the dominant force of life. The novel includes illustrations and music on compact disc to accompany it. Esquivel continues to write, working on screenplays and fiction from her home in Mexico City.

Short Story in 2nd person

As we approach the end of the marking period, please work on completing your 2nd person short story.
We'll also be picking up Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.

Let's also go over your character blog assignment for the Eyre Affair.

Discussion Starters for A Prayer for the Dying

Today, read over the following discussion questions and post a response to one of them in essay form.    Develop your response using specific examples from the book.  These questions require thoughtful answers focused on what O'Nan has written (AP English students take note of Question #5!).  How does this novel relate to other works you have read in or outside class this year--(Question #8--Fugitive Pieces, The Things They Carried)? A little critical lens practice, perhaps, in comparison and contrast?)...

Continue to work on your second person short story as well.

 Some excellent discussion starters:

Link to blog:

http://thelibrarium.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/discussion-starters-for-a-prayer-for-the-dying/

1)  A Prayer for the Dying uses as its epigraph a quote from Albert Camus: “There is no escape in a time of plague. We must choose to either love or to hate God.”  How does A Prayer for the Dying illustrate this quote?  Do you believe that Camus is correct in presenting the choice we must make in such stark terms?
—–
2) Richard Eder, in his review of A Prayer for the Dying, writes:

[Jacob Hanson, the protagonist] is, he tells us, the town sheriff. He is the minister. He is the undertaker.
This wacky accumulation expresses his obsession: Out of the destruction of the war, when God seemed to have vanished, Jacob is determined to reinvent Him. He cares for his town as God is supposed to care for the world: He punishes transgressions, provides faith for the living and passage for the dead. “Credo quia absurdum” — the classic religious formula of, roughly, “I believe even to absurdity” — becomes, as horrors multiply, its own horror: I believe right on into madness.

What are your feelings about Jacob’s descent into madness?  When did you first recognize that all was not well with him?  Can religious belief become absurd, and do you see evidence of Eder’s contention above in the book?  And, can religious faith not only descend into absurdity, but even madness?
—–
3) Eder also goes on to state, “Clinging to his faith, Jacob disputes it as well. Here is one of his tortured arguments with himself:

” ‘It’s not right,’ you say.
“Who are you angry with?
“Not God
“No? Who else is there? Is this the devil’s work?
“It must be, you think, but uncertainly.”

Eder concludes with, “It is the problem of belief: how to reconcile God with evil. O’Nan carries it further. In Jacob he has the believer, torn. He has God, as well: struggling in despair with the same problem.”
I know that a book discussion forum is too limiting a place for a full expose on the problem of God and evil, but what does O’Nan say about this problem in A Prayer for the Dying? 
—–
4) Patrick McGrath in his review in the NY Times reminds us of O’Nan’s use of the second person singular and present tense in his writing: 

O’Nan has employed a surprising but ultimately successful narrative technique for Jacob’s story: it is told throughout in the second-person singular and the present tense. Thus Jacob’s references to himself as ”you” have a self-distancing effect; it is as if he doesn’t fully occupy his own being and observes himself from some other place. He is both in his own experience and outside of it. This is a fine perspective for a narrator who will be forced to move from the orderly, predictable contentment of his life in a placid 19th-century farm town to confront the appalling prospect of chaos and destruction as the people around him sicken and die and the brush fires advance ever closer.

Stewart O’Nan once said

“I mean, I could’ve written, I think, Prayer for the Dying, in first person but it probably wouldn’t work nearly as well. This particular character has this overdeveloped sort of superego and it’s always sort of accusing him. No matter how well he’s doing it’s always sort of saying, “You’re screwing up, you’re screwing up, even though he wants to be this perfect, blameless person, so it fits him perfectly.”

In another interview, O’Nan says:

For A Prayer I needed an intimate narrator capable of fairly hiding things from the reader. So I knew it had to be a first- or second-person, because a third- who’s unreliable is kind of cheating. I tried the first, and it was too close. I was reading Robert O’Connor’s Buffalo Soldiers, written in the second person, and noticed how the voice scourged its owner, tapping him on the shoulder whenever he’s doing wrong, like a conscience or superego. It’s the same use of the second as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights Big City, or Charles Johnson’s story “Moving Pictures.” And I thought: what effect would that scourging, nagging, blaming voice have if it were inside a man doing everything he could to prevent a terrible, unavoidable catastrophe? Especially a man who loves his town and feels responsible for everything and everyone. And as I wrote further into the story, I noticed that the voice would veer close to Jacob and then stand apart from him, accusing, and that it worked to highlight that gothic split in him of the strange and troubled private side and the solid and responsible public side. The hidden vs. the seen. And it also works as that ceaseless voice in the head of a mad person, the voice that won’t leave him alone.

Did you find this narrative technique to be successful or off-putting?  Did it take a while for you to settle into the book because of O’Nan’s style here?
—– 
5)  Mark Winegardner, writing for Barnes and Noble, says:

When I finished Stewart O’Nan’s A Prayer for the Dying . . . I called him. I told him how jealous I was that he’d been able to write such a large-vision book in such a svelte (190-page) package. Flannery O’Connor was right: A good man is hard to find, when what’s meant by “good” is moral and not civil, when it refers to something larger than likability. What O’Nan does in this book — create a convincingly good man and put him in the middle of his story — is among the toughest acts a novelist can perform.

Given some of his actions in the story, Is Jacob Hanson a good man?  Is he a moral man?  Does Hanson believe, as one reviewer has stated, ”that the calamity is all his fault.”  Is it even possible to be a good man in a time of madness.
—–
6) In the first chapter we find this bit of dialogue:

“In Heaven you forget everything,” she says. “In Hell they make you remember.”
No, you think, it’s the other way around. “Maybe so,” you say.

Which do you think it is, if either?
—– 
7) O’Nan says that the one question underlying all of his work is “When do you give up?” Which, he concedes, “is a horrible question to ask, but it’s a question that a lot of people have to face.” Then, echoing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, “That’s the question.”
Do you see this question reflected in A Prayer for the Dying?  Is this question “the question?”
O’Nan also once stated, ”I am primarily a realist and hope to show great empathy for my people without softening the difficult situations they find themselves in-yet my work inevitably veers into the cruel and the sentimental…It is extreme fiction masquerading behind the guise of mainstream realism. I hope it is generous, or, as Cheever said, ‘humane.’”
Is A Prayer for the Dying a humane book despite its extremes?
—– 
8) On the last page of the novel Jacob thinks:

“The whole idea of penance is selfish, misguided. You can’t bargain with God, buy Him with pieties. This is what you’ve found out – that even with the best intentions, even with all of your thoughtful sermons and deep feelings and good works, you can’t save anyone, least of all yourself. And yet it’s not defeat. After everything, you may still be saved. Your mother was wrong; it’s not up to you. It’s always been His decision.”

Ultimately, what does this book say about Divine providence?  Do you agree with Hanson’s statements?

Prayer for the Dying

This haunting novel, written in the second person, paints a disturbing picture both of the reality of an epidemic in an age before effective vaccines and antibiotics and of the psychology of one who witnesses mass death. This story might take a place beside Poe's The Masque of the Red Death in a course on the literature of epidemics, raising unsettling questions about the strategies that enable some to survive what drives others to madness or suicide. Because it is told in the second person (which some readers might find a bit distracting at first) we seem to be required to fathom Jacob's complex character from the inside looking out.

Masque of the Red Death     www.online-literature.com/poe/36/

Today continue reading A Prayer for the Dying after our discussion.

Begin working on your own 2nd person short story.

Enter Sokol contest.  Go to SokolContest@gmail.com and follow instructions.  Poetry and fiction

Gannon Contest--1-3 poems.

Lelia Tupper (juniors--Alfred University)--12 pages mixed, an essay and creative writing.  See Ms. Gamzon