Marvelous Writing: The Sentence Will Save the Form
A woman is seduced by a yeti. A girl visits home to witness the literal dissolution of her mother. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder creates the conditions for a dangerous love triangle. A teenager falls in love with a mummified girl that he finds in a bog. Ghosts of girls narrate the aftermath of their own deaths.
I’ve hardly entered a bookstore recently without opening a collection of short stories that reads something like the blurbs above. In fact, each premise has been pulled from one of a plethora of books I’ve read in the past year. They come from different collections, but they form a larger constellation of a kind of story that has proliferated in the past five years. Why, I ask, book jacket in hand, another love-making yeti or cyborg boyfriend in the blurb, so many of these? And what is it that threads them together?
This constellation has been called magical realism, surrealism, and speculative fiction. Ayse Bucak’s Trojan War Museum (2019) was called “at once uncanny and startlingly real” and Karen Russell’s Orange World (2019) emerges from “the author's off-center, magic-inflected world.” Kate Folk’s Out There (2022) unearthed the “weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience.” Paige Clark’s She is Haunted (2022) was termed “fantastical and quirky” and Allegra Hyde’s Last Catastrophe (2023) a mix of “dystopias and parallel universes.” Meng Jin’s Self Portrait with Ghost (2022) was placed on the spectrum “from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight.”
To squabble over genre would be to take away from the very potent delight of these kinds of tales: a capacity to traverse an enormous affective range, to play lightly at the surface of life and to sink to tragic human depths. Their charm derives from the fluidity of genre and emotion; they unfold unexpectedly, forcing us to attend to the text because at any moment the hard rock of the story’s world is liable to crumble, slip like sand through our fingers. Quirky fantasy turns to horror; technological dystopia turns to desperate romance. Silliness plays a critical role in creating this dynamism. For the height of the silliness (yeti lover!) allows for the depths of the melancholy (grief, loneliness, the lengths we will go to forget an ex), just as the heights of the surreal allows for the depths of the real, the utterly human.
Cuban writer and critic Alejo Carpentier, who wrote extensively about Latin American art in the early twentieth century, gives us a name for this ineffable delightful quality: the marvelous. In his essay “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” from 1975, he distinguishes between magical realism and surrealism. As opposed to surrealism, which imposes fantastical elements onto otherwise realistic settings, he tells us that magical realism uses fantastical elements to expose the inexplicable reality of the world around us—in these texts, he tells us, things like ghosts and men turning into bugs and telepathy are both emotionally true and entirely real. Regardless of the distinctions between the genres, though, he says that surrealism and magical realism share an interest in “the marvelous” which he is careful to differentiate from “the beautiful.” “Ugliness, deformity, all that is terrible can be marvelous,” he writes. “All that is strange is marvelous.”
Indeed, in order to understand these stories’ rising popularity, it is helpful to situate them in a lineage of “marvelous” texts interested in using unreality in the service of better seeing reality, like a distorted mirror that brings out the ugliness, or loneliness, the untended wounds that we might not be able to look at otherwise. The lineage includes Kafka and Borges—whose interest in unveiling the labyrinthian and bureaucratic (the “ugly” marvelous)—manifests in blurring the lines between the realistic and the illusory. So, too, does the magical realism of Latin American authors seek the “marvelous” ugliness of colonization. They infuse fantastical elements into the fictional worlds to reflect “great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism," as David Lodge argues in the Art of Fiction. In other cases, these tools are used to represent experiences that themselves have no name.
Carpentier coined the term “marvelous real” to describe the particular kind of art that emerged from newly colonized Latin America. Colonization was an undefinable experience—the size of the land and the nature of the culture, the buildings, the religious experiences, and the enormity of the atrocities committed in this “new world.” Carpentier argues that “in order to understand and interpret this new world, a new vocabulary was needed.” Whereas the “marvelous real” is geographically and temporally specific (Latin American, European colonization), a lineage of writers from other places and times have borrowed these tools to describe their own indescribable worlds. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, writers like Angela Carter, Aimee Bender, and Ramona Ausubel used “modern fairytales” to equip themselves with language to discuss gender, romance, casual cruelty, and motherhood. By infusing daily events with mythical accoutrement, these writers defamiliarize readers with the ugliness (and, sometimes, tenderness) of the world we live in, allowing us to see it more clearly. It may be, for instance, that we are best able to understand the complexities of masculinity through the story of a lonely cyclops looking for love on a dating app (“You Can Find Love Now,” 2014). Or through a tale of a man passing onto his son the desire to take from his wife the one thing that she says is private: the ribbon around her throat (“The Husband Stitch,” 2014). These stories take an oblique approach to the events that are flattened by ubiquity but that are yet mystical experiences (things like birth, death, love, jealousy). They reinvigorate these concepts by making them strange to us.
By identifying this “marvelous” lineage, we can see that these tools have been used to give language to that which we fear we can’t face, or that—facing it—we are unable to name.
This history gives us a good reason to suspect why these stories have become so popular. Because lately our world seems only to consist of the things that are impossible to name, that can’t be understood from one vantage, one genre, one discipline. Professor of English at Rice University, Timothy Morton, calls these phenomena that supersede human imagination “hyperobjects.” Things like the Anthropocene, artificial intelligence, the pandemic, or globalism more broadly. And that’s exactly what these modern marvelous texts address. They take the tools of magical realism (and surrealism!) to respond to the equally terrifying modern prospects of climate change and online dating, diasporic identity and the Amazon algorithm. These pair nicely with the evergreen perils of loneliness, alienation, the desire for connection. These texts reveal the need for a “new language” to express the marvelous moment we live in.
But looking through the ten-some books in front of me in this genre, it is hard not to feel that tropes have begun to emerge and threaten the delight—the strangeness—at the core of the stories. It is difficult, for instance, to find a collection that doesn’t involve a modern, aimless woman unsatisfied in her relationship with her dumb/dud/bum/inept boyfriend. Many of the collections involve body modification or body horror. All spend some time explicating dystopian climate change scenarios. Then, there are the creatures. At least seven collections involve stories about ghosts.
The question becomes: If this genre formed out of the need to describe the indescribable, what happens when the genre of surrealism itself becomes codified? When it develops its own tropes? Will it be able to survive the systems it is designed to make unfamiliar? Or will it become recognizable, flattened? How does one preserve the delight, the absurdity, and the dignity of this genre?
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Originally, I set out to review The Last Catastrophe (2023) by Allegra Hyde and She is Haunted (2022) by Paige Clark. I couldn’t help but think of them in the larger context of marvelous stories, and whether or not they themselves might be endangered species.
Hyde and Clark are on two sides of the spectrum: The Last Catastrophe sidles up to speculative fiction while She is Haunted nears realism; her worlds—while strange—don’t always advertise themselves as alternate. Both include many of the tropes above and both can help pinpoint how the genre of surrealism, speculative fiction, or magical realism (whatever we call it)—that “marvelous” quality—is imperiled by cliche, and how it might yet be saved.
As a warning to humanity, Hyde’s Last Catastrophe succeeds in realistically depicting what might happen when climate change strikes. It portrays the mundane ways in which humans will trek onward, outward, or inward—as in the case of the story in “The Eaters,” which takes place in an enclosed compound designed to exclude genetically modified zombie-humans (this is a drought-ridden, famine-ravaged world). In “Colonel Merryweather’s Intergalactic Finishing School for Young Ladies of Grace & Good Nature,” a girl speaks to her Hal-2000-esque artificial intelligence machine on a spaceship that seeks a new planet that might be hospitable to human life. In these large world-building premises, there are moments of brilliance, like with the title and concept of “Colonel Merryweather.” By combining futuristic space travel with outmoded finishing school (and in the sheer length of the title) Hyde embodies some of that delightfully strange combination of Things That Don’t Match. The contrast provides commentary on the way that—even after we’ve destroyed the earth—traditional gender norms will flourish. That is to say, technological progress does not equate to social progress. This is an important social statement for the world that Hyde describes, in “The Eaters,” as harmed by an “overemphasis on STEM [that] created an imbalance in civilizational prioritization.”
However, the futuristic premise is undercut by experience of reading the heavy-handed exposition and social commentary. In “Colonel Merryweather,” the AI tells the main character exactly what happened to the earth:
Twenty years ago, centuries of unchecked industrialization had soured the once green-blue planet Earth. The air was choked with poison chemicals. The oceans swilled with plastic. The land was raw from overuse. Everyone was getting sick and hungry. There was mass die-offs of plants and animals. The situation was only projected to worsen. The planet would grow increasingly inhospitable and violent as people fought over the few remaining resources.
Because this comes from the mouth of AI, it is afforded a kind of robotic exposition, yet it feels like a trope or template, as if it were copied from a promotional video about climate change. It makes us aware of the alternate world being described, but it doesn’t make us enter or feel that world.
A similar device is employed in “The Eaters” when a historian explains: “The treatment did not address the famine’s underlying issue: capitalism’s gaping maw.” While I agree with this critique, it comes across as a present-day humanist projecting herself into the future. It didn't make me feel the truly strange nature of the future I was being thrust into. Reading some of these stories felt like reading Dystopian Fiction Describing A New World And Critiquing the Old, as opposed to being immersed in a world that is totally foreign. It lost the “marvelous” quality of the new world, in part because it failed to create a new vocabulary.
What enlivens this genre is the surprise at what might come next and the strangeness of experiencing not just a new idea, but a new expression of that idea.
Some of Clark’s stories might offer a response. In She is Haunted, Clark directs the mirror of magical realism toward the human experience and spends fewer words on world building. In fact, many of her stories are more realist than surrealist, only lightly inflected by the uncanny. A few—one about a worker at a department for romantic rejections, for instance—are glaringly “otherworldly.” But it is her language that affords a sense of the strangeness of ordinary life.
In the story “Times I’ve Wanted to be You,” for example, she writes about a woman who tries to become her dead husband by wearing his clothes. At his funeral, she “[imagines] the too-white velvet lining of the coffin itchy against my fingers.” By saying “imagines,” she situates herself outside the coffin, looking in. However, in the next line, there is no such boundary between her imagined world and her reality as the “pallbearers . . . lift [her] above their heads.” Finally, she enters not just the coffin, but his body. She claims: “I wear his skin like a suit. It fits me perfectly.” By inverting the metaphor from “wearing his clothes like skin” (what she is actually doing) to “wearing his skin like clothes,” Clark slowly drops us into the husband’s body alongside the main character. Clark accepts the character’s feeling as reality because the premise of the simile is that she is wearing his skin. Clark toes the line between reality and imagination, making us, the readers, enter the realm of the ghostly, the departed, alongside the main character. Through language she makes us experience the ghostliness of grief. At once, she is not her husband and she is. Here, the “marvelous” takes place for the character through the grief, but for the reader the marvelous is infused into the sentence structure.
Clark uses the same tools to embody the experience of climate change. “Amygdala” depicts a climate change dystopia at a more indirect angle than Hyde’s “Colonel Merryweather.” The premise: A woman (Eliza) and her husband remove their amygdala and a frontal cortex, respectively, in order to reduce their body temperatures in a time of extreme heat (it’s 138 Fahrenheit outside!). In a similar passage to Hyde’s robot exposition, Clark writes in close third person, as Eliza addresses herself in an internal monologue:
Holy hell Eliza! You lost your narrator. Plastic was the word you wanted. The oceans are swimming in it. Due to an abundant crop over the past hundred years, we’re eating the shit. Forget mama’s milk. Our babies are born sucking the silicone teat.
We get the same context as in Last Catastrophe: Radical, life-altering climate change is here. And it’s only getting worse. But because Clark treats the postoperative state through free indirect discourse, we emerge from the darkness of surgery along with Eliza into the distorted world of the future. She not only describes the heat, but the story alters her narration; as she acknowledges, her own relation to language shifts (“you lost your narrator!”). She struggles to regain access to lost words, and when she recounts them, they seem to have accumulated new meanings, like a face that has gathered creases with time and wear. This world is familiar, but it is not the same. What’s more, Eliza is aware of herself as a storyteller, as a dealer in that flimsy tool of language, which lends humor and destabilization to her narrative. We feel it in her words—in the metaphor of the “silicone teet” that suggests the integration of the artificial and organic, and in her near inability to remember that there is language to describe “plastic.” With the changing of the world, so comes the changing of the brain, so comes the changing of language. In the last scene, a song comes on, but because of their respective brain damage, Eliza has lost motor function and her husband has lost memory; she remembers the song but cannot sing aloud and he may not remember it, but is able to sing out loud. She writes: “His lips move in sync with mine, but I make no sound he can hear. / It isn’t a language we know. / But we are singing the same damn song.”
The last lines are metafictional in that they describe the needs of the genre as well as the couple’s particular situation. It is imperative that the story not merely describe a new world in old terms, but also ensure that the strangeness of this new world leaks into the DNA of the story, either through formal experimentation, or through deep attentiveness to words themselves.
There are moments in Hyde’s collection that succeed in creating this new language. Last Catastrophe shines when the attention to form and language mirror the nature of the hyperobject in question. For instance, in the sweet and clever story “The Tough Part,” the disintegration of a marriage is mirrored by the global extinction of moose. Together, a couple dresses up as a fake moose and shepherds the last five moose to a better place (Canada), only to realize that “the tough part is that we are actually already in Canada.” That is to say: there is no place that hasn’t been overwhelmed by real estate and drought. The refrain of “the tough part” echoes anaphoristically, followed by different accounts of what exactly is so tough, until the last line: “The tough part is continuing on,” which repeats ten times. The phrase is reminiscent of Beckett's Molloy: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Every action is scraped of its specificity, reduced to the blunt force of time pulling us forward. Because, well, what else is there to do? In the pure repetition, we feel the weightiness of the mundane (continuing in a tepid marriage) to the existential (continuing to believe in something, in having children that will “continue on” until every scrap of habitable earth is taken). We come to feel in this story the thing she describes in the more sci-fi story “The Eaters”: that the end of the world will come sooner than we expect, and that we will continue to live through it for longer than we can imagine.
There are a few other striking pieces in which formal experimentation and attention to language allows her worlds to breathe, to blossom. In “Mobilization” a group of people are constantly on the move away from climate disaster; the piece has a frantic, frenzied feel, with the montage of places and events spinning by alongside the characters:
The Gulf: A gullet. It swallows us, grinds us . . . we are pressed and squeezed beneath all that weight. . . . In our lightless, airless underwater coffin—down where the moon can’t find us—we are fossilized, liquefied, transmogrified . . . underneath it all, we are chemicals, superheated: we are millions of years in the making. We wait—to be called up, summoned—to burst to the surface, burn into motion. We are ready.
The characters’ entropy seeps into the language, which itself proliferates, spins out of control (swallows, grinds, fossilized, liquefied, transmogrified). We don’t just witness the end, but we—with the language—dissipate, become primordial.
This is true more broadly of the other collections that take on modern hyperobjects. Kate Folk, Rita Bullwinkel, Paige Clark, Karen Russell, Ling Ma, Ayse Bucok, and their compatriots in this pursuit of the “marvelous,” shine when they borrow the inter-genre form and the attentiveness to the sentence, rather than constructing premises with the old building blocks of familiar language. The point is that the old building blocks are outdated. Because the truth is that these surreal experiences cannot be described. We can’t wrap our language around them; that’s what’s so odd about them. They are here, yet they are unimaginable. Words therefore cannot describe, but should reveal in a fell swoop—in their twistedness, in their unconventional treatment—the oddness of these situations, and the effect that these hyperobjects have on our world down to its most microscopic structures. The language must be as marvelous as the plot.
Texts Referenced:
Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis and Other Stories (1915)
Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones (1944)
Samuel Beckett - Molloy (1951)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude (1967)
Alejo Carpentier - “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (1975)
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber (1979)
David Lodge - The Art of Fiction (1992)
Aimee Bender - Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures (1998, 2005)
Timothy Morton - Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013)
Rita Bullwinkel - Belly Up (2016)
Carmen Maria Machado - Her Body and Other Parties (2017)
Ramona Ausubel - Awayland (2018)
Karen Russell - Orange World (2019)
Ayse Bucak - The Trojan War Museum (2019)
Ling Ma - Bliss Montage (2022)
Meng Jin - Self-Portrait with Ghost (2022)
Kate Folk - Out There (2022)
Paige Clark - She is Haunted (2022)
Allegra Hyde - The Last Catastrophe (2023)