EE Draft v1, Gabriel Garcia Marquez PDF

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EE Draft v1, comparative literature epq on Gabriel Garcia Marquez...

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I. Introduction “My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.”  - Gabriel García Márquez Magical realism has become a popular storytelling method within the literary world. Popularized by Gabriel García Márquez, modern day writers are taking advantage of the technique to tell imaginative stories through time distortions. Time distortions are when the logical nature of time is bent, felt when the narrative transitions back and forth so many times along the time spectrum that one loses track of time. An example of this is the two short story collections The Coast of Chicago by Stuart Dybek and The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami. With both authors using time distortions through fantastical elements and spatial features in order to incorporate magical realism into their stories, The Coast of Chicago and The Elephant Vanishes both blur the lines between the past, present and future in order to simultaneously blend the real and fantastic.

Having been born and raised in Chicago, Stuart Dybek’s works are commonly based in the urban setting of the United State’s city life. As a writer of Eastern European descent, Dybek uses his short story collection The Coast of Chicago to highlight his cultural background by delineating the lives of “outsiders - loners, eccentrics, misfits, visionaries, who are tied to one another only by a shared sense of yearning and loss” (Kakutani, 1990). Through the depiction of the lives of the misfits in Chicago, Dybek employs magical realism in order to take his short stories beyond the city and uses every story’s setting to distort the reader’s sense of time. With even Dybek mentioning how even “sometimes I [Dybek] forget that there’s a real Chicago,” in his interview with Kelly Luce, his magical realism is presented through a sense of memory and the traveling to the places where “the conscious mind can’t go—the fourth dimension, the microscopic world where Newtonian physics break down” (Luce, 2014). This sense of memory is what draws readers to his work as especially in the case of his Japanese following, they are drawn to “the sense of natsukashii, which might be loosely translated as ‘nostalgia,’ or more literally, ‘the sweet sadness of memory,’ that it evokes” (Luce, 2014). Therefore, although his stories were shown to lack the “cumulative, mythic power” presented through his lack of a “central hero” or an “authorial perspective to put the characters’ dilemmas in context with the

larger world,” Dybek’s individual stories “possess an emotional forcefulness” as “they introduce us to characters who want to take up permanent residence in our minds” (Kakutani, 1990) thus conjuring up a fictional world that is both realistic and fantastical.

Similarly to Dybek’s The Coast of Chicago , Haruki Murakami’s short story collection The Elephant Vanishe s also takes place an urban setting, however this time in Tokyo, Japan. First published in Japanese during the 1980s, the short stories are placed in the context of the rapid economic development Japan was undergoing at the time. With this industrial era shrouding late 20th century Japan, Japan began to host a more technological culture. However, while the Japanese began to embrace the available technological advances, they are known for preserving their customs, with traditional and modern values forcibly coexisting with one another. By also shifting through the time spectrum throughout his short stories, Murakami entertains his readers by blending “the fantastic with some strong realist fiction” (Getter 2017). With his “often dark, often comic, and (even more) often strange stories” (Wright 2017) also highlighting the bizarre lives of his Japanese characters, The Elephant Vanishes’ “meandering narrators have the rootless, shiftless, listless, air of characters waiting around for something to happen” (Rees, 1993). Thus it can be seen that even though the two collections are placed in very geographically distinct cultural contexts, both collections represent the human experience through literature by using their common urban settings as a foundation for time distortions.

I first read The Coast of Chicago as I admired the way Dybek incorporated varying types of imagery to provide the reader with a first-hand sense of being within the setting of the story, leading to me being most drawn to “Farwell” at the time. However, rereads of the collection led me to admiring the even clearer magical realism taking place in the other stories such as “Pet Milk” and “Nighthawks.” Especially through these two stories, I was able to cultivate an enthusiasm for magically realistic literature, leading me to stumble upon The Elephant Vanishes. At first, Murakami’s style of magical realism did not appeal to me as unlike Dybek — whose works revolve around the lives of misfits — Murakami uses magical realism in order to give life to the mundane everyday lives of people. By noticing how magical realism could be applied in very different manners, I wanted to investigate the techniques used by two writers from two very different cultural context. Thus, I was able to develop the question: What techniques do Stuart Dybek and Haruki Murakami’s employ to distort time and how does this aid the magical realism essential to their respective collection of stories, The Coast

of Chicago and The Elephant Vanishes? However, this paper will focus on the short stories “Nighthawks” by Dybek and “The Dancing Dwarf” by Murakami.

II. Fantastical Structure A central technique of Murakami and Dybek’s work is the establishment of fantastical elements in their storytelling. Fantasy is the incorporation of the supernormal into everyday life. By showing how anything can happen, the mundane nature of everyday life is transformed into a mythic world. When one enters a fantastical world, there subsists a sense of timelessness as time is irrelevant and can be bent. Thus, when the characters switch in and out of the fantastic world to the real, the readers may lose track of time. Both authors can be seen establishing paranormal worlds in their stories and integrating them into the everyday lives of their characters. Since time becomes irrelevant when these characters enter the fantasy world, there is a sense of timelessness in the recurring shifts throughout the time continuum. Thus, by letting their characters switch in and out of the fantasy world, time is distorted, allowing for the establishment of magical realism.

In his short story “Nighthawks,” Dybek narrates the lives of two lovers over an extended period of time: from the start of their relationship to the time long after they break up and move on. Dybek tells this story through the presence of a fantastical world where “silhouettes” reside. Through the introduction of unreal elements, Dybek distorts time by shifting between the worlds over the various sections of “Nighthawks.” Thus, Dybek is able to stack the memories of the couple on top of one another and connect past events without the sense of chronology. Similar to “Nighthawks,” Murakami’s “The Dancing Dwarf” is a notable piece within his short story collection as the story adds a fantastical and dream-like world within the plot. By telling the story of a man in a world directly representative of his own subconscious, Murakami shows how one’s subconscious mind has the ability to lead towards self fulfillment. However, this is by releasing the need for the control of our own bodies and give into the endless possibilities of life. The portrayal of how the narrator’s path towards self fulfillment is guided by the dancing dwarf, a representation of the narrator’s subconscious. This demonstrates how Murakami heavily relies on fantasy to develop on the magical realism within the short story.

In “Nighthawks,” Dybek divides his short story into various subsections in order to tell multiple stories within the context of the narrator’s past relationship. By telling the story of the narrator’s relationship in a nonlinear fashion, Dybek makes his characters step into the future and the past depending on the subsection. For example, in the subsection “Everything,” a girl calls the narrator while she is “‘tripping on MDA’” (Dybek, 105). The girl is depicted to be the narrator’s ex-girlfriend as she seen to be reflecting upon the memories of their relationship. Dybek is able to therefore juxtapose the girl’s drug use with her sense of memory as both heighten her sense of euphoria. However, while the protagonist steps into the future in “Everything,” he steps into past in “Laughter” as he tells the story of the same girl, but this time prior to the developed stages of her relationship with the narrator. While Dybek uses a third person narrative in “Everything,” he employs the first person in “Laughter,” helping him juxtapose the temporal distinctions of the girl before and after their relationship. Therefore, through his division of “Nighthawks” into subsections, Dybek allows his story to become a bricolage of palimpsest where he tells different memories of the relationship, giving the reader slight revelations about the couple while disregarding any aspect of time. This means that the different stories are placed together to draw attention to how past memories are not lost. In other words, past events are pressed right up to the present as the past is occupying the characters’ consciousness. For example, in the diner within the subsection “Insomnia,” the couple who witness the woman fixing her makeup and unknowingly create “the kiss,” sit at the counter waiting for something or nothing. While the man is smoking, the girl “dreamily studies a matchbook from some other place where they sat like this together killing time” (Dybek, 115). The guy behind the counter goes home every morning and tries to sleep but he can’t; he “tries to dream, but succeeds only in remembering” (Dybek, 115). This shows how Dybek further draws a clear distinction between dreams and memories in the story. While Dybek shows dreams to be when one surrenders to their subconscious entirely, he depicts memories as something that can never be altered.

Similar to “Nighthawks,” Murakami incorporates a fantastical world into “The Dancing Dwarf.” By also drawing a distinction between dreams and reality into his story, Murakami employs a frame narrative where he uses multi-linear storytelling techniques, by introducing newspaper clippings, stories the narrator hears second-hand, and dreams, thus creating several interweaving “rivers of narrative.” For example at the beginning of the story we are introduced to

a surreal world where a dwarf “came into my [the narrator’s] dream and asked me to dance” (Murakami, 242). However, the story suddenly shifts to the narrator insisting it was just a dream as he wakes up and returns to reality: “I washed my face with great care, shaved, put some bread in the toaster, and boiled water for coffee. I fed the cat, changed its litter, put on a necktie, and tied my shoes. Then I took a bus to the elephant factory” (Murakami, 245). Although the narrator insists that the reader is back in reality, the mention of the elephant factory makes us pause in disbelief. Due to the sudden turnabout in the real and magical, reality and dreams have suddenly traded places, juxtaposed in magical confusion. The protagonist really does work at an “elephant factory” where living elephants are literally mass-produced through detailed industrial process. This shows how the common structural motif in Murakami's work is the motif of two parallel worlds: the underworld or the nighttime world of dream and the unconscious, and the daytime world of everyday life. With its mythological structure, and like much of Murakami’s fiction, it parodies or inverses the logic of modern concepts such as linear time, the division between wakefulness and dream, and industrial mass-production. Thus, by structurally serving as a microcosm of Murakami’s literature, “The Dancing Dwarf” is a postmodern fairytale.

Both Dybek’s usage of substories with “Nighthawks” and Murakami usage of a dream-like world heavily ties in with Wendy B. Faris’ study of magical realism as in her work, Ordinary Enchantment: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative ( 2004), Faris describes the magical realism element of ‘defocalisation’ by expressing how magical realism leads to the focalisation — “the perspective from which events are presented” (Rainer, 128) — becoming indeterminate as the kinds of perceptions presented are indefinable and the origins of these perceptions are unlocatable. This shows how “magical realism modifies the conventions of realism based on empirical evidence, incorporating other kinds of perception” (Rainer, 129) as the story’s narrative is defocalised with it appearing to come from the two disparate perceptions of the magical and the real. Therefore, since both short stories narrate from both the real and fantastical worlds, both Dybek and Murakami blur the story’s narrative, utilizing a magical realist technique. This magical realism is essential in “Nighthawks” as the story hopes to delineate the lives of the misfits and outsiders. Since magical realism is highlighting this misfit culture as these misfits are coming from different cultural backgrounds, the incorporation of more foreign contexts and allusions leads to the reader feeling like the story is not actually happening in Chicago. Thus, Dybek applies magical realism to depict the lives of these “Nighthawks” or outsiders.

III. Fantastical Characterization Another notable magical realist technique Dybek employs within “Nighthawks” is inclusion of fantastical characters in the form of “silhouettes,” ghost-like characters who reflect the story of the protagonist’s relationship. The readers are introduced to them in the first subsection entitled “Silhouettes,” where Dybek depicts them as “shadows that threw shadows” (Dybek, 101). While Dybek mentions multiple examples of silhouettes, the most significant silhouettes are Niña, “the beautiful high school girl who had plunged from a roof one summer night” (Dybek, 102) and Choco, Niña’s boyfriend and “a kid who played the conga and had gone AWOL to see her [Niña]” (Dybek, 102). Niña and Choco are significant characters within the larger story as they are representative of the recurring Silhouette motif. Dybek uses the silhouettes in order to parallel the story of Niña and Choco with the narrator’s relationship. Although the two relationships are indirectly juxtaposed due to the nonlinearity of the story, the parallel can be drawn through how both relationships progress in the same way as if the silhouettes are shadowing the human couple. Dybek’s usage of the silhouettes’ narrative helps the story’s time distortion for the reader as the narrative is transporting the reader back and forth from the fantastical world. Therefore, since Dybek shifts between the real and unreal, his narrative assumes different identities and manipulates time. This manipulation of time heavily ties in with the superstitious undertones of Nighthawks. Dybek establishes superstition within the story through the establishment of the parallel between the protagonist’s relationship with Niña and Choco’s. In the subsection “Transport,” Dybek mentions the drumming and dancing ghosts within the ghostly atmosphere of the underground. However, even though Choco stops drumming, the “drumming continues without him - incessant, chaotic, shattering time rather than keeping it” (Dybek, 125). This shows how drumming is symbolic of the manifestation of Choco’s relationship as Choco realises that “from the start he has not been the one doing the summoning” (Dybek 126) as even though he stops, Niña still appears. Dybek further demonstrates Choco's epiphany through his allusion to Elegua, the owner of roads and paths in the Yoruba belief system. By showing how Choco is questioning Elegua’s presence, Dybek shows how Choco is “lost” within his memory of Niña. Thus, Dybek incorporates superstition alongside the silhouettes to establish how, alike the human couple, Choco and Niña’s courtship has become a memory.

The incorporation of the silhouettes and their surrounding fantastical world plays a key role in the story’s establishment of magical realism as according to Rosemary J Rainer’s An Exploratory Study into Magical Realist Narrative Techniques in Contemporary Young Adult Literary Fiction , “the disruption of time, space, and identity in magical realism” can be likened to “the ideology of shamanism” (Rainer, 38). With Shaman practices entailing the journey to different realms and spiritual places, Rainer illustrates the clear connection with regards to how both magical realism and the powers of the Shaman involve moving in and out of reality and the incorporation of different perceptions. Nighthawks is seen to incorporate a type of magical realism which Rainer would heavily associate with Shamanism as the silhouettes in the novel are used in the recurring shifts between the supernormal to normal. Furthermore according to Wendy Faris’ Scheherazade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction (2005), a defining element of magical realism is the presence of “Ancient systems of belief and local lore” (Faris, 182) underlying the text, meaning that Dybek’s incorporation of superstition through the allusion to Yoruban beliefs contributes to “Nighthawks” being classified as a magically realistic text. This contributes to the short story’s theme as Dybek’s depiction of how Chicago’s fantastical streets are filled with these ‘silhouettes’ illustrate how Chicago can represent a world where human misfits can reside.

Murakami also notably incorporates mythical figures into his work. In “The Dancing Dwarf,” the plot revolves around the protagonist’s encounter with the dwarf, a fantastical figure who is symbolic of the protagonist’s subconscious mind. Murakami first introduces to the dwarf at the exposition of the story, within the protagonist’s first dream. As the novel then shifts towards the real, the dwarf does not appear until the protagonist re-enters the dream world. Thus, the story establishes how the dwarf is synonymous to the character’s dreams as Murakami draws a distinction between the dream and real worlds. However, as the plot progresses, the real and the protagonist's dreams seemingly coincide as the dwarf transcends its fantastical state and plays a part in the character’s real life. For example, when the protagonist is dancing with his “dream” girl in the seemingly real world, the dwarf is within the protagonist’s mind, commenting his thoughts as if it were the protagonist’s own. The presence of the dwarf in the narrator’s mind during his experiences in the seemingly real world blur the lines between what is magical and real. Therefore, since the dwarf is in both the real and the fantastical world, Murakami, like Dybek, incorporates a very Shamanistic form of magical

realism by disrupting space and time through traveling to a dream-like realm. This magical realism is essential in Murakami showing how one’s subconscious mind has the ability to lead towards self fulfillment if we are able to release the need for the control of our own bodies and give into the endless possibilities of life. This is because Murakami uses the dwarf to directly embody the protagonist’s consciousness by making him present in the real and act as a guide to landing him the girl that may “fulfill” him.

IV. Symbols and Motifs Dybek further distorts the chronology of “Nighthawks” by emphasizing various symbols and motifs. This is because Dybek places various recurring motifs within the different subsections of his story. These motifs can serve as anachronisms as they are continuations from the different subsection it originates from. The anachronistic nature of these motifs can therefore provide links between the various substories and place them in chronological order. For example, Dybek often alludes to the Edward Hopper’s painting also titled “Nighthawks.” The story’s protagonist first introduces the reader to the painting in the substory “Killing Time” as he would...