Idle Weekend October 8, 2016: Dangerous Realism

[Jake]

Idle Weekend October 8, 2016:

Dangerous Realism

We're going to some scary places this weekend on the show. The dark hearts of our friends, playing Subterfuge. The streets of Mafia III's New Bordeaux. The Idle Weekend inbox, after dissing magical realism last week. But don't worry, friends! We brought our finest weapon: our imaginations. It's a very magical (but still totally real) episode of Idle Weekend!

Discussed: Subterfuge, Mafia III, Dishonored, Danger Man, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Voyager, Batman: The Animated Series, Farscape, Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Leftovers, Grayson, Luke Cage, WestWorld

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[graddy]

Batman! Favorite Batman.

[Vader]

I just need to share the email I wrote the show about the Magical Realism discussion. Was hoping what I wrote might get discussed in the show, but understand that the hosts got lots of emails.

I appreciated Danielle's humility. I'm sure Rob means well, but I couldn't help but find him a little condescending. He seems to be operating under the assumption that magical thinking in the Secular Anglo Western world doesn't exist and that in this worldview folks just purely operate as rational beings.

Rob, everyone sees the world through a mix of magical and materialist thinking. You can have a belief in things like ghosts as a lens of narrative cultural interpretation and also embrace science. That, in fact, is one of the few cross-cultural norms in our post-colonial times. Magical thinking just looks more obvious when you observe it as an outsider of a culture foreign to you.

To act as though the Secular Anglo Western lens is so unique and perfectly well reasoned is just patronizing. Maybe I look at the destruction of the planet that your non-spiritual, materialist paradigm has brought down on us and see THAT as a truly irrational mode of thinking. In light of this, it's a little rich to hear someone from this school of thought complain that the anti-colonial perspective is heavy handed. If that's the case, the whole story of the Americas must be a sappy melodrama we should all just forget so we can blow fossils out of our tail pipes and rebuild every piece of dead land to meet our every industrial whim.

I love you Rob, but I really think you need to look outside yourself and check out how others might perceive what just seems to you as 100% normative and smart.

Oh well. Here's what I wrote.

____________

Hi R&D,

Maybe I can help shed some light on this often invoked but seldom understood genre of "magical realism." Magical realism has its roots in the 20th Century Latin American literary tradition. To have a better grasp of what this means, I would highly recommend checking out the works of authors like Isabelle Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

What Danielle described as "inconsistency" can be better understood as "hybridity." That is, people experiencing life on different simultaneous planes of reality. Many mestizo and indigenous folks get this. Beause of the melding of european and indigenous-american cultures, we often interpret things both rationally and narratively, both materialistically and spiritually.

Pan's Labyrinth, counter to Rob's point, actually presents an excellent example of this. Ofelia experiences her abusive, imperialistic stepfather both as a harsh, industrial millitarist and as a literal monster that fits in perfectly with her cultural mythology.

For a real life site imbued with magical realism, check out Coricancha or Church of Santo Domingo in Cusco, Peru. Coricancha was one once a "temple of the sun" built by the Incas as a place to worship Inti, the sun god. When Spaniards conquered Cusco, they attempted to destroy all the "blasphemous" architecture and cultural sites, but were largely unable to do so because of the Incas' robust architectural designs. Thus, the Spaniards instead converted Coricancha into the Church of Santo Domingo, and today they are simultaneously experienced through the lens of both Christian and Quechua spiritual tradition. (I uploaded an image of Coriconcha).

Magical realism is vital and even profoundly political in our time. Its inconsistency comes not from haphazard "world building," but from the way millions of people actually experience the world around us.

Love the show, and looking forward to the next cast.

[Gormongous]

Rob, everyone sees the world through a mix of magical and materialist thinking. You can have a belief in things like ghosts as a lens of narrative cultural interpretation and also embrace science. That, in fact, is one of the few cross-cultural norms in our post-colonial times. Magical thinking just looks more obvious when you observe it as an outsider of a culture foreign to you.

Even without invoking obviously magical things like ghosts, you can see magical thinking written all over the traditional Anglo-American mindset. Ask a "rational" person how the economy works. Ask them how to keep from catching a cold. Ask them what they think the weather's going to be like over the next month or two. Ask them how the past hundred years of international politics have led to our world today. Ask them about their friendships and their job. All of their answers to these questions will probably have a "rational" process of thought that's functionally irrational because its premises are, at best, heuristic assessments of chaos and, more likely, working backwards from instinctual beliefs about how the world works (or should work).

It all puts me in mind of alt-right STEM fetishists who believe that, if you just stop feeling emotions, you'll always be logical and therefore always be right, because logic is never wrong. Obviously untrue, but to some practically an article of faith anyway.

[Vader]

Yes, thank you! I was going to go into some Anglo American cultural myths if anyone pressed me on this but you beat me to the punch.

[SL128]

Here's a video which explains why Valve made the Steam review changes, from before they were made:

 

Steam groups were made by groups of developers specifically to give away copies of their games to random Steam users in exchange for raffle entries to possibly get good games.  This was primarily done by the Digital Homicides of the world, whose games are small, bad, and have no publicity; the reviews would ultimately give a false sense to store browsers that a 100% positive game with 20 or so reviews may be a hidden gem.

 

 

 

P.S. A Dishonored Halloween stream would be amazing

[Twig]

Around the time of the review system change someone compiled a list of games most affected by the change. It might've been steam db or similar, I can't remember. At any rate, very few Games Of Note (I.e., games I'd even just heard of the title, so v biased for sure), more actually had positive changes than negative. There were a few that WERE really poorly affected (Sunset being the worst iirc). But overall, the list wasn't that big. It had some threshold for noteworthiness, but I forget what that was too!

Then they added all those reviews back but now let you choose which ones are visible to you. So hey, there's that, I guess.

[Dragonfliet]

The magical realism discussions have been pretty infuriating to listen to. Largely this is because both Rob and Danielle seem to have very little understanding of what the genre is, while they simultaneously are dismissive of it. For instance, calling the Grayson books magical realism is pretty eye-rolling. The books are great, but are as close to realism as a playdough car is to a ferrari. Granted, the difficulty with the genre is that it overlaps so many other things. For instance, when does a story stop being magical realism and become fabulism? Or surrealism, or urban fantasy or etc.?

 

We can trace a path from Franz Kafka to Jorges Louis Borges (and Bruno Schultz), and from Borges to people like Carpentier and then onto Marquez, Allende, etc. Sometimes people will lump Calvino into the genre, but that feels like a stretch (cosmicomics perhaps being closest?), and then there are contemporary people like Karen Russell (who, like Kelly Link and Aimee Bender is more of a fabulist, most of the time--though there are instances in all that are clearly magical realism in all), or George Saunders, who get called magical realists, but don't seem to fit, exactly. Only sometimes. I would argue that Haruki Murakami comes close at times (A Wild Sheep Chase does this wonderfully, whereas some of his books are fabulist or even sci-fi, with a surreal twist), that Salmon Rushdie is a perennial favorite (Midnight's Children is the best example, as it tells the story of India--and Indira Ghandi's rise to power through a malevolent kind of magic), Chitra Divakaruni touches it from time to time (but is largely a writer of realist fiction), Angela Carter is a postmodernist writer who lives also in the magical real. Tim O'Brien isn't normally in this camp, but Going After Cacciato is a marvelous book that veers into the magical (or is it surreal?), and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon certainly leans hard on the use of magic in a wonderful, interesting way. 

 

I do find it interesting to see the focus of this discussion resting on the "belief" that magical things happen in real life--which is certainly an aspect of certain books/stories, to the exclusion of the other piece of magical realism, in which the magical elements intrude as the only seeming way to make sense of what is happening. For instance, Salmon Rushdie doesn't think that Indira Ghandi is capturing people with large noses, but how else to explain the trajectory of his country's history? It is a way of approaching the insanity of the political process (as well as criticize Ghandi's awful tendencies) in a way that both seems more ridiculous (magic) and yet, somehow, more natural an explanation than reality. It is this sharp break that shows how ridiculous things can be, that claims that surely reality/realism fails to account for how we got to this place/decision/outcome/etc. 

[plasticflesh]

This year I've been reading a lot of psychology texts, to try and be a responsible arm-chair psychologist. What makes people feel "smart" when they call other people "stupid?" I've always wavered on the total rejection of superstitions like religion or astrology because they are forms of proto-psychology, they are, in some regards, honest attempts to understand the world, and might still offer insight for the ineffable boundaries of rationality. I admit, I am more inclined myself to want to see the world as a magical whole. And why are people drawn to magical interpretations of the world at all?

 

My favorite texts on the subject so far are Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and Ernest Becker's "Denial of Death."

 

 Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is a 1970s book that posits that before we had modern consciousness of introspective thought rationalizing actions; ancient humans were more instinctual automatons, like animals, but in times of stress, would have schizophrenic Hierophanies, blinding visions of their deities giving them direct orders.

 

"Denial of Death" posits that all of human's anxieties and strife come from the paradox that we are mortal animals aware of our imminent death. This knowledge of our mortal demise is a constant and real terror, and we bulwark against it by constructing complex symbolic world-views, that our self-esteems depend on. We invest into these world-views as our "causa sui," a term used for objects that can give themselves meaning, or put another way "immortality project". And so humanity subconsciously is always investing energy into maintaining their preferred causa sui / immortality project. Man is half animal, half symbol. "Shitting Gods".

 

So this stuff given me great comfort, or at least stoic understanding, when I see such hostile political tribalism, or fundamental atheism, or astrology communities reacting so negatively to NASA's new constellation maps. Everyone has locked into their world-view, rationally since adolescents, subconsciously since birth. Their world-view effects their self-esteem and their attempts to transcend being an animal. Shifting to a new ideology, a new world-view with a new self-esteem, is nothing short of rebirth. Painful, screaming, bloody rebirth.

 

What I also find interesting is that so much of Magical Realism is from Latin America writing. I wonder if it draws more from Catholic spirituality, that god is immutable and holistic, permeating through out our world. Versus Protestant spirituality, that the earthly realm is a purgatory lobby testing-ground before the afterlife.

[Rob Zacny]

I appreciated Danielle's humility. I'm sure Rob means well, but I couldn't help but find him a little condescending. He seems to be operating under the assumption that magical thinking in the Secular Anglo Western world doesn't exist and that in this worldview folks just purely operate as rational beings.

Rob, everyone sees the world through a mix of magical and materialist thinking. You can have a belief in things like ghosts as a lens of narrative cultural interpretation and also embrace science. That, in fact, is one of the few cross-cultural norms in our post-colonial times. Magical thinking just looks more obvious when you observe it as an outsider of a culture foreign to you.

To act as though the Secular Anglo Western lens is so unique and perfectly well reasoned is just patronizing. Maybe I look at the destruction of the planet that your non-spiritual, materialist paradigm has brought down on us and see THAT as a truly irrational mode of thinking. In light of this, it's a little rich to hear someone from this school of thought complain that the anti-colonial perspective is heavy handed. If that's the case, the whole story of the Americas must be a sappy melodrama we should all just forget so we can blow fossils out of our tail pipes and rebuild every piece of dead land to meet our every industrial whim.

I love you Rob, but I really think you need to look outside yourself and check out how others might perceive what just seems to you as 100% normative and smart.

 

Sorry if I rubbed you the wrong way. There's a couple things here. And I'm sorry we didn't get to your letter, it was absolutely the other one that I really wanted to read.

 

First, I definitely threw some gasoline on this discussion because I wasn't wild about leaving it off with, "I guess we didn't realize other people looked at the world differently," because I felt that somehow the original aesthetic objection to magical realism had been lost. So if that device somehow puts-off Danielle, or me, I wanted us to at least try and unpack that hang-up rather than simply write it off as a cultural blindspot to be cured with education. In short, I felt like we'd ended up learning about, say, the exact nature and context of "belief in elves" and why that is not some kind of benighted, backwards belief... which I don't think was the original problem. The problem was that, for some reason, works of fiction where elves are woven into the fabric of a world otherwise grounded in familiar, materialist reality seems to piss Danielle off, and I'm not too sure about it either. So why does that device, not the foundations underlying it, act as a turn-off?

 

And I think, for me, that's where the heavy-handed remark comes in. Not that the critique of western civilization and values is heavy-handed and I'm so over it, but that the way this literary tradition tends to state this critique often seems, to me, heavy-handed in its delivery.

 

That got lost, however, because at a certain point the thread of the conversation slipped away from me and I ended up expressing my frustration with western adoption of bastardized version's of other culture's spiritual beliefs at which point one could justly ask whether, at any point, we were actually talking about magical realism.

 

Clearly, more study is required, as has been very well called-out here an elsewhere. But if I came across as condescending, I apologize. My attempt was to drive us toward the point of our original, if poorly thought-out, objection.

[Vader]

Sorry if I rubbed you the wrong way. There's a couple things here. And I'm sorry we didn't get to your letter, it was absolutely the other one that I really wanted to read.

 

First, I definitely threw some gasoline on this discussion because I wasn't wild about leaving it off with, "I guess we didn't realize other people looked at the world differently," because I felt that somehow the original aesthetic objection to magical realism had been lost. So if that device somehow puts-off Danielle, or me, I wanted us to at least try and unpack that hang-up rather than simply write it off as a cultural blindspot to be cured with education. In short, I felt like we'd ended up learning about, say, the exact nature and context of "belief in elves" and why that is not some kind of benighted, backwards belief... which I don't think was the original problem. The problem was that, for some reason, works of fiction where elves are woven into the fabric of a world otherwise grounded in familiar, materialist reality seems to piss Danielle off, and I'm not too sure about it either. So why does that device, not the foundations underlying it, act as a turn-off?

 

And I think, for me, that's where the heavy-handed remark comes in. Not that the critique of western civilization and values is heavy-handed and I'm so over it, but that the way this literary tradition tends to state this critique often seems, to me, heavy-handed in its delivery.

 

Thanks for responding. Sorry if I came across as a little combative. If you couldn't tell it really ruffles my feathers when people come across as dismissive of what I see as the rich cultural output of Latin America.

 

I think perhaps one problem with this discussion is that I am speaking in defense of an entire genre, a genre that has a rich library beyond its Anglo-American or Western adaptations, and you seem to be making what are perhaps isolated critiques of specific works? I'm not sure what specific elf-imbued work of fiction you are referring to here (if any), but perhaps that poorly developed manifestation of a spiritual reality in a material world is what offends you, not the concept of material-spiritual hybridity itself.

This could perhaps also explain your comment about critiques of western civilization being "heavy handed." Again, that sounds more like a critique of something you have a specific beef with than of the genre as a whole, unless you truly are just tired of the heaters hating on colonialism. In this sense, maybe your criticisms are not unlike someone saying that all American action flicks are bad because they saw Transformers 2