11th hour heroics

It's late, in the 4:30AMs to be exact. I'm half asleep currently, but have found full asleep impossible for the last few hours. I'm not firing on all cylinders. I'm dog-ass-tired, yet jittery. I'm really anxious about the GREs/Grad School/My life. Stress, I think, is the word. If only there was a The Pill for general unease, rather than just unease born of accidental egg fertilization.

I think this strange and unsettling feeling is common in many people. It must come with the part of life that doesn't involve being unemployed in your parent's basement--the part of life I'm not used to. I hope I acclimate quickly.

So I can't sleep. Instead, I'm dialup surfing, researching the Arab-Israeli conflict to get my mind off the unbelievable amount of crap I have to do. I'm reading watchdog reports about ethnic stereotypes in Palestinian and Israeli school books. I'm desperate.

Quiz: If this were a school night and I were still up, it would be because I have to write a paper of some kind on a topic I (A) Haven't read (B) Don't understand (C) Fell asleep through/missed lecture for (D) All of these.

The answer is (D). The answer is always (D).

If this were a school night, now would be about the time my brain--in one of the displays of fortitude that I've really come to depend on it for--would be engaging in some 11th hour heroics*. While wonderful, this is usually the only time I can count on my brain for much of anything.

In the larger scheme of things, I suppose I'm more or less at the 11th hour right now as well. I have like a month to wrangle letters of recommendation, take the GRE and maybe the subject test, find schools that do Contemporary Lit, narrow those schools down, apply to those narrowed schools, pay fees, do paperwork, find a job, etc, etc. And I'm also probably going to have to write a 20 page example paper to include with each application. This last thing is of vital importance because it's now painfully clear that my GRE score is going to be several orders of magnitude lower than I'd anticipated.

Shit.

Fitting then, as I sat in bed after tiring of the horrible atrocities being lobbed across a squiggly imaginary line in the desert, that an idea should come to me. An idea for a paper. A paper about a particular movement in contemporary literature.

Sweet.

I wrote this kind of hastily in Word, so it's probably not going to format correctly or make much sense, but here it is (keep reading because I have a question at the end):

Can Magic Realism exist outside the context of the culture that spawned it?

Is Garcia-Marquez for Americans a Magic Realist or just a fabulist, a fantasist?

Idea: Taking as a starting point that Magic Realism could not exist without Realism itself, we have to assume that certain broad fundamental assumptions made in the context of Realism do, and in fact must, carry over into Magic Realism.

So, when realism purports to, "concentrate on 'ordinary people', and feature stories either based on, or similar to, real events," we should (should we?) assume that Magic Realism too will concentrate on ordinary people and be based on, if not actual events, then at least 'reality' as it exists for the work's inhabitants.(?)

Certainly, for Morrison, Garcia-Marquez, et al, their characters exist in a world where ghosts, curses, miracles and unfathomably improbable coincidences are not only common, but, have a fantastic power to shape that world.

So, if this is realism, then whose reality is it? Is it a reality that exists only in the literature itself, or does it also exist in the mind/culture of the Author? If the former, can it even really be called realism at all; if the latter, can anyone outside the mind/culture in which the book is written truly consider it realism?

If it exists only on paper then is it just fantasy? If it exists solely in an isolated culture, with there be/are there barriers to understanding by other cultures who do not share that fundamental reality?

Basically: Can you understand a work of Magic Realism AS a work of Magic Realism if you have no link/connection to the reality from which it is created? Consider someone (Oprah's Book Clubbers, myself) who doesn't know Macondo, who doesn't live the folklore, who doesn't see ghosts, who isn't steeped in just that reality, can that someone call it realism, or is it just fantasy?

Is Magic Realism even supposed to portray reality as it actually is? Riddle me this.

I'm including links in case you don't know what any of this is. Wikipedia isn't the best source for defining literary movements, but it's good enough for conceptual work.

I'm not so much interested in defining a movement as I am in exploring the way that movement impacts upon the perception of reality, or rather, how the reality of a book is affected by the reader's orientation to that reality.

YOUR TASK:
Comment, please. Anyone (Aleah especially) who has some insight into Magic Realism as a genre or anyone (Alphabetically: Don, Mike, Omni) who might have some ideas about collective perception and group reality are encouraged, nay implored, to voice your opinions.

And for God's sake cite sources.

*11th hour heroics are similar to 4th quarter heroics. 11th hour heroics, however, have more loosely defined temporal constraints and lack any athleticism at all.