Today we looked at three questions:

1. What is truth?
2. What is fiction?
3. Can fiction reveal truth?

By first viewing “Magical Realism is Still Realism” by Salman Rusdie, and then annotating the text transcript of the video we attempted to answer those questions.  We learned that Rushdie explains that since there is no truth in fiction, it does not matter if the fiction is magical or a made up story about an ordinary person. When we read literature, we read in search of the human truth or the part of the story that speaks to us as humans.

Each pair of students then wrote an objective summary of the transcript.  Mrs. Scales provided a model for a strong objective summary:

What is truth in fiction? All fiction is by definition “not true.” The characters and their problems and their situations did not exist or occur in history. So we do not read literature for real truth, but human truth. We read fiction to recognize the parts of the character and how he or she relates to others, comparing that to our own lives. If we can accept that those characters are not real then we can accept that magical elements of stories are unreal in the same way. No more or less. When an author adds a magical element, such as a flying carpet, the author must write to make that magical element real. When that magical element is explained practically in the story, it becomes real. We read these magical stories (fairy tales, fantasy etc.) for the same reasons we read regular fiction: human truth. It does not matter if there is a flying carpet, we read to relate to the characters and the situation.

Tomorrow we will use the same transcript to start defining magical realism and setting the specific criteria for the genre.