Disrupting Realism: the Take-Away from a Master Class w/ Marie-Helene Bertino
by Kimberley Allen McNamara
Sunday June 6th, 2020 I had the privilege of attending a free online class with one of my favorite authors, Marie-Helene Bertino. The subject: Disrupting Realism.
Bertino offered the class to celebrate the release of her novel Parakeet in paperback. Released in the midst of the pandemic, Bertino’s Parakeet received great acclaim: long-listed for the Carnegie Medal and the Joyce Carol Oates prize, Editor’s Choice at the New York Times Book Review, and chosen by many as Best Book of the Summer, Month and Year 2020. As noted by the publisher: “Miraculous: spry and mordant, with sentences that lull you with their rhythms, then twist suddenly and sting." —Lauren Groff, author of Florida
The class started with Bertino in front of her 1000+ audience identifying why she chose to offer this class:
She believes in accessibility to craft and the mechanisms behind or advancing craft
Too often accessibility is denied because of a lack of means to pay for such knowledge.
She then went on to further identify herself as: a white woman, with olive complexioned skin, brown hair and eyes, and to share her story of not being able to attend NYU’s creative writing program because of a lack of funds. (Bertino teaches at NYU now). She thanked Electric Literature for making her vision of this accessible class possible through their streaming and orchestration and then gave us the syllabus.
Envisioned in the format of Sesame Street (incidentally a show created to give accessibility to children to early education skills) Bertino explained she was going to have friends stop by and share the screen and offer their insight regarding the Disruption Realism and how to go about Disruption.
What follows now is my interpretation of what I garnered from this class--my take away. This post is by no means complete and I plan to offer more regarding disrupting realism in future posts.
Realism is open to interpretation. What one might call a realistic depiction of an apple another may call an impressionistic, a cubist-interpretation, a surreal interpretation, or hyperrealism. Unless you are actually holding the apple and viewing the apple with your eye, anything else is a rendering of the real. And even then you might think the apple has chartreuse highlights (a color my daughter claims is only seen by people over 40), while another person holding the same apple may only see the apple’s bruise. Again interpretation of the real.
To illustrate this Bertino shared a story from Picasso who was confronted by a man for not painting realistically. When confronted, Picasso said: “Realistic, what do you mean?” The man offered a photograph of his wife, “Like this,” the man said. “Oh,” said Picasso “So your wife is 3 inches tall, has no hands or legs, and is black and white?”
Bertino also noted: Picasso was not terribly nice to women but this story illustrated the point she was trying to make that there is a spectrum for everyone with regard to realism and how we disrupt the spectrum would be our focus today.
Disrupting Realism could, Bertino acknowledged, fall under many names: magical realism, fabulism, the transformation into animals, Afro-magical realism, slipstream, and more. While all these are types of disrupted realism and each could warrant their own tightly focused class, the focus for us, for this class, would be on the general spectrum of disrupted realism in fiction.
Bertino cautioned that we should take from this class, from this friend drop-in Sesame-esque session, whatever we felt sounded right for our own writing. There was no right or wrong, all or nothing when it came to employing disruption techniques.
To get to writing The Uncanny, or Disrupting Realism, Marie-Helene Bertino believes the key is to look at the Laws of Physics and then break them.
For example: When you are in love you feel as if you are flying, you are high on the airwaves of Love, so why not have your character fly. Say it: And so she flew. Who can argue that is not the way that character is experiencing time and space? She is flying because she is in love. Break those Laws of Physics and you now have the Uncanny, that left of center, a bubble off-plumb, the Uncanny.
The Laws of Physics:
Think of the basic Laws of Physics you may recall without googling. Below are mine:
Laws of Gravitation: Newton’s law, objects attract other objects, what goes up must come down.
Laws of Motion:for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction, a body at rest or in motion will remain at rest or in motion unless disrupted.
E = mc2 Energy = mass (matter) times speed of light squared
And something about multiple times/universes occurring simultaneously and overlapping (I am thinking this is Time and Space Continuum).
And that is about all I can recall “off the top of my head”, but this is enough to understand what Bertino means.
Bertino advocates abandoning or playing with the Laws of Physics to achieve the Uncanny but not the Laws of Fiction with regard to character. The laws of fiction must be satisfied. The satisfaction of the Laws of Fiction are non negotiable.
Consider the What/Why Question, the this that drives your fiction. The Laws of Physics you may break or play with, but you can never undermine this basic question of why you are writing what you are writing, which is of course, the answer to the Question of What Happens and the familiar Why now, this event, this alignment of the stars, is different than any other point in time?
As Bertino says: You play with or break the Laws of Physics because you want to cut out the middleman, you want to get to the essence faster, quicker, more poignantly and you want to do so without bogging the reader or your character down with excess. So you play with salient details, you may invent words, tell a joke backwards, or in the case of Parakeet, have your main character inhabit another. You repeat a metaphor in the same work but you have the metaphor be slightly incomplete in its repetition.
As you may be able to tell, I found the class inspiring. I have read Bertino’s works—my favorite is Two A.M. at the Cats Pajamas. I have read and enjoyed the works of other authors who play with the Uncanny, the Impossible: Raymond Carver, Octavia Butler, Kelly Links, Amy Hempel, and Amiee Bender. These Writers can lean toward either the Uncanny, fall in the middle between Uncanny and the Impossible or embrace the Impossible; they do this by disrupting realism.
If you feel at all resistant to such writings ask yourself why? Are you being like the man in the Picasso story? Are you closing yourself off to the impossible or the uncanny because such writings, musings, word choices, depictions are not within your universe? Consider expanding your Universe. Maybe, like Mikey in that old Life Cereal commercial, if you try something new you might actually like it.
My next post will focus on the lessons I learned about disruption from MHB’s friends who stopped by on this video. Until then, Happy Writing and Reading.
