The Impossible Moment: Shape-Shifting Nonfiction and Magical Realism Influences on a Work of Original Fiction

Abstract

This thesis investigates the idea that impossible moments given realistic treatment in literature can lead us to think more creatively about what is possible. Until the 1970s, social conditions in much of America made it impossible for a woman to raise children as well as have a career. Some might argue that, though the laws have changed, it is still very difficult even now, if one wants to slight neither the children nor the career, for women and for men. This is the dilemma at the heart of my novel, and I introduce an impossible event into the story in order to see what fruitful disturbance it might produce.

In developing the implications of that intervention, I have sought guidance from three authors who regularly toy with the boundary between the real and the unreal. John McPhee offers what are clearly facts, then pronounces them to be lies, or presents an actual event with facts that sound like a case against its reality; by these methods, he moves from the original tenor of the facts to something more nuanced and profound. Gabriel García Márquez flings an inexplicable fragment into the midst of everyday life in places where everyday life has been roughly the same for centuries, and the result is that the settled routines begin to open and change. Jorge Luis Borges focuses on one man’s life, with the normal divisions of the younger and the older self, and inverts the natural order by setting the two selves on the same park bench or in the same room, conversing with each other; each time, his characters grow and deepen from their strange encounter.

This kind of wonder and openness is what I hope my novel will bring to the question of what is possible in a woman’s life, and in a man’s, in the one life that each of us has. In my novel, I present an ideal case that could not occur and that contradicts the rules of reality. This allows the heroine to travel an impossible path wholeheartedly; at the end, she understands and incorporates sorrows and triumphs she could never have undergone in an actual human life. It’s a dream, of course, a fiction, but that’s what fiction is for: to give us experiences we otherwise might never have had.