Magical Time

A Musing on Fairy Tales and Contemporary Realism

Ever notice that strange setting of traditional fairy tales? How they tend to take place in some vaguely old-fashioned period that is both instantly recognizable and impossible to pinpoint? We get horses and castles and forests. We don't get toasters or television or smart phones. But we don't get specific dates or date markers, either. If the king is named (rarely), it's not an actual one whose reign has recorded beginning and end points.

This horses-and-castles time has a vaguely medieval feel in the European fairy tales, such as those recorded by the Grimms and Perrault. Folklore of other cultures might situate itself in different periods, though it is most often the unspecified past. It's that "unspecified" aspect—and the way it slips and shimmers—that I'm interested in.

This non-time makes sense (or non-sense) for fairy tales. Magic positions them outside of time.

[Or, Erin Kate poses [pedantically, Allie whines], as having time—events usually occur in a recognizable sequence, but are not impacted by time outside of the boundaries of the story. [OK, Erin Kate is correct. Allie admits it.]]

Contemporary fairy tales often play with time. Sometimes they use the traditional non-time to evoke fairy-tale feel. In other cases, the updated story takes place in a present or historical or even futuristic period, subverting the reader's expectation but also, necessarily, reminding of the once-upon-a-time feel the tale is "supposed" to have. This is one way subtext and subversions can work—an opposite makes us notice whatever thing we (perhaps subconsciously) expected. But perhaps my favorite trick of the modern fairytale is using deliberately anachronistic details to create a particular sort of magic, one that is whimsical, absurd, and drenched in fairy-tale feel.

Now let's consider a different non-time—the contemporary one. I'm thinking of stories that occur in a vague "now" that feels generally like the present but is not marked in a specific way. If the story is set in the US, we get smart phones in the latest size, but we don't know who the president is.

And what about the lack of masks? For a while, I could suspend my disbelief that every TV series was happening just before the pandemic—and written and filmed then, too. But as 2019 creeps further away, this is no longer plausible. We must be in a setting outside of time. A pseudo-contemporary world that evokes "realism" but is not real or actual.

I'm not claiming that the pseudo-contemporary non-time is new. But it's become more obvious to me, and I wonder why.

[Erin Kate points out there must have always been moments like this, when major life-altering conditions, such as those of war or famine, don't yet appear in the fiction that is both written and set in that time.]

Maybe it's because we need some distance before we write about horrific events. A lack of specificity can feel like intentional erasure, but it might be trauma that is responsible.

But I suspect there’s more to it. It could be that we struggle—and have always struggled—with pinning down the "now" because the task is impossible! I'm typing these words in a now that will be gone long before you read it, before even I can reach the period at the end of the sentence.

Maybe that's why the fuzziness of realism has often felt off to me, like my eyes won't quite focus. It's supposed to be happening right now, but that now is shifting, it's already gone. I can't catch a moment, if I'm always reaching for the next one. And so when does, or did, it happen?

Time is imaginary anyway. It's an abstraction that can't be held like an object, or turned over for examination. Yet isn't that a function of a storytelling? (Or at least one of many functions?) To twist what is abstract and unknowable into something that feels almost, almost concrete?

Some writers sharpen their realistic fiction to a specific moment in history, and I appreciate how it focuses the storytelling. It pins it. It makes the moment solid even as the scene flickers, then recedes from the grasping fingertips of present time. Specific and dated details—stating the year, naming the brands and hairstyles and soon-to-be-forgotten social media memes—of a scene serve to position us not just in a geographical locale, or a particular room in a house, but in a moment. They let me stop to look around.

We write to transcend time, to exist outside of it and past our own deaths and to record this disappearing moment, so it's not lost forever. But I don't think vagueness is the best way to do that. Whatever moment we are trying to keep is not much like this goopy maybe-yesterday-or-five-years-ago alternate world. "The present day" is a fascinating concept, but it's also not real and never realistic. At least not until we turn around to look back at it.

I set my own stories in the future or in fairy-tale time or sometimes in a bizarro alternate reality that only sort of feels like the present, but is not really. Erin Kate writes so often in the historical past. We've been workshopping together for twenty years now and our stories are so different, but also maybe we're noticing the same thing about the slipperiness of time, just pinning it and playing with it in our own ways.

It may seem like I'm calling the unpinned present of many "realistic" stories a failing. But it's too ubiquitous to have failed. And I don't believe in literary failures anyway. What I think, instead, is that it evokes something different than time. [Yes, yes, Erin Kate, there is still sequence. I'm talking about the other sense of it.] It does feel fuzzy to me–but that doesn't mean it's bad.

Maybe the compulsion to stay, impossibly, in-the-moment, in-the-now is part of what contemporary realism is working to examine. And so there must be magic there—like the fairy tales—but a different kind.

Let's write into that.

From Erin Kate (more officially)

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon refers to fairy time as midnight, a time when fairies and elves can “hop as light as bird from brier”—there’s a sense of fairy time existing at that soft boundary between real and unreal, pretend and consequential. I think there’s something there, too, to consider for fiction that isn’t fantastical. Even a piece of fiction placed at a specific time and site (say, February 2020) can be affected BY that time, but it can never change that time, except in that soft real/unreal space that exists in the readers’ and writer’s shared imagination. Or in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for The Time Being.

Try This:

Write a "realistic" and "contemporary" story that recognizes the way time and reality is stylized for fiction. Don't pin the time, but use that choice to slip into anachronism and strangeness. Be as meta as you like.

Or go the opposite way:

Consider a contemporary, realistic scene you've been working on and find a way to pin it—solidly, specifically, and without a doubt—to history. See what shifts in the world you have created.

And just because I'm me (Allie, again):

Write a fairy tale that is set in the distant, unspecified, horses-and-castles past, but include one vivid and specific and anachronistic detail that the story spins around. See if you can make the detail as up-to-the-minute as possible. (And then maybe reflect in how impossible that really is...)

IMPROMPT2 is a project of writers Erin Kate Ryan and Allison Wyss.