I’m glad I took a few hours to think about my Chabon post.
Michael Chabon said this line in his interview this morning with Calvin English professor Don Hettinga:
Imagination is the key to morality.
This concept is something I think I was on the verge of getting last night, but his saying it out loud helped.
The appeal of genre fiction and magical realism is that it is perhaps more easily timeless than a lot of traditional literature. While the humanity of traditional literature is indeed as timeless, the assumptions and conventions of genre fiction, of works like Marisol, while absurd in their own right, have a sense of always being, have have been, and always will be.
It’s much like classical literature and epic literature in some ways: the situations contain so much of the unbelievable that the focus is constantly, if not subtly, concentrated on the humanity of characters, and the choices they make, and how they shape the somewhat implausible world they live in.
Chabon characterized his key to morality as the ability to see situations even if you are not present in them. In a day of out-of-control media saturation, when we take in more but understand less, it is hard not to agree. And if things like comic books and fantasy stories about angels rebelling are ways of showing the timeless human morality of choices, then perhaps Chabon is right in saying they continue to be heartbreakingly underrated.
