The universe has been conspiring for a while now to get me to read Haruki Murakami, who seemed to be just crazy up my alley. After checking out Kafka on the Shore I can confirm that premonition. This sort of thing is for me as chick flicks are to most American women. It's almost too easy with this sort of postmodern surrealistic culture-referencing, messy-narrative, time-and-space-bending, mysterious-character-dressed-up-as-Colonel-Sanders shit.
Anyway, I was talking about "surrealism," which is a term I apply very broadly, and the question was posed to me to differentiate surrealism and fantasy. It was a good question for me especially, since I loved fantasy books as a kid and gradually, during adolescence, transitioned to the Lynchy stuff that I now call surrealistic art.
There are plenty of superficial differences, primarily in the realm of what these genres use as their foundations. Fantasy's foundation is in the unreal: the setting is distant and almost always fictional, the characters belong to classes like wizards and knights and other things that don't exist in our lives. Surrealism, by contrast, starts with the real. It usually takes a person whose life is normal, by our standards, and then throws the weird shit their way.
For this reason fantasy, to me, is actually kind of negative. It always reminds us of what is not in our lives, what we can't be and can't do. Surrealism, by contrasts, suggests things that might be, things not necessarily good, usually scary, but at least always interesting. Things that aren't likely or logically explicable, but nonetheless could exist around us, under the veneer of our normal lives.
The surreal may not be REAL, but I think more so than fantasy it does contain an element or two of POSSIBILITY. Maybe.
Opening invisible ozone holes into pockets of experience, suggesting previously unnoticed dimensions of our own lives that are not immediately clear, that we can't see, that we only feel. Maybe.
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