[Journal] The Importance of the Surreal and the Supernatural

I was reading an article on Boing Boing the other day about a rotting and now-demolished Japanese themepark that was set in the world of Jonathan Swift’s novel, Gulliver’s Travels. The post included a picture of a giant Gulliver statue that people were once able to walk on like Lilliputians. When the picture was taken, the statue was covered in graffiti.

Source: SleepyCity.net / Boing Boing

The creative regions of my brain began firing when I saw this image, and I immediately sat down and started writing a story (which I’ll post up later this week). As I wrote, it occurred to me how much the element of the surreal and supernatural is important in storytelling, and how it’s one of the key ingredients needed to tell a story that sticks in the memory of others.

I’ve commented before that films like Super 8 or The Matrix, shows like Lost and The X-Files and novel series like the Dark Tower and Harry Potter all begin with mysteries that are slowly metered out over time. Part of what makes these stories so appealing, I’ve argued, is the fact that things are happening that don’t make sense to the audience, but which do make sense to the characters within the world because of unknown information. Even when the main characters are as out-of-the-loop as the audience, there are others (often, the villains) who know the full story and who promise some kind of answer.

But at the same time, these stories often have some element of the surreal and/or the supernatural that helps to make these mysteries more intriguing. Harry Potter exists in a hidden world of wizards and mythical creatures. Agents Mulder and Scully exist in a world where the paranormal is real and has an explanation that goes beyond what we know in our own world. Neo is a computer hacker who realizes that he is able to manipulate the world around him because it’s just a program with rules that can be bent and broken.

And yet the surreal and the supernatural don’t have to be so far-fetched. Often, they are at the heart of mystery stories that have perfectly natural explanations. I’m reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose right now, a story where medieval monks who do believe in the supernatural are faced with the fact that the evil that is causing murders within a remote abbey derives from humanity and not the devil. Many of Sherlock Holmes’s mysteries involved a mysterious crime (often accompanied by patter meant to make the caper look supernatural in nature) that could be explained by natural causes. The idea of a grotesque or interesting murder creating a phenomenon that is later revealed to be deception is a common plot device for mystery writers, and perhaps the question of “What was the cause of A when B is not a satisfying explanation?” is the reality of what a mystery truly is.

Sometimes, too, the fantasy of a simple surreal image – such as a giant statue of a man lying dormant in a field, with strange symbols graffitied on his face – can yield something memorable as well. I hope that will be the case with my own story.

I’ve also noticed that often, the surreal image of an idea of what a story is about is more appealing to me than the actual story. I was much more interested in The Dark Tower before I read the books, because in my mind, the idea of a gunslinger chasing after a shadowy tower always on the horizon was a powerful image. But when I read the books, I was disappointed to see what Stephen King did with the story, constantly bringing it back to our own world and often introducing characters who seemed like they were written on a whim rather than included with a purpose. (The fact that the author wrote himself into the story as a major plot device was almost too much to bear.) My imagining of the story was far more interesting than the final product.

I’ve felt that way about many other stories – Lost and Harry Potter and the later Matrix films among them – because they’ve all strayed away from that central mystery and focused instead on characters and sidestories and avenues that just weren’t relevant. Whereas mysteries are built around the surreal or the supernatural almost to a fault, these longer stories run out of gas once they stray from their central notion.

This is all interesting to me because one of the trilogies of novels I’m working on progressively introduces more surreal elements as it goes on, ultimately revealing a cause for the mysteries that is far-out, but which I hope will be satisfying. What begins with a haunted house becomes a deeper story about religious cults and alien visitors. It’s different from the story I’ll be sharing this week, which is more about effects than causes. But I hope it will be enchanting all the same.

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan