P.1 The term magical realism, coined in the early twentieth century to
describe a new, Neo-realistic, style in German painting, then applied to
Latin American fiction, now designates perhaps the most important
contemporary trend in international fiction. Magical realism has become so
important as a mode of expression worldwide, especially in postcolonial
cultures, because it has provided the literary ground for significant
cultural work;
P.1 Why has it been able to do this? Magical realism radically modifies
and replenishes the dominant mode of realism in the West, challenging its
basis of representation from within. That destabilisation of a dominant
form means that it has served as a particularly effective decolonizing
agent. Very briefly defined, magical realism combines realism and the
fantastic so that the marvellous seems to grow organically within the
ordinary, blurring the distinction between them. Furthermore, the
combination of realistic and fantastical narrative, together with th
inclusion of different cultural traditions, means that magical realism
reflects, in both its narrative mode and its cultural environment, the
hybrid nature of much postcolonial society.
P.2 It illustrates how modifications of realistic narrative technique in
magical realism are both an index and an result of its cultural situation.
P.8 In short, the magic in these texts refuses to be entirely assimilated
into their realism; it does not brutally shock but neither does it melt
away, so that it is like a grain of sand in the oyster of that realism.
And because it disrupts reading habits, that irreducible grain increases
the participation of readers, contributing to the postmodern proliferation
of writerly texts, texts co-created by their readers.
Magical images or events, glowing alluringly from within the realistic
matrix, often highlight central issues in a text.
P.14 Magic thus also serves the cause of satire and political commentary.
… The magic grows almost imperceptibly out of the real, and the narrator
registers no surprise, with the result that the element of surprise is
redirected onto the history we are about to witness, which constitutes the
nasty shock.
P.15 García Márquez’s rewriting of the history of Latin America in that of
Macondo, for example, including a massacre that has been elided from the
public record, and the opening of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, which replaces a man airbrushed out of history by party
doctrine, are elements that differ from the mythical components of those
tales, though they are related to the. The combination implies that
historical events and myths are both essential aspects of our collective
memory. As we hear in Midnight’s Children, “sometimes legends make
reality, and become more useful than the facts” (48).
P.16 Historical anchoring is well demonstrated in what John Foster calls
“felt history,” whereby a character experiences historical forces bodily:
Anna Karenina, for instance, is crushed by a train, which in this context
represents European modernising forces in Russia. This phenomenon is
exaggerated and particularised in magical realist fiction. Clear examples
are Lisa’s pains that anticipate her death at Babi Bar in The White Hotel,
Grenouille’s magical nose born from the smells of Renaissance Europe in
Perfume, and Saleem’s literal dismemberment as a result of his sympathetic
identification with the forces dividing his country at the end of
Midnight’s Children.
P.17 Magical realist scenes may seem dreamlike, but they are not dreams,
and the text may both tempt us to co-opt them by categorising them as
dreams and forbid that co-option. Magical realist narratives almost seem
to bring up the possibility of interpreting what they chronicle as a dream
in order to forestall that interpretation, after having first aired it as
a possibility.
P.23 In both cases, magical realism blurs borders between categories. It
also begins to erode the categories themselves because the link between
empirically constructed perceptions of reality and realistically
constructed fictional discourse means that to question one is to question
the other.
P.25 Magical realism reorients not only our habits of time and space but
our sense of identity as well. The multifocal nature of the narrative and
the cultural hybridity that characterise magical realism extends to its
characters, which tend toward a radical multiplicity.
… With over five hundred children of midnight talking though his
head, for example, is Saleem himself anymore? … “Who what am I? My answer:
I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been
seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose
being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that
happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come.
Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I,’ every one of
the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I
repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a
world” (457-58)
P.27 Geographical stylistics are problematic, but one might speculate
about the existence of a tropical lush and a northerly spare variety of
the magical realist plant. In the northerly variety, there is less magic
and its range is more circumscribed: the ingenious and rather programmatic
magic of smell in Perfume, and the very small intrusions of magical event
in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, for example, contrast with the
more pervasive magic in García Márquez and Rushdie; the occasional magic
of Beloved is somewhere in between the two. Jean Weisgerber makes a
similar distinction between two types of magical realism: the “scholarly”
type, which “loses itself in art and conjecture to illuminate or construct
a speculative universe,” and which is mainly the province of European
writers, and the mythic or folkloric type, found mainly in Latin America.
P.29 Because magical and realistic narrative modes frequently come from
different cultural traditions, their amalgamation makes magical realism a
liminal mode, in the sense of Victor Turner’s “liminal entities,” which
“are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions
assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”
P.30 Especially with regard to the questioning of time, space, and
identity, it is possible to see how magical realism has its roots in
modernism and its branches and leaves in postmodernism, as it were.
P.32 If in modernism character generates story out of psychic depth, and
in postmodernism story generates character out of events and histories and
intertextual bricolage, then once again, magical realism medicates between
those modes.
P.36 But as magical realism moves out of that primitivist phase, as it is
currently doing, such a distancing mechanism lessens in importance, and
the otherness moves closer to the selfsame. In any case, its frequent
alliance to literary identity politics, an alliance strengthened by its
narrative encoding of alterity, has made magical realism a powerful
decolonizing mode. That it continues to serve such a function and that
this function is tied to the magical realist portrayal of worlds of the
spirit is suggested by a recent article describing fiction by a new
generation of post-apartheid black South African writers, many of whom
claim that their writing is more nuanced in a society whose primary
concern is no longer the relatively clear-cut injustice of the racist
regime but the complex interracial tensions that have succeeded them.
Thus, according to the reporter Rachel Swarns, many young black writers
are “abandoning a rigidly realist style to incorporate a sense of the
spiritualism that pervades rural villages. Lightening is hurled to kill an
enemy. Birds carry messages of good and evil. And the dead fuss over the
living as they watch from the other side.”
P.39 Throughout its history, an erosion of clear distinction plagues the
term magical realism itself, which is flawed for many reasons. It began in
art history, having been coined, to repeat, by Franz Roe in 1925 to
describe European painting’s movement back toward realism after
expressionism, but also virtually simultaneously used by Bontempelli to
describe both painting and literature in 1926. It therefore carries
burdens from visual history that its verbal embodiments cannot well bear.
… While it is too anachronistic to label The Odyssey, for example, or The
Inferno magical realism, because they are informed by pre-Enlightenment
systems of belief in which the terms magic and realism were not so sharply
distinguished as they subsequently became in post-Enlightenment thought,
they can be seen as precursors of magical realism, in the sense that
Borges describes writers such as Kafka as creating their own precursors by
achieving similar effects even though they might not have had the
imaginary precursors specifically in mind.
P.40 As Jean-Pierre Durix has proposed, “perhaps the merit of the phrase
‘magic realism’ is to suggest a field of possibilities in which the term
will no longer be an oxymoron.” … In his description of the fantastic,
Tzvetan Todorov, for example, associates the phenomena he discusses as
“the fragility of the limit between matter and mind” with the worlds of
the child and the psychotic or the drugged, but not in any explicit way
with the domain of spirit or mystery.
P.41 According to Edna Aizenberg, the spread of magical realism “is a
development of revolutionary magnitude … and we should not take it for
granted”; it “suggests that Latin American magical realism may well be the
first contemporary literary mode to break the hegemony of the centre by
forcing the centre to ‘imitate’ the periphery, and by allowing a vibrant,
innovative intertextuality of the margins—between Latin America and
Africa, for instance. Similarly, Franco Moretti maintains that with
magical realism, “for the first time in modern history, the centre of
gravity of formal creation leaves Europe.”
P.43 Thus magical realism modifies the conventions of realism based in
empirical evidence, incorporating other kinds of perception. In other
words, the narrative is “defocalized” because it seems to come from two
radically different perspective at once. Therefore, I have coined the term
delocalisation to take account of the special narrative situation that
seems to me to characterise magical realism as a genre. … In short, my
discussion of delocalisation here attempts to describe in modified
narratological terms the strangely indeterminate nature of magical
realism’s generic narrative stance.
P.44 Because realism attempts to create an accurate picture of the world
as it is experienced by ordinary human consciousness, readers of realistic
fiction are most familiar with focalisations that seem to be grounded in
empirical evidence, the quantity of sensory data enhancing the reader’s
confidence that this representation is accurate and causing the reader to
invest the narrative’s picture of the world with authority. And the
prevailing realism in magical realism, with its many sensory details,
reinforces those habits.
P.46 We might say that delocalisation creates a narrative space of the
ineffable in-between because its perspective cannot be explained, only
experienced.
P.50 As we have been observing, this perspective suggests the existence of
a different dimension within th ordinary coordinates of the sensory world
and its realistic representation.
P.61 Because they incorporate eccentric ways of writing, these texts can
be seen as a kind of wilful narrative insanity, a mode that recalls the
romantic variety of primitivism that includes glorifications of mental
deviance and that Edward Dudley and Maximilian Novak claim brought the
wild man within the mind in the nineteenth century. In this way, magical
realism continues that primitivist retreat within the self that engendered
the literary wild man of the mind but projects that wild self onto the
surface of the text.