1 Introduction: Re-Thinking Magical Realism
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Notes 1 Introduction: Re-thinking Magical Realism 1. In May 2002, a banner headline in Newsweek International offered the world the question, “Is Magical Realism Dead?” (Margolis 52). The story was taken up in Britain less than a week later by Robert McCrum in The Observer under the headline, “Has Magic Realism Run Its Course?” By contrast with these last rites, a company called Mag-Well recently adver- tised a new kind of fluid conditioning technology with the label ‘magic realism’ (see Mag-Well). 2. I am glossing over critical debates about the differences between magic realism and magical realism because, unlike, Maggie Ann Bowers in her book, Magic(al) Realism, I don’t think much is at stake in this regard. I prefer the latter term because I emphasise the fact that magical realism is a kind of modified, expanded or subverted realism. For an alternative position see Hegerfeldt (1). 3. This phrase is derived from Irlemar Chiampi, who in 1980 described processes involving the “denaturalisation of the real” and a “naturalisation of the marvellous” (see 27–32). In her 1985 book, Amaryll Chanady, drawing on Chiampi, claims magical realism “naturalizes the supernatural” (151). This chapter argues that this formulation encapsulates the key feature of magical realist narrative. 4. For more detail see my essay “The Hermeneutics of Vagueness: Magical Realism in Current Literary Discourse.” 5. See Radcliffe-Brown’s distinctions between the “expressive” and the “technical” (143); Evans-Pritchard’s between “patterns of thought that attribute to phenomena supra-sensible qualities” and those that depend on empirical patterns of thought (12); Lévy-Bruhl’s between “mystical men- tality” and the “conceptual” and “intellectual” (38, 382); Douglas’s between differentiated and undifferentiated “fields of symbolic action” (85); and Geertz’s “common-sense” and religious “orientations to reality” (122). Durkheim and Eliade are also relevant here. These thinkers have, of course, all influenced and revised each other’s positions. 6. Inquiries into the natures of magic and religion reveal them to be concep- tually inseparable on a number of levels. See for example Mircea Eliade who subsumes both under the label of the sacred (14), or Mary Douglas who saw Frazer’s and Tylor’s distinctions as nothing more than “sectarian quarrel about the value of formal ritual” (30). Tambiah elsewhere argues for magic to be interpreted as a form of rhetoric comparable with the performative utterances of linguistic philosophy (“Form and Meaning of Magical Acts” 60–72). 155 156 Notes 7. See for example Hebrews 11:1 and 2 Corinthians 5:7. 8. The term “faith-based” has taken on a number of political connotations given its centrality to George W. Bush administration policy where it is used to refer to social programmes run by religious institutions in the US. Faith in these contexts means religious faith, whereas I am at pains to take a broader definition of faith to mean the suspension of rational, sceptical or scientific frames of reference, and the often accompanying confidence in the claims to truth of non-empirical, extra-rational orderings of reality. In my discussion, faith is very often linked to claims about non-Western cultural modes of thought and belief. A second element to my definition of faith is specifically literary: faith in the power of the novel to be able to convey “faithfully” a record of such cultural otherness is often an intrin- sic element in certain strands of magical realism. Neither of these two core aspects of my argument have anything to do with White House Policy, despite the co-incidence of terminology. 2 Magical Realism as Postcolonial Romance 1. See Guenther 34, n15; Zamora “Swords” 28–29. 2. The original passage reads: Pathologische Philosophie. Ein absoluter Trieb nach Vollendung und Vollständigkeit ist Krankheit, sobald er sich zerstörend, und abgeneigt gegen das Unvollendete, Unvollständige zeigt. Wenn man etwas Bestimmtes tun und erreichen will, so muß man sich auch provisorische bestimmte Grenzen setzen. Wer aber dies nicht will, der ist vollkom- men, wie der, der nicht eher schwimmen will, bis ers kann – Er ist ein magischer Idealist, wie es magische Realisten gibt. Jener sucht eine Wunderbewegung – ein Wundersubjekt – dieser ein Wunderobjekt – eine Wundergestalt. Beides sind logische Krankheiten – Wahnarten – in denen sich allerdings das Ideal auf eine doppelte Weise offenbart, oder speigelt – heilige – isolierte Wesen – die das höhere Licht wunderbar brechen – wahrhafte Propheten. So ist auch der Traum prophetisch – Karikatur einer wunderbaren Zukunft. 3. I sympathise with Hegerfeldt’s dissatisfaction with critical attempts to interpret literary magical realism via art-historical uses of the term (12–15). As this chapter should make clear, however, I believe that there is scope for a broad, philosophical consideration of the extent to which discursive resemblances can be traced between magical realism’s philosophical, art-historical and literary manifestations. 4. For a tendentious argument that postmodernist anti-rationalism repre- sents a comparable set of dangers, see Richard Wolin. 5. The best recent example of magical realist narrative techniques being used in the service of reactionary politics can be found in the title story of a collection of short stories by the Afrikaans writer, J.C. Steyn, Op pad na die grens. The cause in question here is the ideology of apartheid then dominant in 1970s South Africa. Notes 157 6. See Amaryll Chanady’s essay “The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America” and, in a different context, Anne Hegerfeldt’s defence of her identification of a number of British writers as magical realists (2–6). 7. Jameson’s own discussion of magical realism relates more to cinema than to literature. Unfortunately, he never makes clear exactly what he under- stands the term to mean, and his description of magical realism as based on “a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society” (“Film” 302) seems to be inadequate for similar reasons to those identified by Aijaz Ahmad in his critique of Jameson’s examination of ‘Third World’ literature. Ahmad concedes that Jameson’s plea for syllabus reform is noteworthy, and his readings of Lu Xun and Ousmane are “mar- vellously erudite”; it is the “suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries on the one hand and the imperialized formations on the other” that are troubling. (95). 8. Jameson specifically links a valorisation of romance (“the place of narra- tive heterogeneity and of freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage”) with a defence of Marxism: “The association of Marxism and romance does not discredit the former so much as it explains the persistence and vitality of the latter”. See The Political Unconscious, p. 91. 9. For an article that explores medieval elements in García Márquez as a form of allegory, see Christopher Little. 3 Faith, Idealism, and Irreverence in Asturias, Borges, and Carpentier 1. See, for example Camayd-Freixas 60; Loiz Parkinson Zamora “Swords” 44; Hegerfeldt 37. Seymour Menton’s analysis in Historia verdadera del realismo mágico is an exception to this rule, but Menton’s classification of Borges as a magical realist and García Márquez as a fantasist is controversial and unlikely to garner much support. 2. It may be the case that Borges, like Novalis, did in fact desire to break out of the circle of subjectivism, since solipsism was for him so closely associated with psychological traumas related to his relationships with duty, parents, tradition, sex, and his own writing. Edwin Williamson suggests that there is a cruel irony in the fact that the acclaim Borges received for Ficciones and The Aleph derived largely from their exposi- tion of “the nothingness of personality,” a notion that secretly filled him with “horror and revulsion” (444). Signs of ambivalence can be found in the nightmarish qualities of some of his inverted worlds, or in the ways he parodies idealism as well as realism. 3. The glossary to the Pittsburgh Edition of Men of Maize defines ladino: “In Spanish America generally, a mestizo or half-breed who speaks Spanish; in Guatemala, however, the term denotes any person whose speech and way 158 Notes of life are Spanish, that is, ‘European’, even if ethnically he or she is mainly or entirely ‘Indian’ ” (310). 4. Rene Prieto points to a link that may have existed in Asturias’s mind between his mother, who was mestizo, and Indian culture (116–123). Certainly, shifts in Asturias’s personal life, along with his encounters with Mayan and Aztec texts at the Sorbonne, lie at the heart of the empathy he shows for the Indians in Men of Maize, and which was notably lacking in his dissertation on “the Indian problem,” completed in 1923. 5. Asturias became, in 1967, the first Latin American novelist to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Martin notes that he has never been as widely read in the Anglo-Saxon world as in Eastern Europe and France, though, and his achievements have been partially eclipsed by the so-called boom of Latin American literature which he, among others, made possible (xiv). 6. Asturias is quoting from Garibay’s Poesía indígena (1940). Garibay drew the extract from “Canto de Atamalcualoyan” collected by Sahagún in Teapepulco in the sixteenth century (Martin 315). 7. See, for example, Karin Barber’s discussion of the genre of Yoruba oral poetry known as oriki, which are “attributions or appellations: collections of epithets, pithy or elaborated, which are addressed to a subject” (1). 8. For Chatman, drawing from French structuralism, “story” is “content or chain of events (actions, happenings) plus what might be called the existents (characters, items of setting),” and is to be contrasted with “discourse” or “the expression, the means by which the content is communicated” (107).