Chapter 3

Magical Realism: Devi’s Narrative Tool

The term “magical realism” was coined around 1925 by German art critic Franz Roh to describe paintings that demonstrated an altered reality. For him, it was a way of representing and responding to reality and of depicting its enigmas pictorially. Although the term was later used by Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri to describe the work of certain Latin American writers, it came into vogue only after Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturia used the expression to define the style of his novels in the 1960s. The term gained popularity with the rise of the “el boom”—led by writers such as Julio Cortázar of Argentina, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia—and with increased interest in Latin American literature in the last three decades. More recent Latin Amer- ican authors in this vein include Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel. In the 1960s, magical realism was a way to express the Latin American mentality and create an autonomous style of literature. Subsequently, the term has been applied both to earlier writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov from Russia or Ernst Junger from Germany, and to postcolonial and other contemporary writers, from Salman Rushdie (Indo-British) and Günter Grass (German) to Janet Frame (New Zea- lander), Angela Carter (British), and Toni Morrison (Afro-American). Dynamic critics like Brenda Cooper and Wendy Faris have attempted to broaden magical realism’s scope by attaching this term to works by writers from Africa, Europe, and Asia. In her work Magical Realism in West African Fiction, Brenda Cooper argues that magical realism arises out of postcolonial, unevenly developed societies, where mod- ern and ancient, scientific and magical views of the world coexist. Therefore, the concept cannot be restricted to Latin America. She examines three writers from different African countries, their plots, themes, and narrative techniques that combine the dimensions of mag- ic, myth, and historical reality. Similarly, in Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, Wendy Faris discusses a rich array of examples from magical realist novels around the world, including the works of both Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Rulfo, and writers from other traditions, like Salman Rush- 120 ANANDA DEVI – FEMINISM, NARRATION, AND POLYPHONY die, Günter Grass, Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, and Marie Darrieussecq. For Faris, magical realism has become the most important trend in contemporary international fiction, especially in postcolonial cultures, because it “has provided the literary ground for significant cultural work; within its texts, marginal voices, submerged traditions, and emergent literatures have developed and created masterpieces” (1). Faris believes that there is a need to use the term in a larger context than just Latin America or the Caribbean:

Although magical realism has been most widespread in Latin America, my aim here is to continue the critical trend that extends the mode beyond that region, beyond ‘el boom,’ which popular- ized the term. […]. A truly comprehensive study of magical real- ism in world literature would need to range much more widely and, I suspect, could be extended into other literatures, especially in the Near and Far East. (2-3)

Magical realist techniques of merging the real with the unreal or the supernatural have long been associated with Latin America, be- cause of the continent’s natural landscape with its volcanoes and wa- terfalls; because of its indigenous cultures with their religious tradi- tions; and because of the political, social, and economic upheavals it had to undergo, due to the oppression of indigenous populations, the forced migration of African slaves, colonialism, and dictatorships. All the conditions that made magical realism a vehicle to describe and bear witness to the challenges of daily life exist in other parts of the world, especially in most postcolonial third-world countries, and therefore it would be useful to investigate their literature through the lens of magical realism. Although magical realism is conceived as inherently political be- cause it challenges several assumptions of order, it has never been viewed as a feminist genre. In fact, it also perpetuates some of the patriarchal cultural stereotypes, “using the female body as a bridge to the beyond” (Faris 2). Yet, many practices of magical realism that make it relevant for political struggles might be pertinent to some issues in feminist theory and criticism. It is a literary mode that aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites, characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Ac- cording to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, in which the presence of the supernatural is of- ten connected to the primeval or “magical” Indian mentality. Ray Ver-