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Magically Strategized Belonging: Magical Realism As Cosmopolitan Mapping in Ben Okri, Cristina García, and Salman Rushdie

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Magically Strategized Belonging: Magical Realism As Cosmopolitan Mapping in Ben Okri, Cristina García, and Salman Rushdie Magically Strategized Belonging: Magical Realism as Cosmopolitan Mapping in Ben Okri, Cristina García, and Salman Rushdie Kim Sasser Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2011 1 Table of Contents Declaration Abstract 1. Cosmopolitan Cartography: Magical Realism’s Constructive Capacity 3 1.1 Construction, Deconstruction, and the Question of Authorship 7 1.2 Defining the Mode 28 1.3 Three Magical Realist Modi Operandi 33 1.4 Belonging, Translocation, and Cosmopolitan Maps 45 1.5 Controversy? 55 2. Vernacular Humanism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road 57 2.1 To Become a Man 60 2.2 Vernacular Humanism 81 2.3 Other Humanisms 91 2.4 lo real maravilloso 107 2.5 Magical Realism 120 3. The Family Nexus in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban 122 3.1 Political Families 124 3.2 Inner Worlds 136 3.3 Wider Worlds 145 3.4 The Magical Braid 157 3.5 The Traumatic Braid 172 3.6 Belonging to People 180 4. Universal Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence 183 4.1 Layer One: Particularism 186 4.2 Layer Two: Doubling 193 4.3 Layer Three: Exile 205 4.4 Universal Cosmopolitanism 215 4.5 Beyond Hybridity 228 4.6 Magical Realist Metamorphosis 239 5. Conclusion: Is Magical Realism Exhausted? 249-255 Notes 256-275 Works Cited 276-283 2 Chapter One Cosmopolitan Cartography: Magical Realism’s Constructive Capacity “Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.” –Benedict Anderson1 Since literary magical realism exploded out of Latin America and into international critical attention in the mid twentieth century, the limbs of its narrative genealogy continue to be sketched in both lower and higher than the branch bearing the immense impact of el boom. Perhaps the most often cited figure from magical realism’s pre-Latin American and pre-literary phase is Franz Roh, who deployed the term in 1925 to describe the German painting movement Magischer realismus, as critics such as Irene Guenther, Kenneth Reeds, Wendy Faris, and Lois Parkinson Zamora have shown.2 After having migrated transatlantically, magical realism mutated formally in the process whereby it came to be embodied in Latin American literature. Following the boom of the 1950s and 60s magical realism began to be recognized as a global phenomenon. Literary magical realism has now been written by authors from innumerable countries of origin and thus is not the sole property of Latin Americans, as Alejo Carpentier might have us believe. Erik Camayd-Freixas, who himself contends for the delimitation of a distinct Latin American magical realism, still concedes that the mode is “today’s most compelling world fiction” (583). In addition to Carpentier, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende, among other significant Latin American magical realists, key contributions to the mode’s corpus have since been recognized in the works of Jack Hodgins, Louise Erdrich, Robert Kroetsch, and Toni Morrison. Beyond the American continents, Wen- chin Ouyang points out: “[Magical realism] is in Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tibetan, and Turkish, to name but a few languages” (15). 3 One recent example of magical realism is Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Enchantress of Florence (2008), analyzed in this study. Considering this novel in conjunction with the landmark 1949 publication of Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (El reino de este mundo), including its famous prologue, these two magical realist texts represent a significant development in magical realist authorship among East and West Indies.3 Furthermore, they form two temporal poles between which there is a nearly sixty-year time span, a figure that does not include texts preceding the Latin American boom. Magical realism has traversed boundaries of many kinds. It has crossed temporal eras, vast geographical distances, linguistic borders, and forms. Since its transformation from philosophy and painting to literature, a more recent trend has been the metamorphoses from magical realist literature to theater and film.4 Clearly, the mode has proven extremely elastic, and it is just this adaptability that explains a significant aspect of its creative and critical persistence. Yet, the mode has been underestimated. I am not here merely responding to skeptics of magical realism by pointing to the stubborn endurance of the term, though that point is true. What I want to draw attention to addresses those within the magical realist fold, as it were, those who have engaged or are engaging with this aesthetic creatively and/or analytically. I mean to contend that magical realism proves to be far more malleable than perhaps anyone deploying the term within very particular historical moments, locations, and political frameworks may have been able to foresee, crucial as these specific usages have been to the mode’s development and genealogy. We are beginning to see that this aesthetic is thin enough to structure diverse projects and even divergent, incompatible views, and this is a benefit, I hasten to add, for it means that the mode is capable of continuing beyond a specific historical exigency. I will take Carpentier back up at this point, then. Extending his argument about the “baroque” attributes of lo real maravilloso to 4 magical realism in general, the mode’s aesthetic thinness recommends it as a cyclically recurring spirit as opposed to a “historical style” frozen in time (“Baroque” 95).5 The particularist view of magical realism, that which sees the mode as requiring specific thematic and extratextual deployments, is demonstrated in a critical debate regarding magical realism’s functionality. Specifically, this discussion concerns the question how is magical realism positioned in relation to the two contrasting operations of deconstruction and construction. What is its capacity to effect either or both of these outcomes? A prominent view has developed which understands the mode as one that structures an exclusively deconstructive narratology, a position erroneously supported by the particularist view (and vice versa). This study takes a different position, demonstrating that the parameters of magical realist poetics are broad enough to encompass both functions. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), and Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (2008) all evince this, as they appropriate the distinct techniques offered by magical realism to construct various strategies, or models, of belonging in the world, as will be demonstrated at length in the subsequent chapters. Magical realist history also corroborates this position. As will be demonstrated shortly, the mode has been a vehicle for both construction and deconstruction throughout its diverse incarnations. In addition to insights from the mode’s historical usages, this dual capacity becomes evident when particular (if predominant) thematic and political deployments are distinguished from magical realism’s minimal aesthetic requirements. This differentiation requires an understanding of what the fundamental characteristics are that constitute the mode. After this is clarified, magical realism can be separated from a historical, thematic usage and considered more broadly and afresh. 5 In making this distinction between aesthetics and particular deployments, I am, on the one hand, picking up and continuing an old critical argument, a “secular schism in Magical-Realist scholarship” that has never been resolved since Roh and Carpentier, describes Camayd-Freixas (584). This is a debate over whether the mode should be defined formally or thematically, or, as Frederick Luis Aldama describes it, a debate between magical realism as an aesthetic or an “ethnopoetics,” or socioanthropological artifact (1, 9).6 In their anthology Zamora and Faris comment on the divergent views among two of the mode’s founders: “Roh’s emphasis is on aesthetic expression, Carpentier’s on cultural and geographical identity,” the latter being reflected in primitivist thematics such as Afro-Cuban voodoo. Significantly, Camayd-Freixas observes, Zamora and Faris formulate magical realism as a conversation which should include both Roh and Carpentier, aesthetics and thematics, as is implicit in their inclusion of both in their anthology and is explicit in the view they espouse here: “Despite their different perspectives, Roh and Carpentier share the conviction that magical realism defines a revisionary position with respect to the generic practices of their times and media; each engages the concept to discuss what he considers an antidote to existing and exhausted forms of expression” (7).7 While I agree that magical realism includes both thematic and aesthetic aspects, this is true only in a specific sense. A robust understanding of magical realism requires both a close-up view in which one perceives the numerous different applications (i.e. the postcolonial), including how these specific usages have adapted the mode, and a bird’s-eye view, a panoramic perspective of the magical realist timeline in its entirety, including an understanding of why and how magical realism as a theoretical term has attracted myriad usages. As examples of the mode continue to proliferate the need to separate aesthetics from thematics has become (again) compelling. This debate, then, is also recent, pressing afresh the 6 necessity of reviving—and working towards resolving—it. This is an issue underlying, I suggest, contemporary critics’ advocating expansions in our understanding of the mode. Faris, Ouyang, and Christopher Warnes have each pointed to areas of exclusion within magical realist criticism wherein the mode’s constructive capacities are overlooked, as I will describe in more detail later. For now, it is enough to note that these exclusions indicate that the critical registers available to us for engaging with magical realism are too narrow, and this problem stems in part from a narrow, particularist view of the mode, one which has married thematics and extratextual issues with aesthetics. Untangling these issues requires a new look at magical realism and some of its most basic presumptions.
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