Christopher Warnes

[1] The term magical realism has appeared in print with increasing frequency over the past few decades.It can now be found in a vast number of university course descriptions, dissertations and academic articles, and it has received notable coverage in the popular press.Even the advertising industry has recently begun to take an interest in the term, though it long ago learned how to capitalize on magical realist visual techniques in its quest for ever more novel ways of marketing products.The main force of the attraction seems to be that the term’s distinctive oxymoronic nature suggests a numinous quality to the everyday, and it thus promises somehow to reconcile the modern, rational, disenchanted subject of the West with forgotten but recoverable spiritual realities.

[2] In the domain of literary studies this popularity has not been matched by any certainty over what magical realism actually is, and scholars new to the field are likely to be confronted by a number of contradictory attitudes towards the term.One eminent critic has referred to magical realism as the “literary language of the emergent postcolonial world”, while another has called it “little more than a brand name for exoticism”.It can be “a major, perhaps the major, component of postmodernist fiction”, or it can be “a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism”.Magical realism has by turns been praised for founding a new multicultural artistic reality and denigrated as dangerous and shallow.It has even been accused of being underpinned by pernicious — even racist—ideologies.While such discrepancies are partly to be accounted for by ideological differences, as a critical term magical realism has, until recently, lacked widespread definitional and theoretical legitimacy.

[3] Some critics have responded to this state of affairs by suggesting that we ought to do away with the term magical realism altogether.The problem with such a suggestion, even if it were possible to implement, is that it ignores the fact that the tenacity of the term is due in large measure to its explanatory value.There is a growing corpus of literary works that draws upon the conventions of both realism and fantasy or folktale, yet does so in such a way that neither of these two realms is able to assert a greater claim to truth than the other.This capacity to resolve the tension between two discursive systems usually thought of as mutually exclusive must constitute the starting point for any inquiry into magical realism.A brief survey of canonical magical realist texts — Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Laura Esquival’s Like Water for Chocolate, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, for example — will reveal that what these otherwise different texts all have in common is that each treats the supernatural as if it were a perfectly acceptable and understandable aspect of everyday life.As Rushdie says, talking of García Márquez, “impossible things happen constantly and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun”.A basic definition of magical realism, then, sees it as a mode of narration that naturalizes the supernatural that is to say, a mode in which real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of rigorous equivalence — neither has a greater claim to truth or referentiality.

Notes

1.Christopher Warnes: He is a University Lecturer in English and a Fellow of St.Johns College, University of Cambridge, UK.He held previous lecturing appointment at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa.He has published on topics ranging from contemporary South African literature to computer games.

2.Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: It is a novel that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia.The non-linear story is narrated via different time frames, a technique derived from the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (as in The Garden of Forking Paths).

3.Like Water for Chocolate: It is a popular novel published in 1989 by first-time Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel.The novel follows the story of a young girl named Tita who longs her entire life to marry her lover, Pedro, but can never have him because of her mother’s upholding of the family tradition of the youngest daughter not marrying but taking care of her mother until the day she dies.Tita is only able to express herself when she cooks.

4.Midnight’s Children: It is a 1980 book by British Indian Novelist Salman Rushdie that deals with India’s transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of India.It is considered an example of postcolonial literature and magical realism.The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual historical events as with historical fiction.

5.Beloved: It is a novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 1987.It is based on the true story of the African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state.A posse arrived to retrieve her and her children by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue slaves across state borders.Margaret killed her twoyear-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured.

6.Nights at the Circus: It is a novel by British novelist Angela Carter, first published in 1984.The novel focuses on the life and exploits of Sophie Fevvers, a woman who is — or so she would have people believe — a Cockney virgin, hatched from an egg laid by unknown parents and ready to develop fully fledged wings.At the time of the story, she has become a celebrated aerialist, and she captivates the young journalist Jack Walser, who runs away with the circus and falls into a world that his journalistic exploits had not prepared him to encounter.

7.The Famished Road: It is the Booker Prize-winning novel written by Nigerian author Ben Okri.The novel, published in 1991, follows Azaro, an abiku or spirit child, living in an unnamed most likely Nigerian city.The novel employs a unique narrative style incorporating the spirit world with the“real” world in what some have classified as magical realism.Others have labeled it animist realism.Still others choose to simply call the novel fantasy literature.The book exploits the belief in the coexistence of the spiritual and material worlds that is a defining aspect of traditional African life.

For Fun

Works to Read

Please refer to the notes of Text C

Movies to See

1. Donnie Darko (2001)

It is an American science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Richard Kelly.The film depicts the realitybending adventures of the title character as he seeks the meaning and significance behind his troubling Doomsday-related visions.With a strong tint of postmodernism, the film might find some close inspiration from Jorge Borges’s stories.

2. Midnight’s Children (2012)

It is a film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel of the same name.Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, the film was released in late 2012.