3S ACAD 3 1867 00136 6306 MY M U.H .AL REALISM Theory, History, Community / * r LOIS PARKINSON ZAMORA AND WENDY R.FARIS, EDITORS ' x Magical Realism J8£i- S3 c -Anno 1778 '###& # # # PHILLIPS • ACADEMY # OLIVER*WENDELL*HOLMES # LIBRARY S altiora jE ^gj ADAMS BOOK FUND MAGICAL REALISM Theory, History, Community Edited with an Introduction by LOIS PARKINSON ZAMORA AND WENDY B. FARIS DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham & London igg$ Hsn c,a. \ Fourth printing, 2003 © 1995 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Typeset in Berthold Bodoni by Tseng Information Systems. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Magical realism : theory, history, community / edited, with an introduction, by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-1611-0 (alk. paper). — isbn 0-8223-1640-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Magic realism (Literature) 2. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism 3. Spanish American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. I. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. II. Faris, Wendy B. PN56.M24M34 1995 809.3 937— dc20 94-47223 CIP To Friendship CONTENTS Acknowledgments x Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s 1 I. Foundations Franz Roh Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925) 15 Irene Guenther Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic 33 Alejo Carpentier On the Marvelous Real in America (1949) 75 The Baroque and the Marvelous Real (1975) 89 Angel Flores Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction (1955) 109 Luis Leal Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature (1967) 119 Amaryll Chanady The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms 125 Scott Simpkins Sources of Magic Realism/Supplements to Realism in Contemporary Latin American Literature II. Theory Wendy B. Faris Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction 163 Theo L. D’haen Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers 191 Rawdon Wilson The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism 209 Jon Thiem The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction 235 Jeanne Delbaere-Garant Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on Magic Realism in Contemporary Literature in English 249 III. History John Burt Foster Jr. Magical Realism, Compensatory Vision, and Felt History: Classical Realism Transformed in The White Hotel 267 P. Gabrielle Foreman Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call 285 viii Contents Richard Todd Narrative Trickery and Performative Historiography: Fictional Representation of National Identity in Graham Swift, Peter Carey, and Mordecai Richler 305 Patricia Merivale Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Midnight’s Children, Magic Realism, and The Tin Drum 329 Steven F. Walker Magical Archetypes: Midlife Miracles in The Satanic Verses 347 David Mikics Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer 371 IV. Community Stephen Slemon Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse 407 John Erickson Metoikoi and Magical Realism in the Maghrebian Narratives of Tahar ben Jelloun and Ahdelkebir Khatibi 427 Susan J. Napier The Magic of Identity: Magic Realism in Modern Japanese Fiction 451 Melissa Stewart Roads of “Exquisite Mysterious Muck”: The Magical Journey through the City in William Kennedy’s Ironweed, John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” and Donald Barthelme’s “City Life” 477 Contents ix Lois Parkinson Zamora Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction 497 Selected Bibliography 551 Contributors 559 Index 563 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful to Lilia Carpentier for the rights to translate Alejo Car- pentier’s essays, “On the Marvelous Real in America” and “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real”; to the editors of Twentieth Century Literature for permission to reprint Scott Simpkins’ essay, originally titled “Magical Strategies: The Supplement of Realism,” in Twentieth Century Literature 34, 2 (1988): 140-54; to the Women’s Studies Program of the University of Maryland for permission to reprint P. Gabrielle Foreman’s “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende On Call,” Feminist Studies 18, 2 (1992): 369-88; and to Auburn University for per¬ mission to publish a revised version of John Burt Foster’s “Magic Realism in The White Hotel: Compensatory Vision and the Transformation of Clas¬ sic Realism,” Southern Humanities Review 20, 3 (1986): 205-19. The following essays, some in slightly different versions, were originally published in these collections: Franz Roh, “Realismo magico: Problemas de la pintura mas reciente,” Revista de Occidente 16 (April, May, June 1927): 274-301; Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fic¬ tion,” Hispania 38, 2 (1955): 187-92; Luis Leal, “El realismo magico en la literatura hispanoamericana,” Cuadernos Americanos 43, 4 (1967): 230- 35; Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse,” Cana¬ dian Literature 116 (1988): 9-24; Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Space: Magic Realism,” in Magic Realism and Canadian Literature, ed. Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski (Waterloo, Ontario: University of Water¬ loo, 1986), 61-74; Patricia Merivale, “Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Inter- textual Strategies in Midnight’s Children and The Tin Drum,” Ariel 21, 3 (1990): 5-21. To our contributors, for their patience and good humor, we are espe¬ cially grateful. LOIS PARKINSON ZAMORA AND WENDY R. FARIS Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s A quota system is to be introduced on fiction set in South America. The intention is to curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony. Ah, the propin¬ quity of cheap life and expensive principles, of religion and banditry, of surprising honour and random cruelty. Ah, the daiquiri bird which incubates its eggs on the wing; ah, the fredonna tree whose roots grow at the tips of its branches, and whose fibres assist the hunchback to impregnate by telepathy the haughty wife of the hacienda owner; ah, the opera house now overgrown by jungle. Permit me to rap on the table and murmur “Pass!” Novels set in the Arctic and the Antarctic will receive a development grant. —Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot1 Barnes has got it just right. His parodic pastiche of magical realism moves back and forth, as do many of the literary texts we consider here, between the disparate worlds of what we might call the historical and the imaginary. Propinquity—Barnes’ word —is indeed a central structuring principle of magical realist narration. Contradictions stand face to face, oxymorons march in locked step —too predictably, Barnes insists —and politics collide with fantasy. In his reference to religion and banditry, and to the miracu¬ lous impregnation of the hacienda owner’s haughty wife (clearly the kind of magical realist image he wishes would go away), Barnes implies that bad politics has become an expected ingredient of the form. His images reflect the popular perception of magical realism as a largely Latin Ameri¬ can event. In ridiculing the forms and conventions of magical realism, Barnes helps us distinguish them. As in all effective parody, he turns the form against itself, uses its conventions to critique its conventions. His hyper¬ bole parodies the hyperbole of magical realism, for excess is a hallmark of the mode. His distillation of characters into types suggests the shift 2 Zamora and Faris in emphasis in magical realism from psychological to social and political concerns. His refusal to sign on for the baroque “package tour” suggests the style of the cabin decor in many of these textual cruises. His comic curse on magical realism declares that its conventions have become ossi¬ fied, tedious, overripe. Julian Barnes is fun to argue with because his prescription (“Pass!”) is so self-consciously reductive. He invites refutation, because the resources of magical realist narrative are hardly exhausted. On the contrary, they have been enabling catalysts for the development of new national and regional literatures and, at the same time, a replenishing force for “main¬ stream” narrative traditions. Readers know that magical realism is not a Latin American monopoly, though the mastery of the mode by several re¬ cent Latin American writers explains Barnes’ association. It is true that Latin Americanists have been prime movers in developing the critical concept of magical realism and are still primary voices in its discussion, but this collection considers magical realism an international commodity. Almost as a return on capitalism’s hegemonic investment in its colonies, magical realism is especially alive and well in postcolonial contexts and is now achieving a compensatory extension of its market worldwide. Further¬ more Barnes’ parodic suggestion that magical realism is a recent glut on that market ignores its long history, beginning with the masterful inter¬ weavings of magical and real in the epic and chivalric traditions and con¬ tinuing in the precursors of modern prose fiction—the Decameron, Die Diousand and One Nights, Don Quixote. Indeed, we may suppose that the widespread appeal of magical realist fiction today responds not only to its innovative energy but also to its impulse to reestablish contact with traditions temporarily eclipsed by the mimetic constraints of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism. Contemporary magical realist writers self¬ consciously depart from the conventions of narrative realism to enter and amplify other (diverted) currents of Western literature that flow from the marvelous Greek pastoral and epic traditions to medieval dream visions to the romance and Gothic fictions of the past century. It is a temptation to run Barnes’ risk, to polarize the distinction between realism and magical realism in order to define the latter. In fact, realism and magical realism often spring from coherent (and sometimes identi¬ cal) sources. Consider the magical departures from realism by such mas¬ ter realists as Gogol, James, Kafka, Flaubert. Indeed, Barnes might have noticed that beside his daiquiri bird, mentioned in the passage quoted Introduction 3 above, perches Flaubert’s parrot, the presiding spirit and eponymous hero, as it were, of Barnes’ own wonderful book, Flaubert’s Parrot. Barnes’ title refers to Flaubert’s short story, “A Simple Fleart.” In this story, Flaubert writes of the maidservant Felicite, whose banal reality eventually admits a transcendental parrot: “To minds like hers the supernatural is a simple matter.”2 In the magical realist texts under discussion in these essays, the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary mat¬ ter, an everyday occurrence — admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort. An essential difference, then, between realism and magical realism in¬ volves the intentionality implicit in the conventions of the two modes. Several essays in our collection suggest that realism intends its version of the world as a singular version, as an objective (hence universal) repre¬ sentation of natural and social realities —in short, that realism functions ideologically and hegemonically. Magical realism also functions ideologi¬ cally but, according to these essays, less hegemonically, for its program is not centralizing but eccentric: it creates space for interactions of diver¬ sity. In magical realist texts, ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural cor¬ rective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation. Ironically, the dichotomy encoded in the critical term “magical realism” positions its users outside of the world portrayed in the “magical realist” texts we wish to enter, for the term implies a clearer opposition between magic and reality than exists within those texts. For the characters who inhabit the fictional world, and for the author who creates it, magic may be real, reality magical; there is no need to label them as such. We will do well, then, to test the term magical realism against such alternative terms as metaphoric realism or mythic realism, as one of the following essays proposes. Texts labeled magical realist draw upon cultural systems that are no less “real” than those upon which traditional literary realism draws — often non-Western cultural systems that privilege mystery over empiri¬ cism, empathy over technology, tradition over innovation. Their primary narrative investment may be in myths, legends, rituals —that is, in collec¬ tive (sometimes oral and performative, as well as written) practices that bind communities together. In such cases, magical realist works remind 4 Zamora and Faris us that the novel began as a popular form, with communal imperatives that continue to operate in many parts of the world. Or, where these prac¬ tices (and communities) have been occulted or supplanted, magical realist writers may revitalize them in their fictions. A number of the writers dis¬ cussed here self-consciously recuperate non-Western cultural modes and nonliterary forms in their WesternTorm (the novel, the short story, the epic poem), among them Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Juan Rulfo, Derek Walcott. So, too, Gabriel Garcia Marquez insists that he is a social realist, not a magical realist: one of his characters in One Hundred Years of Soli¬ tude confirms this amplification of the realm of the real by observing, “If they believe it in the Bible ... I don’t see why they shouldn’t believe it from me.”3 How, then, are we to proceed, distanced as we are by our own term from the very texts we wish to approach? Comparative literature can be an effective medium for deconstructing ideologically charged dichotomies, including that of “magic” and “real.” Our aim in soliciting discussions of a wide variety of texts and traditions is to establish the viability of magical realism as a significant contemporary international mode and to encour¬ age attention to local contrasts, to cultural and political divergences. The authors of the essays in this collection recognize in a variety of ways the contradictions between the critical label and the literary practice of magi¬ cal realism, as well as the dangers of appropriation, colonization, domes¬ tication inherent in their analytical activity. They are at pains, in general, not to monumentalize magical realism as the postmodern or the post¬ colonial mode or to propose marginality as some new (disguised) main¬ stream. Indeed, a collective discussion like ours, which features six recent Nobel prize winners — Garcia Marquez, Paz, Morrison, Kawabata, Walcott, Oe — as well as such diverse and widely read writers as Rushdie, Allende, Barthelme, Rulfo, to name only a few, suggests that magical realist practice is currently requiring that we [renegotiate the nature of marginality itself. Amidst complex definitional and conceptual questions, the authors of these essays recognize that, by whatever name, magical realism is an im¬ portant presence in contemporary world literature. Because they treat texts from many countries and cultures, they create a complex of compara¬ tive connections, avoiding separatism while at the same time respecting cultural diversity. Included here are references to Eastern, African, and indigenous American mythological and expressive traditions as well as to European traditions, and to works that self-consciously depart from Euro- Introduction 5 pean traditions. So the following essays, like the texts they treat, circulate eccentrically: their arguments overlap, but they do not revolve around a single ideological or geographical center. Within this eccentric comparative context, each essay offers general¬ izing theoretical formulations, as well as specific discussion of particu¬ lar literary works. Rather than providing a comprehensive geographical or linguistic survey of magical realism, the essays tend to illustrate the strength of the mode by intensive textual analyses. They show that magi¬ cal realist writers are reading and responding to each other across national and linguistic borders in ways that have influenced individual works and encouraged the recent development of magical realist subjects and strate¬ gies. The essays on contemporary literature describe various formal and thematic interactions among the literary texts they treat, interactions that suggest the existence of a flourishing trend, perhaps one that will eventu¬ ally be recognized as a movement. On the other hand, the essays that look back to earlier periods of literary history may suggest that magical realism is less a trend than a tradition, an evolving mode or genre that has had its waxings and wanings over the centuries and is now experiencing one more period of ascendency. The challenge of these latter essays is to articulate the differences between current literary manifestations of magical realism and their many magical precursors. In the diversity of texts and traditions they discuss, the authors of these essays remind us that a literary genre is both a formal and a historical category. As a group, the essays address the synchronic relations of a par¬ ticular magical realist work within its own cultural context and beyond its borders, as well as the diachronic relations of the texts that comprise an on-going generic tradition. Together, they allow us to evaluate the formal capacities of magical realism to express a variety of cultural and historical conditions. Ortega y Gasset said of a writer’s choice of literary genre that it reflects “at one and the same time a certain thing to be said and the only way to say it fully.”4 In their use of magical realist devices to enhance the expressive potential of their chosen genre, the authors considered here confirm (and complicate) Ortega’s assertion. In surveying the definitions of magical realism in the following essays, we sight several repeating elements. The essays generally agree that magi¬ cal realism is a mode suited to exploring—and transgressing—bound¬ aries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic. Magical realism often facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of pos- 6 Zamora and Faris sible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of fiction. The propensity of magical realist texts to admit a plurality of worlds means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory be¬ tween or among those worlds —in phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformation, metamorphosis, dissolution are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism, or pragmatism. So magical realism may be consid¬ ered an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation, at the same time that it resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightment rationalism and literary realism. Mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female: these are boundaries to be erased, transgressed, blurred, brought together, or otherwise fundamentally refashioned in magical realist texts. All of the essays in this collection address the negotiations of magical real¬ ism between these normative oppositions and alternative structures with which they propose to destabilize and/or displace them. Magical realism’s assault on these basic structures of rationalism and realism has inevitable ideological impact, another point upon which these essays agree. Magical realist texts are subversive: their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political and cul¬ tural structures, a feature that has made the mode particularly useful to writers in postcolonial cultures and, increasingly, to women. Hallucinatory scenes and events, fantastic/phantasmagoric characters are used in sev¬ eral of the magical realist works discussed here to indict recent political and cultural perversions. History is inscribed, often in detail, but in such a way that actual events and existing institutions are not always privileged and are certainly not limiting: historical narrative is no longer chronicle but clairvoyance. As Denis Donoghue states in a review of Carlos Fuentes’ magical realist tales, Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins, the plu¬ perfect subjunctive is often more used (and useful) than the past perfect.5 John Erickson, in the essay he contributes here, summarizes this aspect of magical realism by calling it “a corrosion within the engine of system,” an admission of the exceptional that subverts existing structures of power. Implied in this formulation are other subversions and repositionings: of the Cartesian identification of truth with human consciousness; of ratio¬ nalist notions of the probable and predictable relations of cause and effect; of the reader’s relation to the text and the text’s relation to the world. These issues and others are examined in the essays that follow. Here, let us simply cite Henry James, who warns against “the peril of the unmea- Introduction 7 sured strange,” stating that to make his stories of the supernatural work, he needed to juxtapose them to another history, to “the indispensable his¬ tory of somebody’s normal relation to something.”6 But this notion, too, is unsettled by magical realist texts because within them magic is often ac¬ cepted as our “indispensable history” of “noma/ relations” to everything. The world is altered and enriched accordingly. We have divided our volume into four parts: Foundations, Theory, His¬ tory, Community. In our first section, we include essays published in 1927, 1949, and 1975 by two writers who were especially influential in develop¬ ing the concept of magical realism. They are the German art critic and historian Franz Roh and the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier. Roh and Carpentier formulate two issues that have become essential in the theory and practice of magical realism: the imaginary and the autochthonous.7 Roh speculates about the quotients of the real and the imagined and more particularly about the status of the object in Post-Expressionist painting in the twenties in Europe; Carpentier posits a particular affinity between the real and the imaginary in Latin America. Carpentier calls this experience lo real maravilloso americano, a term and concept that Amaryll Chanady will refer to in her essay as Carpentier’s “territorialization of the imagi¬ nary.” Roh’s emphasis is on aesthetic expression, Carpentier’s on cultural and geographical identity. 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 exist¬ ing and exhausted forms of expression. We also include early and widely cited literary critical studies by Angel Flores and Luis Leal, on magical realism in Latin America. The other essays in this first section provide an explanatory history of these foundational essays. Irene Guenther’s historical overview surveys the ways in which Franz Roh’s term of Magic Realism, overlapped with and was ultimately eclipsed by Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, during the Weimar Republic. Guenther also considers the routes by which Roh’s art historical formulation found its way to Latin American writers in the 1920s and, thirty years later, into the transnational discourse of literary criticism. Amaryll Chanady builds on her own seminal study of the nar¬ rative dynamics of magical realism, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antimony (1985), to investigate how Western 8 Zamora and Faris rationalism is subverted, mimesis displaced by poesis, in the work of Latin American writers and critics —Carpentier, Flores, and Leal among them. She argues that they use the resources of European Surrealism even as they modify them in their efforts to articulate a theory of magical realism as a New World phenomenon. In the essay that follows Chanady’s, Scott Simpkins places Roh, Carpentier, and Flores in their philosophic and cul¬ tural contexts. Using these early discussions of magical realism as his point of departure, he analyzes the generic strategies employed by two literary magicians, Borges and Garcia Marquez, and their influence on many of their contemporaries. We have said that our essays circulate eccentrically, that they belie a single, controlling center. It is, however, plausible to say that they orbit around three thematic centers, and the following three sections — Theory, History, Community—are grouped accordingly. The essays in our second section theorize magical realism. Wendy B. Faris proposes a conceptual framework for the mode. She establishes a set of distinguishing charac¬ teristics for magical realism as an international movement and in so doing argues for its central place in any consideration of postmodernism. Equally broad in focus, Theo D’haen’s essay also explores definitional questions. His survey of the history of the term itself traces the radical revisions and recenterings of magical realism in an international context. Rawdon Wilson and Jon Thiem begin to particularize these theoretical issues by focusing on the nature of space in magical realist texts. Wilson observes the interactions among distinct worlds proposed within the text and finds their shifting relations —the “metamorphoses of space” —to be a primary source of counterrealism. In a related argument, Jon Thiem points to the interactions between the textual world and the world out¬ side the text, that is, the interactions between the characters’ world and the reader’s. Thiem identifies a magical realist narrative process, which he calls the “textualization of the reader,” whereby the assumed boundaries between the fictional world and the reader’s world are magically trans¬ gressed. The reader’s reality, and the characters’ fictionality, are called into question by this process of “textualization,” as Thiem demonstrates in a group of texts by Julio Cortazar, Michael Ende, Italo Calvino, and Woody Allen, among others. Concluding the theory section is Jeanne Delbaere-Garant’s call for closer definition of the critical concept of magical realism. She argues that magical realism is useful as a generic marker only if we make distinctions