Magic Realism is a literary movement associated with a style of writing or technique that incorporates magical or supernatural events into realistic narrative without questioning the improbability of these events. This fusion of fact and fantasy is meant to question the nature of reality as well as call attention to the act of crHeation. By making lived experience appear extraordinary, magical realist writers contribute to a reenvisioning of Latin-American culture as vibrant and complex. The movement originated in the fictional writing of Spanish American writers in the mid-twentieth century and is generally claimed to have begun in the 1940s with the publication of two important novels: Men of Maize by Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias and The Kingdom of This World by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. What is most striking about both of these novels is their ability to infuse their narratives with an atmosphere steeped in the indigenous folklore, cultural beliefs, geography, and history of a particular geographic and political landscape. However, at the same time that their settings are historically correct, the events that occur may appear improbable, even unimaginable. Characters change into animals, and slaves are aided by the dead; time reverses and moves backward, and other events occur simultaneously. Thus, magic realist works present the reader with a perception of the world where nothing is taken for granted and where anything can happen.
The fantastical qualities of this style of writing were heavily influenced by the surrealist movement in Europe of the 1920s and literary avant-gardism as well as by the exotic natural surroundings, native and exiled cultures, and tumultuous political histories of Latin America. Although other Latin America writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortazar used elements of magic and fantasy in their work, it was not until the publication of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude in English in 1970 that the movement became an international phenomenon. Subsequently, women writers such as Isabel Allende from Chile and Laura Esquivel from Mexico have become part of this movement's later developments, contributing a focus on women's issues and perceptions of reality. Since its inception, Magic Realism has become a technique used widely in all parts of the world. Thus, writers such as Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and Sherman Alexie have been added to the magic realist canon of writers because of their use of magical elements in real-life historical settings.
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mirrors, circular towers, mazes, gardens, swords, and ruins, these concise, broadly imaginative sketches are meant to be viewed as allegories of different states of consciousness. Rather than creating fully developed characters and traditional narratives, Borges creates characters who appear to have no relation to contemporary reality but who are, for different reasons, on a quest for some kind of knowledge. Unlike García Márquez, who views the specific historical and political reality of South America as having certain magical or "unreal" aspects to it, Borges uses different settings, historical characters, and fantastical plots as a way of exploring ideas about politics, philosophy, world events, art, and above all the limitless power of magic to envision a better world. Fictions offers readers a series of inventive worlds that are intellectually challenging but are not situated in current Latin-American politics and history. Both in its maze-like narratives that often pose questions that are never answered and in its excessive use of details, Fictions presents reality as a linguistic puzzle that needs to be obsessively figured out.
Allende's 1982 novel, La casa de los espíritus, published in English in 1985, immediately became an international bestseller among the literary crowd who had followed the older "Boom" writers such as Marquez, Fuentes, and Borges. The narrative follows four generations of an upper-class family in Chile, revealing the political and social upheaval of that country as witnessed by various members of the family. The novel is a reconstruction of history that has been undertaken by Alba, who is a recent descendent of the family and its current social commentator. Its fierce political critique of the Pinochet dictatorship as well as its use of fantastical description and supernatural acts places it well within the parameters of magic realist fiction. As many critics have noted, in tone and content this novel is similar to García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, yet its focus on women as agitators and writers of history demands that it be viewed as a work that is not completely derivative of García Márquez's. Feminist critics have applauded the novel's ability to portray women not as passive victims of political and social injustice but as active resisters to political and sexual oppression through their desire to write about these experiences.
The Cuban writer Carpentier, one of the earliest writers of Magic Realism, is best known for his novel, El reino de este mundo, published in 1949, and later translated into English in 1957. This seminal work, set in both Cuba and Haiti, follows the story of Ti Noël, a slave who recounts the numerous insurrections by slaves who were aided by magic and the natural world against their oppressors from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Its emphasis on Afro-Caribbean life, with its roots in African spiritualism, music, magical and healing practices, reveals the vitality of a culture that refused to be completely assimilated into Western cultural practices. Critics claim that this novel paved the way for a new generation of Spanish American writers who used the novel as a form of social protest that related particularly to the political, social, and physical conditions found in Latin America. The novel can be seen as a fictive extension of Carpentier's essay "The Marvelous Real," which argues that the rich cross-fertilizing of different cultures in South America engendered the literature that has come to be called Magic Realism.
Originally published in 1985 as El amor en los tiempos del cólera, this novel is another lavishly drawn epic written by García Márquez. However, unlike many of his previous novels and short stories that focus on the political and social upheavals in Latin America, Love in the Time of Cholera (translated into English in 1988) relates the intricacies of Florentino Ariza's love for Fermina Daza, a love that is requited afternearly sixty years. The novel is a tribute to the long-lasting abilities of love to succeed in a corrupt and unpredictably violent world. The bizarre and unlikely political and social events that become commonplace in One Hundred Years of Solitude are secondary in this novel toa lyrical and deeply affecting portrait of the everyday lives of a group of people who are intimately connected to each other. Because this novel lacks some of the political intensity and narrative improbability that much of his previous work had, it has not received as much critical attention, yet for many Love in the Time of Cholera reveals the same intelligent and forceful wit at work that emphasizes the magic inherent in the everyday.
In 1949, Asturias published his novel Hombres de Maize, which was later translated into English as Men of Maize. Although the book may be viewed as too early to be part of the Magic Realism movement, the novel's focus on politics, the effects of colonialism, and the fantastical qualities of reality certainly shares characteristics with many later novels. Influenced by both European Surrealism and the indigenous myths of pre-Columbian Latin America, Asturias's novel reveals the plight of indigenous Guatemalans as their world becomes increasingly subjected to exploitation by the encroachment of whites. The novel's magical qualities invoke indigenous myths of the power of transformation through humans' ability to assume animal shapes. Critics have pointed out that its narrative nonlinearity, shifting points of view, and magical aspects were informed by the sacred Mayan book The Popol-Vuh.
A theme that runs through nearly every magic realist text is the urge to redefine Latin-American identity by forging a point of view specific tothe events, history, and culture of that region. Therefore, its history of colonization, the importation of slaves and influx of immigrants, the political tumult after independence, and economic dependency on imperial powers such as the United States and England that positioned Latin America as inferior and backwards become subjects of investigation that are rewritten and retold from an alternative point of view. For example, Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World is told by a slave who is witness to numerous catastrophic and traumatic events occurring in Haiti during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Likewise, in The House of the Spirits, Allende attempts to forge a feminine identity within a social and historical framework that covers nearly a century of political conflict. For many writers, magic realist techniques were used as an attempt to break with many of their inherited representations by engaging with oral histories of indigenous people, as found in Asturias's Men of Maize.
A defining aspect of magic realist texts is the powerful capabilities of myth and magic to create a version of reality that differentiates itself from what is normally perceived as "real life." This approach to narrative relies on legends and myths from oral pre-Columbian cultures, family histories (both García Márquez and Allende
admitted the influence of their respective grandmothers' yarn-spinning on their writing), the narratives of early explorers and clergy to Latin America, and the spiritual magic of African slaves to the Caribbean region. Drawing from these various influences, magic realist writers redraw the parameters of what is possible by invoking legends and myths that have been passed from one generation to the next and that invoke a loss of some kind with the onset of the modern age. Sometimes it is the loss of traditional values, as in One Hundred Years of Solitude; other times it is the loss of the intimate relationship between humans and animals. These mythical influences form a collective voice that often acts as it does in Men of Maize and The Kingdom of this World, as a resistant force against oppression and exploitation. 2ff7e9595c
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