Magic Realism: A DISTINCTIVE MINGLE OF FANTASY AND REALITY

When speaking of the excellence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, one wonders how Garcia Marquez came to create such a richly composed imaginary world so similar to our everyday one and yet so different from it. He somehow handles a reality in which the limits of the real and the fantastic fade away naturally. This unique style of story-telling is known as "magic realism", and is defined as a narrative technique in which the author emphasizes the fantastic quality of extraordinary events. In the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez successfully demonstrates the technique of magic realism through a skillful integration of fantasy and reality, and the peculiar description of the events and characters.

This feat requires analysis of his resources, especially the most important one: his narrative tone. The author has intuitively grasped the vital relationship that exists between space and tone when he noticed that tone could serve as the main unifying force in the novel. Tone belongs by all rights to the narrator's voice: someone who would report all the incidents calm and untouched, without comments or moral judgments on what has happened. Garcia Marquez chose to employ this serious tone to make unbelievable ideas seems real, because it allows him to dispense with explanations and justifications. With his authentic presentation of events - the tone, there is no need to justify all the implausible phenomena in the story. His sole duty is to simply recount the tale in the most natural fashion, so that the intangible can be associated with the tangible with the greatest of ease. As Garcia Marquez has once asserted himself, "the key to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was the idea of saying incredible things with a completely unperturbed face." (McMurray, p. 87) In order to fuse the fantastic or improbable perfectly into realistic occurrences, the only effective way is to deliver them as if they were the implacable truth.

Examples for this remarkable narrative tone are palpable in the novel: "Just a moment, now we shall witness an undeniable proof of the infinite power of God." (Marquez, p. 85) This statement was said by the priest who levitates by means of chocolate. By depicting this absurd occasion as an unquestionable truth, the author has merged the grotesque into his fictional world so naturally that no one suspect their existence. Consequently, his practice of magic realism in an "unperturbed expression" renders a satiric style throughout the novel.

The stabilized and "normalized" atmosphere in the novel assimilates marvelous things with village and household events, and converts them into acceptable phenomena which the reader can easily admit. This atmosphere is originated from the familiar domestic activities of Ursula, which creates a centre where decisive events happen and others slowly germinate. "Ursula's function is to impregnate the fictional space with everyday realities so that the marvelous may enter it smoothly." (Gullon, p. 133) It is through the presence of Ursula that the transition from the imaginary to the real can occur naturally without any remarkable notices or astonishment. Thus, narrative authenticity becomes more readily perceptible when what is related oscillates between impossible and everyday occurrences.

Numerous episodes in the novel also illustrate the author's adroit manipulation of language and narrative focus for the purpose of fusing the real and fantastic elements of his fictional world. A striking case in point is his treatment of the mysterious death of Jose Arcadio: After his hunting trip with his wife, Jose Arcadio goes into the bedroom to change his clothes. Moments later the sound of a pistol shot signals his death and its strange aftermath:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread." (Marquez, p. 135)

Jose Arcadio's death and its aftermath is utterly ridiculous, but it is made almost believable by the meticulous stylistic precision, and numerous everyday details surrounding the occurrence. This episode perfectly illustrates the author's method of making the fantastic seem real, thus eliminating the barrier between objective and imaginary realities and creating a total fictional universe.

Garcia Marquez has erased the distinctive boundary between reality and fantasy by immersing proven and fabulous events indiscriminately with the application of his steady, unchanging tone. When the author narrates the story, he "never allows it to become evident, by interjection or amazement, that there may be a substantial difference between the extraordinary and the commonplace." (Gullon, p. 130) For him, there is really no difference between what is probable or what is not. He does not doubt or question incredible happenings or facts throughout the story. As a result, under the operation of his imagination and narrative tone, prodigious events and miracles can naturally coexist with the ordinary.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, this fusion of fantasy and reality is patent in different aspects. As a diverting illustration, "this time, along with many other artifices, they brought a flying carpet. But they did not offer it as a fundamental contribution to the development of transport, rather as an object of recreation." (Marquez, p. 31) For many years, the town of Macondo accepts the fantastic as an integral part of life without showing any signs of disbelief or amazement at such remarkable phenomenon. This is a circumstance that the author purposely invents to achieve his ultimate purpose. Although this existence of a flying carpet is obviously a fictional element of the novel, Garcia Marquez does not make it appear unreal. Rather he places it side by side with the familiar realities as equally true events, so that they are connected with one another inseparably.

The author provides a peculiar, exaggerated description of characters and events in order to give each occurrence a sense of reality. In describing Melquiades, Garcia Marquez says,

He was a fugitive from all the plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind. He had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Malayan archipelago, leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in Madagscar, an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous shipwreck in the strait of Magellan. (Marquez, p. 6)

Apparently, this statement is inconceivable. However, it is important to point out that this "deadpan" depiction of extraordinary people and extraordinary occurrences is indeed one of the principle stratagems the author employs to achieve a comic effect. Events and personal characteristics are spectacularly exaggerated, made quite absurdly larger than life, yet in a style that takes the hyperbole for granted, as though it were a meticulous fact. Hence, this hyperbole serves as an important device to intermingle the strange and exotic with reality.

Many of the fantasies of the novel are indeed absurd but logical exaggerations of real situations. Throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez exaggerates events to gain fantasy. For example, "it rained for four years, eleven months, and two days." (Marquez, p. 320) This hyperbole is employed to emphasize the severity of the rainstorm that destroyed the town. Although such long period of raining is very unlikely to occur, however, in another perspective, its specific numerical values gives the incident a considerable sense of reality. Once again, the overstated description has converted the fantastic element in the situation into an undeniable fact.

Magic realism as a technique of transforming the fabulous into true existence is represented by Garcia Marquez perfectly. He shows his taste for this narrative device - the blend of fantasy and hyperbole exhibited in a context of reality throughout the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. By telling the story in a serious and natural narrative tone, Garcia Marquez is able to produce a magical realm where everything is possible and believable. This is the main reason why the novel attracts, convinces and seduces the reader. With his manipulation to blur the distinction between the real and surreal, no one would doubt that this masterpiece is a remarkable breakthrough in the literary world of fiction.


Works Cited


Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

Gullon, Ricardo. "Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Lost Art of Storytelling." Diacritics. 1971:27-32.

McMurray, George R. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983.

::source: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/9181/info-magic.html

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What is Magical Realism?

A literary mode rather than a distinguishable genre, magical realism aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites. For instance, it challenges polar opposites like life and death and the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present. Magical realism is 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. Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society. According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy". The presence of the supernatural in magical realism is often connected to the primeval or "magical’ Indian mentality, which exists in conjunction with European rationality. According to Ray Verzasconi, as well as other critics, magical realism is "an expression of the New World reality which at once combines the rational elements of the European super-civilization, and the irrational elements of a primitive America." Gonzalez Echchevarria believes that magical realism offers a world view that is not based on natural or physical laws nor objective reality. However, the fictional world is not separated from reality either.

Background

The term "magical realism" was first introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic, who considered magical realism an art category. To him, it was a way of representing and responding to reality and pictorially depicting the enigmas of reality. In Latin America in the 1940s, magical realism was a way to express the realistic American mentality and create an autonomous style of literature.

Characteristics of Magical Realism

Hybridity—Magical realists incorporate many techniques that have been linked to post-colonialism, with hybridity being a primary feature. Specifically, magical realism is illustrated in the inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous. The plots of magical realist works involve issues of borders, mixing, and change. Authors establish these plots to reveal a crucial purpose of magical realism: a more deep and true reality than conventional realist techniques would illustrate.

Irony Regarding Author’s Perspective—The writer must have ironic distance from the magical world view for the realism not to be compromised. Simultaneously, the writer must strongly respect the magic, or else the magic dissolves into simple folk belief or complete fantasy, split from the real instead of synchronized with it. The term "magic" relates to the fact that the point of view that the text depicts explicitly is not adopted according to the implied world view of the author. As Gonzales Echevarria expresses, the act of distancing oneself from the beliefs held by a certain social group makes it impossible to be thought of as a representative of that society.

Authorial Reticence—Authorial reticence refers to the lack of clear opinions about the accuracy of events and the credibility of the world views expressed by the characters in the text. This technique promotes acceptance in magical realism. In magical realism, the simple act of explaining the supernatural would eradicate its position of equality regarding a person’s conventional view of reality. Because it would then be less valid, the supernatural world would be discarded as false testimony.

The Supernatural and Natural—In magical realism, the supernatural is not displayed as questionable. While the reader realizes that the rational and irrational are opposite and conflicting polarities, they are not disconcerted because the supernatural is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictional world.

Themes

The idea of terror overwhelms the possibility of rejuvenation in magical realism. Several prominent authoritarian figures, such as soldiers, police, and sadists all have the power to torture and kill. Time is another conspicuous theme, which is frequently displayed as cyclical instead of linear. What happens once is destined to happen again. Characters rarely, if ever, realize the promise of a better life. As a result, irony and paradox stay rooted in recurring social and political aspirations. Another particularly complex theme in magical realism is the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque is carnival’s reflection in literature. The concept of carnival celebrates the body, the senses, and the relations between humans. "Carnival" refers to cultural manifestations that take place in different related forms in North and South America, Europe, and the Caribbean, often including particular language and dress, as well as the presence of a madman, fool, or clown. In addition, people organize and participate in dance, music, or theater. Latin American magical realists, for instance, explore the bright life-affirming side of the carnivalesque. The reality of revolution, and continual political upheaval in certain parts of the world, also relates to magical realism. Specifically, South America is characterized by the endless struggle for a political ideal.

Magical Realist Authors

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ben Okri
Isabel Allende
Syl Cheney-Coker
Kojo Laing
Allejo Carpentier
Toni Morrison
Kwsme Anthony Appiah
Mario Vargas Llosa


Examples of Magical Realism in the works of Marquez and Okri

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez incorporates many supernatural motifs like levitation and flying carpets. Marquez also creates, in the tradition of the grotesque carnival and supernatural realism, the character of Melquiades, who is an overweight gypsy with supernatural powers. His novel contains powerful images of paradoxical bodily disgust and celebration, ambivalent celebration and laughter, and the reconstruction of human shapes, all of which exemplify characteristics of magical realism. In this novel and others, Marquez utilizes ironic distance. Okri’s The Famished Road also incorporates several characteristics of magical realism. Specifically, examples of hybridity occur often. For instance, after the character Azaro wrongly believes a figure by the river to be the ferryman of the dead, he learns that she is in fact a hybrid woman, young in body but ‘with an old woman’s face’. The illustration is also a hybrid of ancient ritual and custom. Also, The Famished Road depicts the theme of political struggle and political corruption. The character Madame Koto is implied in the corruption of modern Nigerian politics. She encapsulates the new power herself, rather than its transgression, foreshadowing the country’s civil war to come. Okri uses ironic distance in this novel as well.



Works Cited

Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. Magical Realism and the Fantastic. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1985.

Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Literature. London: Routledge Publishing, 1998.

Danow, David K. The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

::source: http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/MagicalRealism.html

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Binarisms and duality: magic realism and postcolonialism

Suzanne Baker Although the term "magic realism" has been in use for over 60 years, there appears to be little critical consensus concerning its definition. While "realism" itself is a chronically unstable term, realist writing is usually understood to be that which draws on a set of narrative conventions designed to create the illusion that the story on the page is "real" or "true" and corresponds in some direct way to the ordinary world of day-to-day life. The term "magic" is equally contentious, arousing on the one hand, notions of harmless trickery and good-luck charms, and on the other, images of the supernatural and the fantastic. The oxymoron "magic realism" thus represents a complex and problematical critical concept.

The term "magic realism" first appeared in the context of art, being coined by the German art critic Franz Roh to describe the work of post-Expressionist artists in the mid-1920s. Roh claimed that these artists were painting ordinary objects through "wonderstruck eyes" seeing in such objects a "magical" re-creation of the world.1 These magic realist painters looked at everyday objects and life around them and attempted "to portray the strange, the uncanny, the eerie . . . aspects of everyday reality."2 While their aim was to shake habitual perceptions of their surroundings, they did this not by introducing elements of the fantastic into their work, but rather by showing that there were different ways of perceiving everyday objects.

Since the 1950s and 1960s the concept of magic realism has increasingly been associated with Latin American fiction. It is important, however, to distinguish between magic realism in art and magic realism in literature. While Roh coined the term in the context of the art world, to describe a specific way of portraying the mystery inherent in everyday reality without raising questions about that reality, magic realism in literature is "writing that works both within and against the aesthetics of realism."3 Where normal, plausible, everyday events co-exist on the same level as supernatural, extraordinary and even fantastic events whose authenticity is never questioned.

In her book, Magical Realism and The Fantastic, Amaryll Chanady explains that magic realism is characterised by two conflicting but autonomously coherent perspectives, one based on an "enlightened" and rational view of reality and the other based on the acceptance of the supernatural as part of the everyday world.4 Thus the central concept of magic realism in literature is its insistence on the co-existence of the magic and the real. While a narrator of the fantastic dispenses with the laws of logic and the physical world and recounts an action which may be absurd or supernatural, a narrator of magic realism accepts most or all of the realistic conventions of fiction but introduces "something else," something which is not realistic, into the text. These elements are not highlighted for shock value, but are woven in seamlessly. Magic realism, therefore, belongs neither entirely to the realm of fantasy nor to that of empirical reality. Despite the presence of fantastic events, however, it is always linked with the "real" world, grounded in recognisable reality through social, historical and political references.

The presence of an objective and dispassionate narrator who maintains a tone of complete equilibrium throughout the story is another intrinsic feature of magic realism. While the reader need not believe in the possibility of the extraordinary events narrated, the characters and, above all, the narrator must believe that all the events recounted are equally real. The narrator cannot raise questions or treat the events as puzzling.

Magic realism in literature is not confined to Latin America alone. Canada, for instance, has produced a significant body of magic realist writing (Robert Kroetsch and Jack Hodgins are prime examples) together with considerable critical theorizing about the concept itself. While little has been written about magic realism as a narrative mode in Australian fiction there are certainly texts in which elements of magic realism can be found. A story called "The Bookkeeper" by Strephyn Mappin is one example.5 Here we find a bookshop owner whose grandmother suddenly begins to devour all the T.S. Eliot books in the store, eventually rolling herself in the torn pages into a kind of cocoon from which she emerges as a butterfly. Grant Caldwell's short story "Nemesis For Daddy" tells of the unexpected disappearance of a man from his home and the subsequent retrieval of his body limb by limb.6 For example, one arm is found hanging by its hand from a tree in the park, and his torso is found floating in a hotel swimming pool. All the parts are all still alive, however, and the body is surgically rejoined and topped with a papier m‡chŽ head until the real head can be found. In both these examples, despite the rather "fantastic" and unbelievable events recounted, realist details abound. They obviously occur in a recognizably "real" world and neither the narrator nor the characters express any kind of amazement at the occurrence of such unlikely events.

In the context of postcolonial writing, however, what can magic realism offer? The term "postcolonial" is as problematic as "magic realism," but broadly speaking, postcolonial writing encompasses a wide range of discursive practices which resist colonialism and colonial ideologies. Undoubtedly notions of identity, history and perspective are important to postcolonial writers, but perhaps the most dramatic effect of the colonization process is that the colonized are forced to occupy two conflicting worlds or spaces, referred to by Linda Hutcheon as a duality of "post-colonial doubled identity and history."7 In the Australian situation for example, colonisation effectively created a duality of worlds for the indigenous population. The "reason" and "logic" of European intellectual tradition collided with the "mysterious" and "mythic" perspective of the Aborigines. The settler colonists too were faced with the imposition of an imported world-view onto a new, and in many ways, alien physical space. In both instances the two worlds may be incompatible in many ways, but the colonized cannot avoid defining their identity in terms of the dual worlds or spaces they are forced to inhabit.

It seems, therefore, that Canadian critic Robert Wilson's ideas about the spatial effects of magic realism might be particularly useful in the context of postcolonial writing. Magic realism, he points out, creates a "space in which the spatial effects of canonical realism and those of axiomatic fantasy are interwoven . . . in magic realism, space is hybrid (opposite and conflicting properties are copresent)."8 Wilson calls this phenomenon "dual spatiality" and refers to Robert Kroetsch's novel, What The Crow Said, to illustrate his point.9 The hybrid nature of Kroetsch's space, he claims, "becomes apparent in the natural way in which abnormal, experientially impossible, and empirically unverifiable events take place."10 Kroetsch begins by establishing common features of spring in Alberta when he writes: "The crocuses bloomed in spring as they had always bloomed, the buffalo beans cracked yellow, the violets and the buttercups and the shooting stars took their turn." But a magic-like fold soon creases this even surface. Vera Lang is raped by a swarm of bees. Where the bees come from, why they choose Vera for their Queen, how she can conceive a child from this impregnation: these are not questions that are asked. Indeed, Wilson suggests, "it is as if there are two worlds, (wholly distinct, following dissimilar laws) which interact, interpenetrate, and interwind, unpredictably but in a fully natural manner."11

The opening up of hybrid space in magic realism makes it difficult to conceive of the "real" as a single world with a single set of rules or laws. In the context of postcolonial writing then, magic realism points to the inherent problems created by the imposition of a bizarre and UN-real European world-view onto the local reality of the colonized. In the Australian situation, texts by Aboriginal writers, Mudrooroo and Sam Watson, can be seen to align with Wilson's notion of "dual spatiality." In Mudrooroo's story, Master of the Ghost Dreaming, the colonial world of displaced Aboriginal people and displaced Europeans is described in realistic detail and presented in a matter-of-fact way by the narrator.12 The same manner of narration is used to describe the Aboriginal shaman's powers of metamorphosis which see him transform himself into a spider and into a goanna, see him change the direction of the wind, and see him conjure up Dreamtime companions. Within this magic-like fold the Aboriginal shaman undertakes a spiritual journey to wrest control from the pale-skinned invaders, the "ghosts." These eruptions of magic realism into the smooth surface of the text, these "abnormal, experientially impossible, and empirically unverifiable events" accord with Wilson's notion of hybrid space.13

Similarly, Sam Watson in The Kadaitcha Sung interweaves supernatural events with realistic racial conflict in urban Brisbane.14 Watson's novel clearly presents two distinctive and conflicting spaces or world-views. The recognizably "real" contemporary world is depicted through a narrative which links the brutal suppression policy of the Queensland government to the present living conditions of urban Aborigines. Erupting into this world is an epic-like narrative of Aboriginal cosmology linking the ancestral beings to people of the present and even incorporating the arrival of the white intruders into their ideological framework. A conventional western world-view is carefully detailed while at the same time the narrator introduces another level of reality, that of suspicion and myth, which is inexplicable according to the logic and reason of Western thought. To borrow Wilson's words, the two worlds "interact, interpenetrate and interwind"15 so that spirits, demons and sorcery figures mingle with "real" people of different races in overlapping periods of time.

In both these texts, the reader is clearly offered two systems of possibility, one that aligns with European rationality and another which is incompatible with a conventional Western world-view. Magic realism does not create imaginary worlds. What it does create, through its "dual spatiality," is a space where alternative realities and different perceptions of the world can be conceived. Discourses of colonialism position the Aborigines as objects to be studied, observed and spoken about. The imposed social and political systems of Western culture effectively denied a space in which Aboriginal voices could speak for themselves. The possibility of a "dual spatiality" provided through the deployment of magic realism provides one space where Aboriginal voices can speak and be heard.

Stephen Slemon is one critic who has drawn attention to the proliferation of binarisms and dualities operating within settler cultures, binarisms such as Europe and its other, colonizer and colonized, and the West and the rest, for example. Slemon also suggests that magic realist narrative recapitulates a dialectical struggle inherent within the postcolonial culture.16 The binary oppositions, he continues, undergo a process of dialectical interplay which undermines the fixity of borders between them, foregrounding the gaps, absences and silences produced by the colonial encounter. Binarisms of white and non-white, civilized and barbaric, colonizer and colonized, vocal and silent, centre and periphery are all present in both Mudrooroo's and Watson's novels. In Master of the Ghost Dreaming, for example, the Superintendent of the Government Mission for Aborigines and his wife represent the civilized, white, colonizing power. While the Superintendent firmly believes in the divine right of the Empire to bring light to the dark world of the natives, the reality of his mission of enlightenment is seen somewhat differently by the Aborigines themselves. Instead of enlightenment, colonization destroys the Aborigines' food chain and brings an end to traditional patterns of living. When their task becomes too daunting, the missionary and his wife seek oblivion through either rum or laudanum. The Aborigines in contrast draw on sustaining traditions from the past to cope with their present physical and spiritual displacement. Who then are the barbarians?

As I mentioned earlier, magic realism has been described as "writing that works both within and against the aesthetics of realism," and postcolonial writing, I would suggest, is writing that works both within and against the effects of colonialism. The hybridity of both modes of writing indicates strong possibilities for an interweaving of their agendas. Magic realism contests the restrictions of colonial space by opening up a "dual spatiality," thus making problematic any notion of a single unified world-view or reality. As Chanady notes, the enabling of new and multiple perspectives on events "allows us to see dimensions of reality of which we are not normally aware."17 Magic realism, with its "eruptions of spatial folding" raises questions about the nature of the worlds we inhabit. Stephen Slemon claims that magic realism"s strength is that it encodes "a concept of resistance to the massive imperial centre and its totalizing systems," and further, that the deployment of magic realism in literature can "signify resistance to central assimilation by more stable generic systems."18 In opposition to straight-forward, rational and controlled order which is the dominant style of imperialism, magic realism mixes fantasy and reality, fact and myth, while resisting classical expectations of closure and unity. While some postcolonial writers will continue to adhere to the realist mode of representation in order to depict actual conditions and experiences, it seems certain that others who wish to avoid the inscribed colonial values inherent in the realist mode may opt for the subversive possibilities of magic realism to challenge the restrictions of a circumscribed colonial space.

Murdoch University

Notes

1 Enrique A. Imbert, "Magical Realism in Spanish-American Fiction," International Fiction Review 2.1:1.

2 Seymour Menton, Magic Realism Rediscovered, 1918-1981 (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1983), 13.

3 Lori Chamberlain, "Magicking the Real: Paradoxes of Postmodern Writing," in Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, ed. L. McCaffery (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986), 17.

4 Amaryll B. Chanady, Magical Realism and The Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1985).

5 Strephyn Mappin, Heart Murmurs (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1989).

6 Grant Caldwell, The Revolt of The Coats (North Ryde: Angus & Robertson, 1988).

7 Linda Hutcheon, "Circling the Downspout of Empire: Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism," ARIEL 20:4, 154.

8 R. Rawdon Wilson, In Palamedes' Shadow: Explorations in Play, Game and Narrative Theory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 204.

9 Robert Kroetsch, What The Crow Said (Toronto: General Publishing, 1978).

10 Wilson, 205.

11 Wilson, 205.

12 Mudrooroo Nyoongah, Master of the Ghost Dreaming (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991).

13 Wilson, 205.

14 Sam Watson, The Kadaitcha Sung (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1990).

15 Wilson, 205.

16 Stephen Slemon, "Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse," Canadian Literature 116 (Spring 1988): 12.

17 Chanady, 27.

18 Stephen Slemon, 10.

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*This article is content of Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth
Literature and Language Studies Number 36 (1993), Edited by Michèle Drouart.
*Link source: http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/36/Baker.html

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Gabriel García Márquez and Magic Realism

"Magic Realism" (el realismo magical) was a term first coined in 1949 by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier to describe the matter-of-fact combination of the fantastic and everyday in Latin American fiction. About the same time it was also used by European critics to describe a similar trend in postwar German fiction exemplified by novels like Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959). (German art critic Franz Roh had employed the same term in 1925, but he applied it only to painting.) Magic Realism has now become the standard name for a major trend in contemporary fiction that stretches from Latin American works like Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) to norteamericana novels like Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale (1983) and Asian works like Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children (1981). In all cases the term refers to the tendency among contemporary fiction writers to mix the magical and mundane in an overall context of realistic narration.

If the term "Magic Realism" is relatively new, what it describes has been around since the early development of the novel and short story as modern literary forms. One already sees the key elements of Magic Realism in Gulliver's Travels (1726), which factually narrates the fabulous adventures of an English surgeon. Likewise Nikolai Gogol's short story, "The Nose" (1842), in which a minor Czarist bureaucrat's nose takes off to pursue its own career in St. Petersburg, fulfills virtually every requirement of this purportedly contemporary style. One finds similar precedents in Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Kafka, Bulgakov, Calvino, Cheever, Singer, and others. Seen from an historical perspective, therefore, Magic Realism is a vital contemporary manifestation of a venerable fictive impulse.

The possibilities of storytelling will always hover between the opposing poles of verisimilitude and myth, factuality and fabulation, realism and romance. If mid-century critics (like F. R. Leavis, V. S. Pritchett, F. W. Dupee, Irving Howe, and Lionel Trilling) almost exclusively favored the realist mode, their emphasis reflected their generation's understandable fascination with the immediate past. They still lived in the shadow of what Leavis called the "Great Tradition" of the psychological and social novel. This tradition encompassed (to expand Leavis's Anglophilic list a bit) Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and early James Joyce. As the realistic novel confidently continued in the first decades of the century, it was all too easy to imagine that this particular line of development had decisively superseded the older pre-novelistic modes of storytelling. These London, Oxford, and New York critics would hardly have imagined that a radically different kind of fiction was being developed beyond their ken in places like Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. By the time García Márquez and his fellow members of "el boom" in Latin-American fiction came to maturity, the reemergence of the fantastic heritage in fiction seemed nearly as revolutionary as the region's politics.

All of the main features of Latin American Magic Realism can be found in García Márquez's story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," which appeared in his 1972 volume The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother. (The English translation also appeared in 1972 as part of Leaf Storm and Other Stories. Since Leaf Storm was originally published in Spanish in 1955, the translation volume has led some American editors and critics to misdate "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," which is not an early work but written soon after García Márquez's magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude.)

As a young law student, García Márquez read Kafka's The Metamorphosis. It proved a decisive encounter, and the influence is not hard to observe in the early stories, which so often present bizarre incidents unfolding in ordinary circumstances. If Kafka reinvented the fable by placing it in the modern quotidian world, García Márquez reset it in the unfamiliar landscape of the Third World. If Kafka made spiritual issues more mysterious by surrounding them with bureaucratic procedure, his Colombian follower changed our perception of Latin America by insisting that in this New World visionary romanticism was merely reportage. García Márquez also had another crucial mentor closer at hand—the Argentinean master, Jorge Luis Borges.

Only thirty years García Márquez's senior, Borges had quietly redrawn the imaginative boundaries of Latin American fiction. Almost single-handedly he had also rehabilitated the fantastic tale for high-art fiction. Removing religion and the supernatural from any fixed ideology, he employed the mythology of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Confucianism as metaphysical figures. Significantally, Borges expressed his sophisticated fictions in popular rather than experimental forms—the fable, the detective story, the supernatural tale, the gaucho legend. He was the first great post-modernist storyteller, and he found an eager apprentice in García Márquez, who developed these innovative notions in different and usually more expansive forms.

The plot of García Márquez's story is easily summarized. At the end of a three-day rainstorm Pelayo discovers an old man with enormous wings lying face down in the mud of his courtyard. He immediately returns with his wife Elisenda to examine the bald, nearly toothless man who seems barely alive. They try to converse, but no one understands anything the winged ancient says. After consulting with a neighbor who identifies the man as an angel, Pelayo drags the filthy, passive creature into a chicken coop. Soon people visit—first to mock and tease the winged captive, then to seek miracles The local priest tries to determine if the mysterious prisoner is truly an angel or merely some diabolic trick. He notices the old man's stench and his parasite-infested wings, but writes to the bishop and eventually Rome for a verdict. (Rome seeks additional information but never makes a decision—a very Kafkaesque situation.)

Soon Pelayo and his wife begin charging admission to see their angel. The crowds grow until they draw other carnival attractions. One visiting sideshow features a young woman who was transformed into a tarantula the size of a ram with the head of a maiden. Since the spider woman eagerly talks to customers—unlike the silent, nearly immobile angel—she begins to draw the audience away. By now, however, Pelayo and his wife have earned enough to build a fine two-story mansion. Several years pass. Their child, who was a newborn at the story's opening, is now old enough start school. The feeble angel drags himself around their property greatly to Elisenda's annoyance. He also looses his last bedraggled fathers. That winter the old man almost dies of fever, but by spring his feathers begin to grow back. One day, as Elisenda watches from the kitchen, the old man clumsily takes flight and flaps away across the sea.

The plot of García Márquez's story—the magical elements aside—is positively drab. The ending so conspicuously lacks any overt narrative ingenuity as to seem anticlimactic. The flatness of the plot gives the story an odd quality—as impersonal as a newspaper article, and as episodic as a legend. This feeling of detachment is heightened by the tale's omniscient narrator who reports the odd events with deadpan objectivity. The story's particular power comes from its extraordinary details, which are seldom drab and often dazzling. A motley procession of people and things (ranging from an ordinary parish priest to an enchanted tarantula woman) parade by in such profusion that the reader never knows what to expect next—the mysterious, the mundane, or the magic? That distracting but disorienting effect is crucial to the experience of Magic Realism and to a certain extent, it is the element that most clearly differentiates it from its predecessors. Gogol, Kafka, and Singer may have created similar modes of fiction, but they never lavished so many fabulous details with such profligate nonchalance.

"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" seemingly invites all sorts of symbolic and even allegorical readings, but García Márquez constantly undercuts or frustrates any easy interpretation. If this bedraggled, sickly creature truly represents the descent of the miraculous into the everyday world, he does not fit the preconceptions of anyone in this world—priest, petitioner, or even paying sideshow customer. This putative angel not only remains uninspiring and unknowable, but slightly repulsive. No one in the story ever successfully communicates with him. If he speaks the language of the divine, we cannot understand a word of it. He arrives, stays, and leaves without explanation or apparent purposes. If the story is to be read symbolically, all one can ultimately say is that the winged old man embodies both the impenetrable mysteries of this world and the next one. Whatever he truly is—mortal or supernatural—he exists beyond our comprehension. We can project our own assumptions on the blank screen of his history, but his essence remains forever invisible. When he flies away, we know nothing important about him with more certainty than when he arrived.

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*This article is written by by Dana Gioia, visit his blog http://www.danagioia.net/essays/emarquez.htm

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