Castillo's novel largely deals with borders and demarcations between languages (Spanish/English), culture (American/Mexican/Native American), genders (female/male), and nations (US/Mexico) to name a few. Like many works of magical realism, the narrative skips forwards and backwards in time to piece together the story of Sofia and her daughters in the unincorporated New Mexico town of Tome.
All of the aforementioned borders blur and/or break down. Spanish words and grammar (the use of the double negative) appear on most pages, and the characters to not identify with a single culture or nationality; gender roles are challenged by La Loca's masculine dress and Caridad's love of another woman. Other borders Castillo blurs are those between science and folk medicine, as seen in the episodes with the invisible surgeon, as well as between the sacred and profane, as seen in the chapter where the passion of Christ is commingled with the plight of the poor and the exploited worker.
The novel also pushes back against the status quo of a male-oriented society. For instance, one of Loretta's growing secrets was that she "planted and harvested according to the moon's cycles, not the sun's" (193), thereby challenging both accepted scientific techniques as well following a female's intuition, as represented by the moon. The novel also ends with the valorization of motherhood and communal togetherness rather than conflict; US wars account for the psychological problems of a number of male characters and also for the loss of Sofia's own daughter Esperanza.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon
While I could write a lot about The Yiddish Policemen's Union as being overtly science fictional or utopian, it seems to me that the best critical analysis can be borrowed from Carl Freedman's excursus on Philip K. Dick's alternate history The Man in the High Castle in his own Critical Theory and Science Fiction, specifically his comments about how "the founding critical strategy...lies in its uncoupling of the necessary from the actual, and thus in its defamiliarization of the historical status quo" as well as how "the 'unthinkable' turns out to be surprisingly familiar" (166), of course trading Dick's Nazi-conquered United States for Chabon's description of the post-war Jews who were temporarily resettled in Alaska. Freedman writes:
"Few novels of its era more powerfully express the critical sense of historicity --- the sense that historical societies are complexly determined and mutable totalities, that historical actuality never possesses any transcendent ontological fixity but is always subject to dialectical interrogation and to the process of material change" (173)
As Freedman says of Dick, such works of alternate history may not bear the trappings of science fictional cliche' but that "the character of the genre lies neither in chronology nor technological hardware, but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo" (180). This all fits perfectly with Chabon's reflections of Jewishness and Jewish culture, disassociating it from the physical location of Israel and relocating it in an alternate space in order to examine it free from the burden of "real" historical events.
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a trickier work in that there is only a fleeting glimpse of magical realism in the shape of the golem. The rest of the novel reads as implausible, though not impossible. The golem and the associated magic is bound to the creative impulse:
"The shaping of a golem, to [Joe], was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something --- one poor, dumb, powerful thing --- exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape" (584).
This speaks directly to Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories" where he defends the genre against the charges of being merely "escapist." It would be a minor miracle if Chabon didn't have this specific essay in mind as it deals intimately with the process of Creation (big C) and the attempt of people to "sub-create" in order to emulate the one Creator (big C). The primary difference being that Tolkien is referring to a very Catholic conception of God and his works, whereas Chabon seems to be writing about attempting to make sense of life given the conflicting and confusing postmodern condition in which we live and "the impersonal magic of life.... its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect" (265). This idea runs contrary to Tolkien's central notion of each person choosing (or refusing to choose) following a divine plan to which they've been assignedl; for Chabon its randomness and cruel, coincidental ironies that fuel many of life's events rather than any neat plan.
"Few novels of its era more powerfully express the critical sense of historicity --- the sense that historical societies are complexly determined and mutable totalities, that historical actuality never possesses any transcendent ontological fixity but is always subject to dialectical interrogation and to the process of material change" (173)
As Freedman says of Dick, such works of alternate history may not bear the trappings of science fictional cliche' but that "the character of the genre lies neither in chronology nor technological hardware, but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo" (180). This all fits perfectly with Chabon's reflections of Jewishness and Jewish culture, disassociating it from the physical location of Israel and relocating it in an alternate space in order to examine it free from the burden of "real" historical events.
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a trickier work in that there is only a fleeting glimpse of magical realism in the shape of the golem. The rest of the novel reads as implausible, though not impossible. The golem and the associated magic is bound to the creative impulse:
"The shaping of a golem, to [Joe], was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something --- one poor, dumb, powerful thing --- exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape" (584).
This speaks directly to Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories" where he defends the genre against the charges of being merely "escapist." It would be a minor miracle if Chabon didn't have this specific essay in mind as it deals intimately with the process of Creation (big C) and the attempt of people to "sub-create" in order to emulate the one Creator (big C). The primary difference being that Tolkien is referring to a very Catholic conception of God and his works, whereas Chabon seems to be writing about attempting to make sense of life given the conflicting and confusing postmodern condition in which we live and "the impersonal magic of life.... its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect" (265). This idea runs contrary to Tolkien's central notion of each person choosing (or refusing to choose) following a divine plan to which they've been assignedl; for Chabon its randomness and cruel, coincidental ironies that fuel many of life's events rather than any neat plan.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
"The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms" by Amaryll Chanady
Chanady opens her essay by restating Luiz Costa Lima's argument that there has been a "scandalous prohibition" of fiction, described as "the systematic control of the imaginary by the dictates of a restrictive conception of mimesis based on verisimilitude, decorum, and imitation of consecrated masters and legitimated models" since the 16th century, roughly the time when medieval theocentrism gave way to the Enlightenment and reason; it wasn't until the Romantic era that writers rebelled against such societal controls over the imaginary (125). In Latin American fiction, rather than self-examination writer instead focused on their surroundings, partially because of the European insistence that the New World geography was exceptional and partially because Latin Americans were engaging in identity-building (126).
Chanady goes on to examine both Angel Flores' and Luis Leal's essays on the nature of magical realism. She notes Flores' obvious attempts to find a place for magical realism that will earn Latin American fiction the global respect it deserves. Chanady has problems with Flores' version of magical realism as she sees the opulent narratives of Columbus to be at adds with the cold, cerebral Kafka (128). She also doesn't believes Flores is mixing the fantastic in with magic realism with his statements about magic realist writers clinging to reality versus the fairy tale, which does not; she suggests the solution of looking at the innovative nature of the imagination in magical realist works, contrasting them to the stock structure of fairy tales (129). Flores (as well as Carpentier) also seem to hold mimetic writing in scorn, yet Lima (and Chanady) feel as though magical realism "introduces poeisis into mimesis" which better expresses our condition of modernity (130). Furthermore, Flores can't have it both ways--magical realism can't be both a global phenomenon and unique to Latin American.
Chanady then switches to Leal's essay, arguing that the most problematic part is his idea that magical realism is fundamentally an "attitude towards reality, not a literary mode or technique" (132). Rather than tracing magical realism to Kafka, Leal instead traces it to Roh. Like Carpentier's relations with the surrealists, this creates another problem, namely the context of magical realism within the mindset of a colonized society (133). The argument shifts from Flores' quest for respect to one where these critics want Latin American fiction to be considered equal or superior to the Western European canon, and in fact this resistance can be seen as the primary component to magical realist writing: "Latin American intellectuals have frequently emphasized the ideological dimension of literature, even going so far as to consider formal and stylistic brilliance as 'ancillary' or instrumental and secondary, with respect to the political and social content" (136-7). This component marks the main difference between Carpentier and the surrealists, Chanady says, going on to describe how Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World has a cyclical, "primitive" structure that is itself a critique of Western storytelling traditions (138).
Another main difference is the ontological, as opposed to epistemological, nature of Latin American magical realism. Unlike fantasy stories that work towards estranging the reader with fear and wonder by the fantastic breaking through to the world of the real, the magical realist text (using Cortazar as an example) has the supernatural event simply be with no mutually accepted center. "Reality is not an empirical given but a constantly changing "constellation" or group of figures that is the product of the individual imagination" (139).
Chanady concludes her essay thus: "The development of the literary modes associated with the neofantastic and magical realism that have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America cannot be attributed to a naive essentialist argument to the supposed marvelous reality of the continent or ascribed to the unidirectional flow of metropolitan influence. It is conditioned by various factors, such as a critical stance with respect to canonical rational and especially positivistic paradigms in the context of neocolonial resistance, the tradition of the artist's vindication of the imagination and subversion of hegemonic models, the French Surrealists' indictment of restrictive empirical knowledge and valorization of non-European mentalities, the appropriation of the indigenous Other as a marker of difference, and the general delegitimation of values and conceptual frameworks of the past few decades" (141).
The essay is useful for clarifying and/or crystallizing certain key ideas at the root of Latin American magical realism and for the critique and synthesis of the essays from Flores, Leal, and Carpentier. One question, then, is how applicable are these ideas to non-Latin writers? While the final paragraph may be staking a claim specifically for the Latin American variety of magical realism, it's interesting to consider the ideas in different lights as well.
Also, this essay builds bridges to other generic definitions and claims. The idea that in Latin American fiction, the form and style take a back seat to the political and social commentary sounds strikingly similar to the claims made about science fiction in Freedman's work, namely that the genre has been ghettoized for placing the importance of a work's ideas ahead of its style. Even more clearly, Chanady's emphasis on ontology over epistemology in magical realism, and the creation of multiple relative versions of reality, speaks directly to McHale's central thesis in Postmodernist Fiction.
Chanady goes on to examine both Angel Flores' and Luis Leal's essays on the nature of magical realism. She notes Flores' obvious attempts to find a place for magical realism that will earn Latin American fiction the global respect it deserves. Chanady has problems with Flores' version of magical realism as she sees the opulent narratives of Columbus to be at adds with the cold, cerebral Kafka (128). She also doesn't believes Flores is mixing the fantastic in with magic realism with his statements about magic realist writers clinging to reality versus the fairy tale, which does not; she suggests the solution of looking at the innovative nature of the imagination in magical realist works, contrasting them to the stock structure of fairy tales (129). Flores (as well as Carpentier) also seem to hold mimetic writing in scorn, yet Lima (and Chanady) feel as though magical realism "introduces poeisis into mimesis" which better expresses our condition of modernity (130). Furthermore, Flores can't have it both ways--magical realism can't be both a global phenomenon and unique to Latin American.
Chanady then switches to Leal's essay, arguing that the most problematic part is his idea that magical realism is fundamentally an "attitude towards reality, not a literary mode or technique" (132). Rather than tracing magical realism to Kafka, Leal instead traces it to Roh. Like Carpentier's relations with the surrealists, this creates another problem, namely the context of magical realism within the mindset of a colonized society (133). The argument shifts from Flores' quest for respect to one where these critics want Latin American fiction to be considered equal or superior to the Western European canon, and in fact this resistance can be seen as the primary component to magical realist writing: "Latin American intellectuals have frequently emphasized the ideological dimension of literature, even going so far as to consider formal and stylistic brilliance as 'ancillary' or instrumental and secondary, with respect to the political and social content" (136-7). This component marks the main difference between Carpentier and the surrealists, Chanady says, going on to describe how Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World has a cyclical, "primitive" structure that is itself a critique of Western storytelling traditions (138).
Another main difference is the ontological, as opposed to epistemological, nature of Latin American magical realism. Unlike fantasy stories that work towards estranging the reader with fear and wonder by the fantastic breaking through to the world of the real, the magical realist text (using Cortazar as an example) has the supernatural event simply be with no mutually accepted center. "Reality is not an empirical given but a constantly changing "constellation" or group of figures that is the product of the individual imagination" (139).
Chanady concludes her essay thus: "The development of the literary modes associated with the neofantastic and magical realism that have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America cannot be attributed to a naive essentialist argument to the supposed marvelous reality of the continent or ascribed to the unidirectional flow of metropolitan influence. It is conditioned by various factors, such as a critical stance with respect to canonical rational and especially positivistic paradigms in the context of neocolonial resistance, the tradition of the artist's vindication of the imagination and subversion of hegemonic models, the French Surrealists' indictment of restrictive empirical knowledge and valorization of non-European mentalities, the appropriation of the indigenous Other as a marker of difference, and the general delegitimation of values and conceptual frameworks of the past few decades" (141).
The essay is useful for clarifying and/or crystallizing certain key ideas at the root of Latin American magical realism and for the critique and synthesis of the essays from Flores, Leal, and Carpentier. One question, then, is how applicable are these ideas to non-Latin writers? While the final paragraph may be staking a claim specifically for the Latin American variety of magical realism, it's interesting to consider the ideas in different lights as well.
Also, this essay builds bridges to other generic definitions and claims. The idea that in Latin American fiction, the form and style take a back seat to the political and social commentary sounds strikingly similar to the claims made about science fiction in Freedman's work, namely that the genre has been ghettoized for placing the importance of a work's ideas ahead of its style. Even more clearly, Chanady's emphasis on ontology over epistemology in magical realism, and the creation of multiple relative versions of reality, speaks directly to McHale's central thesis in Postmodernist Fiction.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
"Pedro Páramo" by Juan Rulfo
Pedro Páramo is regarded among many scholars as a foundational work of magical realism. It’s a confusing text with a nonlinear narrative and dialogue without tags so the reader is not always certain who is speaking, and to whom. And then there’s the small matter that the dead talk to the living, and time skips forward and backward, and at times the reader can’t be quite sure whether the person speaking is alive (and thus the scene is in the past) or dead (and thus the scene in the present). Of course, such a structure makes the concepts of past and present fluid and open to debate.
What I found particularly interesting is that, despite the presence of the supernatural throughout, the novel also functions as a mystery, perhaps even as a detective novel. Pedro Páramo's son has traveled to Comala, obeying the deathbed wish of his mother to seek out his father and claim what is rightfully his. He discovers that Comala is purgatory-like, populated with the dead who all have some explicit connection with Pedro Páramo. The first person narration is subsumed by a series of different viewpoints of people in the town, from the women Páramo married to obtain their lands, to the men Páramo swindled and strong-armed into submission, to Pedro Páramo himself. Often, a character enters the text with his/her fate already revealed; such is the case of Toribio Aldrete, where the reader first sees the name in connection with the room in which he was hanged. This prompts the question: who was he and what did he did he do to deserve the hanging?
Unlike a potboiler murder mystery that invites the reader to reconstruct clues in order to establish a linear time line and ultimately assign guilt to a specific party, Pedro Páramo works very differently. The reader knows from the start that Páramo is guilty of many atrocities, and the work to piece together the narrative is much more difficult given the nonlinear telling and the hazy distinction between life and death, between the "actual" and the supernatural.
To me, this seems to point directly to McHale's thesis that the modernist novel is about epistemology, and it's metaphorical vehicle is the detective story where the protagonist is on a search for meaning, whereas the postmodernist novel has to do with the experiential nature of "knowledge" and how we construct meaning. Pedro Páramo is a novel that interrogates the hows and whys of constructed knowledge, and by the end of the novel the reader can hardly remember what mystery was being unraveled, and there is no definitive "meaning" to have been gleaned.
Pedro Páramo bears all the hallmarks of a transgressive literature: it has multiple competing viewpoints; it plays with time; it mixes supernatural events with the mundane; it interrogates how we construct knowledge rather than focusing on the knowledge itself; it crosses through multiple genres including the literary novel and the fantastic, as well as satisfying most definitional requirements of the magically real.
What I found particularly interesting is that, despite the presence of the supernatural throughout, the novel also functions as a mystery, perhaps even as a detective novel. Pedro Páramo's son has traveled to Comala, obeying the deathbed wish of his mother to seek out his father and claim what is rightfully his. He discovers that Comala is purgatory-like, populated with the dead who all have some explicit connection with Pedro Páramo. The first person narration is subsumed by a series of different viewpoints of people in the town, from the women Páramo married to obtain their lands, to the men Páramo swindled and strong-armed into submission, to Pedro Páramo himself. Often, a character enters the text with his/her fate already revealed; such is the case of Toribio Aldrete, where the reader first sees the name in connection with the room in which he was hanged. This prompts the question: who was he and what did he did he do to deserve the hanging?
Unlike a potboiler murder mystery that invites the reader to reconstruct clues in order to establish a linear time line and ultimately assign guilt to a specific party, Pedro Páramo works very differently. The reader knows from the start that Páramo is guilty of many atrocities, and the work to piece together the narrative is much more difficult given the nonlinear telling and the hazy distinction between life and death, between the "actual" and the supernatural.
To me, this seems to point directly to McHale's thesis that the modernist novel is about epistemology, and it's metaphorical vehicle is the detective story where the protagonist is on a search for meaning, whereas the postmodernist novel has to do with the experiential nature of "knowledge" and how we construct meaning. Pedro Páramo is a novel that interrogates the hows and whys of constructed knowledge, and by the end of the novel the reader can hardly remember what mystery was being unraveled, and there is no definitive "meaning" to have been gleaned.
Pedro Páramo bears all the hallmarks of a transgressive literature: it has multiple competing viewpoints; it plays with time; it mixes supernatural events with the mundane; it interrogates how we construct knowledge rather than focusing on the knowledge itself; it crosses through multiple genres including the literary novel and the fantastic, as well as satisfying most definitional requirements of the magically real.
"Woman in the Dunes" by Kobo Abe
This short novel from Japan's Kobo Abe is about a teacher and amateur entomologist who travels to the seaside in order to collect some rare insects. His search causes him to miss the last bus back to civilization and he ends up accepting an old man's offer to spend the night in the sparsely populated village situated among the ever-shifting sand dunes. He stays the night in a small house at the bottom of a deep sand trough, the walls of which are so steep a rope ladder is required to get out. The woman who lives in the ramshackle house is a widow who lost her husband in child in typhoon sand storm. She is unusually quiet and submissive to the narrator, who discovers the next morning that the rope ladder is gone, and the villagers' intent is that he should help the woman remove the sand from accumulating in and around the house.
The protagonist resists his situation by threatening the woman, physically abusing her, and playing sick, all to no avail. Eventually he concocts a scheme and escapes, but he is disorientated during his midnight flight and is rescued from the sucking mud pits and placed back into captivity. Through another scheme to trap a crow and send a message to the outside world to rescue him, he inadvertently discovers a way to harvest water from the sand, thus liberating the couple from the need to wait for the villagers above ground to deliver water. The man becomes obsessed with perfecting his device and falls into a routine of helping clear the sand, improving his water trap, and having sex with the woman. She eventually becomes impregnated and suffers some difficulties; the villagers come to her aid and, in their haste, fail to retract the rope ladder before departing to the hospital. The narrator considers escaping, but rather turns back to his contraption and to await the return of the woman.
The novel has much in common with Kafka as the man's imprisonment against his will is never justified or explained, it simply has to be endured. The novel also reminded me of certain of Haruki Murakami's short fictions, such as "The Iceman" or "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes," where there is a certain allegorical feel to the work. The protagonist here is always considering the metaphor of the sand, how it is always shifting and moving with no purpose, and the job is to somehow make life livable in an uncertain world that is fundamentally devoid of meaning. Such stories with an overtly allegorical nature tend to interest me less than those that are more difficult to interpret, although to Abe's credit this metaphor is interesting and not simple, and there are intriguing ruminations about the nature of insects and birds that can easily be graphed onto questioning the nature of humanity.
Is this magical realism though? Nothing overtly "magical" happens, and only the absurdity of the situation challenges our notions of what could potentially happen in our "reality." The same questions can be asked of Kafka's The Trial; or rather than magical realism, are these works more broadly postmodern in McHale's sense, that they are attempts to explain the ontological nature of existence due to the fact that all epistemological options are shot down?
The protagonist resists his situation by threatening the woman, physically abusing her, and playing sick, all to no avail. Eventually he concocts a scheme and escapes, but he is disorientated during his midnight flight and is rescued from the sucking mud pits and placed back into captivity. Through another scheme to trap a crow and send a message to the outside world to rescue him, he inadvertently discovers a way to harvest water from the sand, thus liberating the couple from the need to wait for the villagers above ground to deliver water. The man becomes obsessed with perfecting his device and falls into a routine of helping clear the sand, improving his water trap, and having sex with the woman. She eventually becomes impregnated and suffers some difficulties; the villagers come to her aid and, in their haste, fail to retract the rope ladder before departing to the hospital. The narrator considers escaping, but rather turns back to his contraption and to await the return of the woman.
The novel has much in common with Kafka as the man's imprisonment against his will is never justified or explained, it simply has to be endured. The novel also reminded me of certain of Haruki Murakami's short fictions, such as "The Iceman" or "The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes," where there is a certain allegorical feel to the work. The protagonist here is always considering the metaphor of the sand, how it is always shifting and moving with no purpose, and the job is to somehow make life livable in an uncertain world that is fundamentally devoid of meaning. Such stories with an overtly allegorical nature tend to interest me less than those that are more difficult to interpret, although to Abe's credit this metaphor is interesting and not simple, and there are intriguing ruminations about the nature of insects and birds that can easily be graphed onto questioning the nature of humanity.
Is this magical realism though? Nothing overtly "magical" happens, and only the absurdity of the situation challenges our notions of what could potentially happen in our "reality." The same questions can be asked of Kafka's The Trial; or rather than magical realism, are these works more broadly postmodern in McHale's sense, that they are attempts to explain the ontological nature of existence due to the fact that all epistemological options are shot down?
Monday, March 16, 2009
"Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature" by Luis Leal
Leal writes this essay in response to Angel Flores' "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction," specifically to repudiate a number of Flores' points including his definition of magical realism, the authors Flores includes in the movement, and the movement's inception in the year of 1935.
Leal beings with recapping a number of definitions of magical realism, including Roh's statement that "the mystery does not descend to the represented world but rather hides and palpitates behind it;" Arturo Uslar Pietri who states that it is the "consideration of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic facts. A poetic prediction or a poetic denial of reality;" and Carpentier's statement that the marvelous "begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality" (120).
Leal then launches into descriptions of what, for him, magical realism is not:
"Magical realism cannot be identified either with fantastic literature or with psychological literature, or with surrealist or hermetic literature that Ortega describes. Unlike superrealism, magical realism does not use dream motifs; neither does it distort reality or create imagined worlds, as writers of fantastic literature or science fiction do; nor does it emphasize psychological aspects of characters since it doesn't try to find reasons for their actions or their inability to express themselves. Magical realism is not an aesthetic movement either, as was modernism, which was interested in creating works dominated by a refined style; neither is it interested in the creation of complex structures per se.
"Magical realism is not magic literature either. Its aim, unlike that of magic, is to express emotions, not to evoke them. Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in closed or open structures.... In magical realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts" (121).
For Leal, Kafka does not qualify because his characters "find the situation intolerable and they don't accept it" and Borges fails because his "principle trait is the creation of infinite hierarchies" and not "the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances" (121-2).
Leal then concludes his essay with a few more statements to show what he finds essential to the magical realist work: "In magical realism key events have no logical or psychological explanation. The magical realist does not try to copy the surrounding reality (as the realists did) or to wound it (as the Surrealists did) but to seize the mystery that breathes behind things.... Let us keep in mind that in these magical realist works the author does not need to justify the mystery of events, as the fantastic writer has to. In fantastic literature the supernatural invades a world ruled by reason. In magical realism 'the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it.' In order to seize reality's mysteries the magical realist writer heightens his senses until he reaches an extreme state [estado limite] that allows him to intuit the imperceptible subtleties of the external world, the multifarious world in which we live" (123).
What complicates Leal's position is his failure to then place writers like Kafka and Borges. Do Kafka or Borges ever "justify the mystery of events" as fantasists should? Clearly, neither "wound" reality as the Surrealists did. I assume Leal would want to categorize Kafka as a fantasist and Borges as a science fiction writer, based on "The Metamorphoses" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" or "The Library of Babel," respectively; yet what would Leal do with Kafka's "Report to an Academy" or "The Judgement," and Borges' "Funes, the Memorius" or "The Alepth"?
The act of definition necessitates the inclusion and exclusion of certain works based on the criteria set forth; for Leal, I presume, the classification of works that do not fill within his definition of magical realism is not his concern. Yet this is unsatisfying for a number of reasons; just because Leal wants a definition of magical realism that is unique to Latin America doesn't mean we have to accept it. For instance, who is to say that Kafka did not reach an extreme state that allowed him to "intuit the imperceptible subtleties of the external world" and found them intolerable? Leal also does not quote Carpentier's statement that the marvelous need not be beautiful, only extraordinary. In order to buy into Leal's definition, one must be content to reject a number of works encompassed by broader definitions of magical realism and, of course, find a category for them. Would Leal be willing to say that all of these works could live together under the wide umbrella of postmodern technique, but keep only the small Latin American subset as specifically magical realist?
Leal beings with recapping a number of definitions of magical realism, including Roh's statement that "the mystery does not descend to the represented world but rather hides and palpitates behind it;" Arturo Uslar Pietri who states that it is the "consideration of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic facts. A poetic prediction or a poetic denial of reality;" and Carpentier's statement that the marvelous "begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality" (120).
Leal then launches into descriptions of what, for him, magical realism is not:
"Magical realism cannot be identified either with fantastic literature or with psychological literature, or with surrealist or hermetic literature that Ortega describes. Unlike superrealism, magical realism does not use dream motifs; neither does it distort reality or create imagined worlds, as writers of fantastic literature or science fiction do; nor does it emphasize psychological aspects of characters since it doesn't try to find reasons for their actions or their inability to express themselves. Magical realism is not an aesthetic movement either, as was modernism, which was interested in creating works dominated by a refined style; neither is it interested in the creation of complex structures per se.
"Magical realism is not magic literature either. Its aim, unlike that of magic, is to express emotions, not to evoke them. Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in closed or open structures.... In magical realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts" (121).
For Leal, Kafka does not qualify because his characters "find the situation intolerable and they don't accept it" and Borges fails because his "principle trait is the creation of infinite hierarchies" and not "the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances" (121-2).
Leal then concludes his essay with a few more statements to show what he finds essential to the magical realist work: "In magical realism key events have no logical or psychological explanation. The magical realist does not try to copy the surrounding reality (as the realists did) or to wound it (as the Surrealists did) but to seize the mystery that breathes behind things.... Let us keep in mind that in these magical realist works the author does not need to justify the mystery of events, as the fantastic writer has to. In fantastic literature the supernatural invades a world ruled by reason. In magical realism 'the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it.' In order to seize reality's mysteries the magical realist writer heightens his senses until he reaches an extreme state [estado limite] that allows him to intuit the imperceptible subtleties of the external world, the multifarious world in which we live" (123).
What complicates Leal's position is his failure to then place writers like Kafka and Borges. Do Kafka or Borges ever "justify the mystery of events" as fantasists should? Clearly, neither "wound" reality as the Surrealists did. I assume Leal would want to categorize Kafka as a fantasist and Borges as a science fiction writer, based on "The Metamorphoses" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" or "The Library of Babel," respectively; yet what would Leal do with Kafka's "Report to an Academy" or "The Judgement," and Borges' "Funes, the Memorius" or "The Alepth"?
The act of definition necessitates the inclusion and exclusion of certain works based on the criteria set forth; for Leal, I presume, the classification of works that do not fill within his definition of magical realism is not his concern. Yet this is unsatisfying for a number of reasons; just because Leal wants a definition of magical realism that is unique to Latin America doesn't mean we have to accept it. For instance, who is to say that Kafka did not reach an extreme state that allowed him to "intuit the imperceptible subtleties of the external world" and found them intolerable? Leal also does not quote Carpentier's statement that the marvelous need not be beautiful, only extraordinary. In order to buy into Leal's definition, one must be content to reject a number of works encompassed by broader definitions of magical realism and, of course, find a category for them. Would Leal be willing to say that all of these works could live together under the wide umbrella of postmodern technique, but keep only the small Latin American subset as specifically magical realist?
"Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction" by Angel Flores
Flores begins his essay by stating that Latin American literature has been underestimated and unappreciated due to the fact that critics have historically tried, and failed, to put this literature into categories in which it does not fit: realism, romanticism, naturalism, existentialism. Flores suggests that the "roots of this ambivalence are psychological" and begin with European attitudes towards much Spanish literature and visual art, and also "can be ascribed to the unstable economic and social milieu of the writers of Spain and Latin America which forces them to improvisation" (110). When read with such categorical expectations, Latin American literature may seem rife with "ineptitude, uncertainty, imitativeness, sentimental histrionics" and tedium (111).
Flores says that artists after the First World War rejected photographic realism and instead turned towards symbolism and magical realism, among them Kafka, Proust, and de Chirico. He singles out Kafka for praise, noting the "difficult art of mingling his drab reality with the phantasmal world of his nightmares" and the novelty in the "amalgamation of realism and fantasy" that can be found in Latin America in the earliest records of the Colonial Period (112).
He then lists a number of Latin American writers influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, but concludes that "all these productions, which depend so utterly on atmosphere, mood, and sentiment... differ from the cold and cerebral and often erudite storytelling" Flores values, and claims that 1935 marks the year Latin American literature came into its own with the publication of Jorge Luis Borges' Historia Universal de la Infamia, an author who was influenced by Chesteron, H.G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Marcel Schwob, Ellery Queen, and most of all Kafka; the shift results in other authors doing cross-genre work, like Adolfo Bioy Casares' La Invencion de Morel (112-3).
Despite the diversity in the works, Flores finds many commonalities. "Meticulous craftsmen all, one finds in them the same preoccupation with style and also the same transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal" (114) and points to the uncertainty and fluidity of time while still remaining grounded in reality. "The practitioners of magical realism cling to reality as if to prevent "literature" from getting in their way, as if to prevent their myth from flying off, as in fairy tales, to supernatural realms" (116). He also finds within magical realist works a "confusion in clarity" and a style that "seeks precision and leanness" that places them against mawkishness of other Latin American writers, and also notes that "their concern for the well-knit plot probably stems from their familiarity with detective stories" (116).
Flores' essay again wishes to reclaim, or perhaps redeem, Latin American literature in the eyes of critics. Flores' discussion of genre crossovers, including both science fiction and the detective story, suggests another point where magical realism is a transgressive type (genre? mode?) of literature. While these claims are easily supported, it further confuses the definitional quandary of parsing works into categories of fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, or even slipstream. It's interesting to note Flores highlights style as being of particular importance, yet also extremely difficult to quantify. How ought we judge whether a particular work has sufficient style to be considered a magical realist work? And if it fails this litmus test, to which category does it then fall?
Flores says that artists after the First World War rejected photographic realism and instead turned towards symbolism and magical realism, among them Kafka, Proust, and de Chirico. He singles out Kafka for praise, noting the "difficult art of mingling his drab reality with the phantasmal world of his nightmares" and the novelty in the "amalgamation of realism and fantasy" that can be found in Latin America in the earliest records of the Colonial Period (112).
He then lists a number of Latin American writers influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, but concludes that "all these productions, which depend so utterly on atmosphere, mood, and sentiment... differ from the cold and cerebral and often erudite storytelling" Flores values, and claims that 1935 marks the year Latin American literature came into its own with the publication of Jorge Luis Borges' Historia Universal de la Infamia, an author who was influenced by Chesteron, H.G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Marcel Schwob, Ellery Queen, and most of all Kafka; the shift results in other authors doing cross-genre work, like Adolfo Bioy Casares' La Invencion de Morel (112-3).
Despite the diversity in the works, Flores finds many commonalities. "Meticulous craftsmen all, one finds in them the same preoccupation with style and also the same transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal" (114) and points to the uncertainty and fluidity of time while still remaining grounded in reality. "The practitioners of magical realism cling to reality as if to prevent "literature" from getting in their way, as if to prevent their myth from flying off, as in fairy tales, to supernatural realms" (116). He also finds within magical realist works a "confusion in clarity" and a style that "seeks precision and leanness" that places them against mawkishness of other Latin American writers, and also notes that "their concern for the well-knit plot probably stems from their familiarity with detective stories" (116).
Flores' essay again wishes to reclaim, or perhaps redeem, Latin American literature in the eyes of critics. Flores' discussion of genre crossovers, including both science fiction and the detective story, suggests another point where magical realism is a transgressive type (genre? mode?) of literature. While these claims are easily supported, it further confuses the definitional quandary of parsing works into categories of fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, or even slipstream. It's interesting to note Flores highlights style as being of particular importance, yet also extremely difficult to quantify. How ought we judge whether a particular work has sufficient style to be considered a magical realist work? And if it fails this litmus test, to which category does it then fall?
Sunday, March 15, 2009
"Baroque and the Marvelous Real" by Alejo Carpentier
This piece, a 1975 lecture from Carpentier, discusses the difficulty in creating acceptable definitions for a number of terms including baroque, Surrealism, the decadent, and classicism. This final term Carpentier concludes with saying "Classicism is academic, and all that is academic is conservative, vigilant, obedient, and therefore declared enemy of innovation, of anything that breaks rules and norms" (92).
Carpentier continues the discussion using architecture as his principal metaphor, the symmetry and harmony found in most European monuments such as Versailles, El Escorial, and the Parthenon where blank spaces serve to highlight the importance of the ornamented spaces. The baroque, on the other hand, is surrounded with "proliferating nuclei" that fill every possible space (92-93).
The examples of such architecture can be found in India, Moscow, and Prague--places he also specifically mentioned in his essay on the magical real in the Americas. Other architectural styles are historical for Carpentier, whereas "the baroque spirit can reappear at any moment" and he goes on to claim that Plato and Aeschylus do not possess any baroque style at all, but that all of Indian and Iranian literature is a baroque literary style, and summons this same spirit in European literature via Cervantes, Ariosto, Rabelais, and some works of Shakespeare (95-6), as well as the development of Surrealism (98).
"Academisim," Carpentier writes, "is characteristic of settled times that are complete, sure of themselves. The baroque, on the other hand, arises where there is transformation, mutation, or innovation... the baroque always projects forward and tends, in fact , to a phase of expansion at the culminating moment of a civilization, or when a new social order is about to be born. It can be a culmination, just as it can be a premonition... America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations, vibrations, mestizaje, has always been baroque" (98).
Carpentier sees the baroque intersecting with what he has called "the marvelous real," but returns again to the dictionary to seek a definition for marvelous. "Dictionaries tell us that the marvelous is something that causes admiration because it is extraordinary, excellent, formidable. And that is joined to the notion that everything marvelous must be beautiful, lovely, pleasant, when really the only thing that should be gleaned from the dictionary is a reference to the extraordinary. The extraordinary is not necessarily lovely or beautiful. It is neither beautiful nor ugly; rather, it is amazing because it is strange. Everything strange, everything amazing, everything that eludes established norms is marvelous" (101).
After speaking of fairy tales and the limited scope of Franz Roh's definition divorced from a political agenda, he then describes why Surrealism does not meet the requirement of the marvelous real: because their fabrications of the marvelous were premeditated (103). The European conquerors on the other hand saw very clearly aspects of the marvelous real in America, "where our nature is untamed, as is our history, a history of both the marvelous real and the strange in America that manifests itself" in unusual occurrences (104-5).
This complexity can only be described in a baroque style of writing, Carpentier says: "I have to create with my words a baroque style that parallels the baroque of the temperate, tropical landscape. And we find that this leads logically to a baroque that arises spontaneously in our literature" (106). Carpentier concludes with a statement explaining that "el boom" is a result of a generation of artists embracing the stories that surround them and have become "the interpreters of our great Latin American reality" (107).
Critics of Carpentier claim that he fails to break with European/Eurocentric notions of Latin America. Also, Carpentier also seems to underestimate the diversity and histories present in all cultures and the voices that may have been historically muffled, for example the Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom. Moving toward the end of the 20th century, it is also difficult to see how Carpentier's theory would hold up against the fantasists and fabulists of today. Does the "baroque" nature of a fragmented postmodern worldview diminish the primal and untamed Latin American spirit? Or would Carpentier claim that, like the Surrealists, that these writers are mere magicians fabricating the marvelous premeditatively?
Carpentier continues the discussion using architecture as his principal metaphor, the symmetry and harmony found in most European monuments such as Versailles, El Escorial, and the Parthenon where blank spaces serve to highlight the importance of the ornamented spaces. The baroque, on the other hand, is surrounded with "proliferating nuclei" that fill every possible space (92-93).
The examples of such architecture can be found in India, Moscow, and Prague--places he also specifically mentioned in his essay on the magical real in the Americas. Other architectural styles are historical for Carpentier, whereas "the baroque spirit can reappear at any moment" and he goes on to claim that Plato and Aeschylus do not possess any baroque style at all, but that all of Indian and Iranian literature is a baroque literary style, and summons this same spirit in European literature via Cervantes, Ariosto, Rabelais, and some works of Shakespeare (95-6), as well as the development of Surrealism (98).
"Academisim," Carpentier writes, "is characteristic of settled times that are complete, sure of themselves. The baroque, on the other hand, arises where there is transformation, mutation, or innovation... the baroque always projects forward and tends, in fact , to a phase of expansion at the culminating moment of a civilization, or when a new social order is about to be born. It can be a culmination, just as it can be a premonition... America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations, vibrations, mestizaje, has always been baroque" (98).
Carpentier sees the baroque intersecting with what he has called "the marvelous real," but returns again to the dictionary to seek a definition for marvelous. "Dictionaries tell us that the marvelous is something that causes admiration because it is extraordinary, excellent, formidable. And that is joined to the notion that everything marvelous must be beautiful, lovely, pleasant, when really the only thing that should be gleaned from the dictionary is a reference to the extraordinary. The extraordinary is not necessarily lovely or beautiful. It is neither beautiful nor ugly; rather, it is amazing because it is strange. Everything strange, everything amazing, everything that eludes established norms is marvelous" (101).
After speaking of fairy tales and the limited scope of Franz Roh's definition divorced from a political agenda, he then describes why Surrealism does not meet the requirement of the marvelous real: because their fabrications of the marvelous were premeditated (103). The European conquerors on the other hand saw very clearly aspects of the marvelous real in America, "where our nature is untamed, as is our history, a history of both the marvelous real and the strange in America that manifests itself" in unusual occurrences (104-5).
This complexity can only be described in a baroque style of writing, Carpentier says: "I have to create with my words a baroque style that parallels the baroque of the temperate, tropical landscape. And we find that this leads logically to a baroque that arises spontaneously in our literature" (106). Carpentier concludes with a statement explaining that "el boom" is a result of a generation of artists embracing the stories that surround them and have become "the interpreters of our great Latin American reality" (107).
Critics of Carpentier claim that he fails to break with European/Eurocentric notions of Latin America. Also, Carpentier also seems to underestimate the diversity and histories present in all cultures and the voices that may have been historically muffled, for example the Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom. Moving toward the end of the 20th century, it is also difficult to see how Carpentier's theory would hold up against the fantasists and fabulists of today. Does the "baroque" nature of a fragmented postmodern worldview diminish the primal and untamed Latin American spirit? Or would Carpentier claim that, like the Surrealists, that these writers are mere magicians fabricating the marvelous premeditatively?
"On the Marvelous Real in America" by Alejo Carpentier
The editor's note for Carpentier's essay, originally written in 1949 (twenty-four years after Roh's coining of the phrase magic realism), states: "As opposed to European Surrealism, a movement in which Carpentier had participated in the 1930s in France, Carpentier's "marvelous American reality" does not imply a conscious assault on conventionally depicted reality but, rather, an amplification of perceived reality required by and inherent in Latin American nature and culture.... where improbable juxtapositions and marvelous mixtures exist by virtue of Latin America's varied history, geography, demography, and politics--not by manifesto" (75).
Carpentier's essay traverses the globe, describing the incredible complexity in a variety of cultures, from China to the world of Islam, to the Soviet Union and Prague before "returning" to dwell on the uniqueness of Latin America. In each instance, Carpentier suggests the impossibility of completely understanding any of these cultures or languages. Also, it's noteworthy that Carpentier briefly touches on literary movements from Western Europe, instead placing that are sufficiently "other." Also, he credits Prague's atmosphere for helping imbue Franz Kafka with the "mystery and possibility" present in his writing.
Carpentier takes a shot at the Surrealists as mere magicians, "forgetting that the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado limite]. To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith" (86).
In this move, Carpentier places "the marvelous real" on the moral high ground, stating that virtue and faith play a key role, whereas the "magicians" of Europe are still laboring to undercut the "privileged revelation" of the Western tradition without having anything authentic to replace it with. For Carpentier, finding such virtue and faith does not trouble people of the Americas: "Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black man, the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund racial mixing [mestizaje], America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies. After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real?" (88).
Critics state (rightly in my opinion) that such statements take an essentialist, Eurocentric view of the population of the Americas, where the people and the land are somehow saturated with magic whereas the European tradition has gone stale. Carpentier's intent is to empower writers in the Americas, to stop them from looking to Europe for approval and inspiration but rather take advantage of the rich cultural, pre-Colonial landscape that is truly their own, yet in doing so Carpentier also helps to sensationalize native beliefs and traditions.
Carpentier's essay traverses the globe, describing the incredible complexity in a variety of cultures, from China to the world of Islam, to the Soviet Union and Prague before "returning" to dwell on the uniqueness of Latin America. In each instance, Carpentier suggests the impossibility of completely understanding any of these cultures or languages. Also, it's noteworthy that Carpentier briefly touches on literary movements from Western Europe, instead placing that are sufficiently "other." Also, he credits Prague's atmosphere for helping imbue Franz Kafka with the "mystery and possibility" present in his writing.
Carpentier takes a shot at the Surrealists as mere magicians, "forgetting that the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado limite]. To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith" (86).
In this move, Carpentier places "the marvelous real" on the moral high ground, stating that virtue and faith play a key role, whereas the "magicians" of Europe are still laboring to undercut the "privileged revelation" of the Western tradition without having anything authentic to replace it with. For Carpentier, finding such virtue and faith does not trouble people of the Americas: "Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black man, the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund racial mixing [mestizaje], America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies. After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real?" (88).
Critics state (rightly in my opinion) that such statements take an essentialist, Eurocentric view of the population of the Americas, where the people and the land are somehow saturated with magic whereas the European tradition has gone stale. Carpentier's intent is to empower writers in the Americas, to stop them from looking to Europe for approval and inspiration but rather take advantage of the rich cultural, pre-Colonial landscape that is truly their own, yet in doing so Carpentier also helps to sensationalize native beliefs and traditions.
"Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar Republic" by Irene Guenther
Guenther's essay places Roh within the social and historical contexts of his time and elaborates on the kind of art being produced in this period. She writes:
"The goal of this post-World War I art was a new definition of the object, clinically dissected, coldly accentuated, microscopically delineated. Over-exposed, isolated, rendered from an uncustomary angle, the familiar became unusual, endowed with an Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) which elicited fear and wonder. The juxtaposition of "magic" and "realism" reflected far more the monstrous and marvelous Unheimlichkeit within human beings and inherent in their modern technological surroundings, of which both Freud and de Chirico wrote" and de Chirico's non-sentimental art was seen as a precursor to both magical realism and Surrealism (36-8).
The diversity of Neue Sachlichkeit art had some common bonds, including the lack of visible brushstrokes creating a smooth finish, and that objects were scrutinized in their minutiae: "Artists 'painted inward from the outside' to get to the invisible. With surgical probing, a deeper layer--the magic and the "unheimlich" (uncanny) behind the real--was revealed" (53).
The link to magic realism in art seems much closer to the Surrealists, who were interested in expressing repressed cultural taboos and the darker corners of the human psyche, and Guenther admits that linking magic realist art with magic realist literature is difficult since Roh's words have been twisted, and "few definitive answers can be found; gaps and conjecture, however, abound" (57).
Regardless, applying art criticism to the literature of the fantastic, magic realism, and postmodernist texts that would come later in the century can be fruitful. Consider this quote from Alfred Döblin: "Art comes from not knowing but from being... We are not in need of art products but rather manifestations of life... The being of the artist is the foundation of art... [and] indicate[s]... that one is and what one is" (41).
This formulation speaks directly to Brian McHale's main thesis in his Postmodernist Fiction, that the identifying characteristic of the postmodern text is that the ontological (ways of being) is foregrounded, whereas modernism foregrounded the epistemological (ways of knowing). This again brings up the question of the relation of the magical realist text within postmodernism, and whether all or only select magical realist texts could be considered sufficiently "postmodern."
"The goal of this post-World War I art was a new definition of the object, clinically dissected, coldly accentuated, microscopically delineated. Over-exposed, isolated, rendered from an uncustomary angle, the familiar became unusual, endowed with an Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness) which elicited fear and wonder. The juxtaposition of "magic" and "realism" reflected far more the monstrous and marvelous Unheimlichkeit within human beings and inherent in their modern technological surroundings, of which both Freud and de Chirico wrote" and de Chirico's non-sentimental art was seen as a precursor to both magical realism and Surrealism (36-8).
The diversity of Neue Sachlichkeit art had some common bonds, including the lack of visible brushstrokes creating a smooth finish, and that objects were scrutinized in their minutiae: "Artists 'painted inward from the outside' to get to the invisible. With surgical probing, a deeper layer--the magic and the "unheimlich" (uncanny) behind the real--was revealed" (53).
The link to magic realism in art seems much closer to the Surrealists, who were interested in expressing repressed cultural taboos and the darker corners of the human psyche, and Guenther admits that linking magic realist art with magic realist literature is difficult since Roh's words have been twisted, and "few definitive answers can be found; gaps and conjecture, however, abound" (57).
Regardless, applying art criticism to the literature of the fantastic, magic realism, and postmodernist texts that would come later in the century can be fruitful. Consider this quote from Alfred Döblin: "Art comes from not knowing but from being... We are not in need of art products but rather manifestations of life... The being of the artist is the foundation of art... [and] indicate[s]... that one is and what one is" (41).
This formulation speaks directly to Brian McHale's main thesis in his Postmodernist Fiction, that the identifying characteristic of the postmodern text is that the ontological (ways of being) is foregrounded, whereas modernism foregrounded the epistemological (ways of knowing). This again brings up the question of the relation of the magical realist text within postmodernism, and whether all or only select magical realist texts could be considered sufficiently "postmodern."
"Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism" by Franz Roh
Most critics agree that the term "magic realism" was coined in this 1925 essay by Roh, who was in fact writing about a new kind of painting he saw emerging in Europe at the time that signaled an end to the Expressionist style. Even though Roh's comments are directed toward visual art, many of his statements are useful to consider in light of the literary phenomenon that became to be known as magical realism as well.
Magic realist art placed focus on the object itself, its tactile nature, the special nature its very being as opposed to being used as a means to other ends. "This calm admiration of the magic of being," Roh writes, "Of the discovery that things already have their own faces, means that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world can take root has been reconquered--albeit in new ways" and that former artistic styles don't "acknowledge that radiation of magic, that spirituality, that lugubrious quality throbbing in the best works of the new mode, along with their coldness and apparent sobriety" (20).
Roh concludes his essay with the metaphor of a person stepping into a church where "the ensemble of an altar painting unfolded its essential meaning at a hundred paces, and then, as the distance diminished, revealed little by little the new world of the very small in successive planes of details, details that were symbolic of all true spiritual knowledge of the world because they always remained subordinate to the entire structure" and how "the latest painting wants to offer us the image of something totally finished and complete, minutely formed, opposing it to our our eternally fragmented and ragged lives as an archetype of integral structuring, down to the smallest details" (30).
Roh's comments about the mixing or juxtaposing of the fantastic alongside the real can easily be applied to the literary works that are generally classified as magical realism. In a more theoretical vein, Roh's comments can also be applied to worldviews, with the fantastic equating to pre-Colonial beliefs and practices of people of the Americas whereas the "coldness and apparent sobriety" equates to the Western scientific worldview that was then subordinated to the cultural belief systems of the colonial powers. Roh refers to this kind of art as a kind of reclamation project, and this can very easily be extended to the literature of magic realism as well, especially in light of the arguments that magical realist works inherently question the received tradition of what constitutes reality and the possible.
More problematic is attempting to reconcile the idea of the minutiae contributing to the overall effect of the entire structure. While this works when referring to a physical piece of art, and perhaps when referring to the book as an object (i.e. fragmented stories, voices, etc. still add up to the entire structure of the physical object of the book) it's much more difficult to place literary works (and probably paintings as well) as working towards an "entire structure." Indeed, considering the overlap between the non-linear nature of many magical realist narratives, they seem to reflect and promote "our eternally fragmented and ragged lives." One possible resolution to this problem: seeing these texts only (or perhaps primarily) as fragments that make no sense suggests a deficiency in our reading or limitation of our comprehension; in other words, if we take a broader view of the chaos of our lives, larger patterns and structures may become visible.
Magic realist art placed focus on the object itself, its tactile nature, the special nature its very being as opposed to being used as a means to other ends. "This calm admiration of the magic of being," Roh writes, "Of the discovery that things already have their own faces, means that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world can take root has been reconquered--albeit in new ways" and that former artistic styles don't "acknowledge that radiation of magic, that spirituality, that lugubrious quality throbbing in the best works of the new mode, along with their coldness and apparent sobriety" (20).
Roh concludes his essay with the metaphor of a person stepping into a church where "the ensemble of an altar painting unfolded its essential meaning at a hundred paces, and then, as the distance diminished, revealed little by little the new world of the very small in successive planes of details, details that were symbolic of all true spiritual knowledge of the world because they always remained subordinate to the entire structure" and how "the latest painting wants to offer us the image of something totally finished and complete, minutely formed, opposing it to our our eternally fragmented and ragged lives as an archetype of integral structuring, down to the smallest details" (30).
Roh's comments about the mixing or juxtaposing of the fantastic alongside the real can easily be applied to the literary works that are generally classified as magical realism. In a more theoretical vein, Roh's comments can also be applied to worldviews, with the fantastic equating to pre-Colonial beliefs and practices of people of the Americas whereas the "coldness and apparent sobriety" equates to the Western scientific worldview that was then subordinated to the cultural belief systems of the colonial powers. Roh refers to this kind of art as a kind of reclamation project, and this can very easily be extended to the literature of magic realism as well, especially in light of the arguments that magical realist works inherently question the received tradition of what constitutes reality and the possible.
More problematic is attempting to reconcile the idea of the minutiae contributing to the overall effect of the entire structure. While this works when referring to a physical piece of art, and perhaps when referring to the book as an object (i.e. fragmented stories, voices, etc. still add up to the entire structure of the physical object of the book) it's much more difficult to place literary works (and probably paintings as well) as working towards an "entire structure." Indeed, considering the overlap between the non-linear nature of many magical realist narratives, they seem to reflect and promote "our eternally fragmented and ragged lives." One possible resolution to this problem: seeing these texts only (or perhaps primarily) as fragments that make no sense suggests a deficiency in our reading or limitation of our comprehension; in other words, if we take a broader view of the chaos of our lives, larger patterns and structures may become visible.
Friday, March 13, 2009
"The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre" by Tzevtan Todorov
The book is broken into 10 sections: literary genres; definition of the fantastic; the uncanny and the marvelous; poetry and allegory; discourse of the fantastic; themes of the fantastic-introduction; themes of the self; themes of the other; themes of the fantastic-conclusion; and literature of the fantastic.
In summation, Todorov's theory states that "the fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty [between the uncanny and the marvelous]. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event" (25). Also, it is important that this hesitation occurs on the part of the reader, although it is usually on part of the main character as well (26).
For Todorov, the uncanny describes events where "the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomenon described" and the marvelous is where "new laws of nature need to be entertained to account for the phenomena" (41). Examples of the uncanny include the phenomena being produced by madness or drug use; the marvelous includes ghost stories or those stories where magic is the only possible explanation for events. Todorov also allows for sub-genres of the fantastic-uncanny and fantastic-marvelous, where the hesitation between experiences is ultimately resolved either rationally (uncanny) or with a supernatural explanation (marvelous) (44).
Todorov's theory is interesting when considering works like Potocki's The Saragossa Manuscript and considering work of Edgar Allan Poe, who Todorov states mostly works in the uncanny ("Fall of the House of Usher") and the marvelous, but only occasionally in the fantastic ("The Black Cat") (48). For Todorov and his structuralist approach, via semantics the genre of the fantastic is able "to transcend the old dichotomy of form and content, in order to consider the work as a totality and a dynamic unity" (94), a result of these worlds being created that do not exist outside language.
Interesting perhaps for selected works, but not entirely convincing. Todorov's analysis of fantastic tropes (i.e. ghosts, vampires, devils) his argument loses steam as he tries to wedge them into his structural--and highly Freudian--framework. He goes as far to say that "psychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby has made useless) the literature of the fantastic" (160) because old taboos of forbidden love, incest, necrophilia, etc. can now be talked about openly and do not need the guise of fantasy. Furthermore, Lem asks the question "Why does the literature of the fantastic no longer exist?" (166), and points the finger at Kafka. For Todorov, Kafka's fictions accomplish a major reversal: "what in the first world was an exception here becomes the rule" (174). The idea of a "normal" world is so far gone that incredible events become passe.
Overall, Todorov's theory may be interesting for a limited subset of works, but to define the genre? As Lem says in his response, in this theory "we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy, and all of SF is represented by two short stories." Lem goes on to further splinter the theory into exception after exception, concluding that "A theory of literature either embraces all works or it is no theory. A theory of works weeded out in advance by means beyond its compass constitutes not generalization but its contrary, that is particularization."
To further Lem's point, what about Haruki Murakami? Much of his short fiction seem to feature these tell-tale moments of hesitation, while others do not. Most of his fictions take place in our contemporary world and the moments of the fantastic are pocket-sized, and quite possibly the result of strange coincidences rather than any supernatural event--"Birthday Girl," "The Mirror," and "Nausea 1979" all seem to fit the bill for Todorov's definition, but they would seem to have far more in common with a postmodern aesthetic rather than the 19th century works Todorov favors.
Overall, Todorov's theory collapses at the slightest push. Rather than attempting to outline a theory that applied to an (ill-defined) genre, Todorov would have been better off writing a theory of liminal literature and the unique work such fictions can achieve. Simply too much of his theory does not hold up under scrutiny.
In summation, Todorov's theory states that "the fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty [between the uncanny and the marvelous]. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event" (25). Also, it is important that this hesitation occurs on the part of the reader, although it is usually on part of the main character as well (26).
For Todorov, the uncanny describes events where "the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomenon described" and the marvelous is where "new laws of nature need to be entertained to account for the phenomena" (41). Examples of the uncanny include the phenomena being produced by madness or drug use; the marvelous includes ghost stories or those stories where magic is the only possible explanation for events. Todorov also allows for sub-genres of the fantastic-uncanny and fantastic-marvelous, where the hesitation between experiences is ultimately resolved either rationally (uncanny) or with a supernatural explanation (marvelous) (44).
Todorov's theory is interesting when considering works like Potocki's The Saragossa Manuscript and considering work of Edgar Allan Poe, who Todorov states mostly works in the uncanny ("Fall of the House of Usher") and the marvelous, but only occasionally in the fantastic ("The Black Cat") (48). For Todorov and his structuralist approach, via semantics the genre of the fantastic is able "to transcend the old dichotomy of form and content, in order to consider the work as a totality and a dynamic unity" (94), a result of these worlds being created that do not exist outside language.
Interesting perhaps for selected works, but not entirely convincing. Todorov's analysis of fantastic tropes (i.e. ghosts, vampires, devils) his argument loses steam as he tries to wedge them into his structural--and highly Freudian--framework. He goes as far to say that "psychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby has made useless) the literature of the fantastic" (160) because old taboos of forbidden love, incest, necrophilia, etc. can now be talked about openly and do not need the guise of fantasy. Furthermore, Lem asks the question "Why does the literature of the fantastic no longer exist?" (166), and points the finger at Kafka. For Todorov, Kafka's fictions accomplish a major reversal: "what in the first world was an exception here becomes the rule" (174). The idea of a "normal" world is so far gone that incredible events become passe.
Overall, Todorov's theory may be interesting for a limited subset of works, but to define the genre? As Lem says in his response, in this theory "we find no Borges, no Verne, no Wells, nothing from modern fantasy, and all of SF is represented by two short stories." Lem goes on to further splinter the theory into exception after exception, concluding that "A theory of literature either embraces all works or it is no theory. A theory of works weeded out in advance by means beyond its compass constitutes not generalization but its contrary, that is particularization."
To further Lem's point, what about Haruki Murakami? Much of his short fiction seem to feature these tell-tale moments of hesitation, while others do not. Most of his fictions take place in our contemporary world and the moments of the fantastic are pocket-sized, and quite possibly the result of strange coincidences rather than any supernatural event--"Birthday Girl," "The Mirror," and "Nausea 1979" all seem to fit the bill for Todorov's definition, but they would seem to have far more in common with a postmodern aesthetic rather than the 19th century works Todorov favors.
Overall, Todorov's theory collapses at the slightest push. Rather than attempting to outline a theory that applied to an (ill-defined) genre, Todorov would have been better off writing a theory of liminal literature and the unique work such fictions can achieve. Simply too much of his theory does not hold up under scrutiny.
Monday, March 9, 2009
The Book List
This is the list of books as of March 09, 2009. I expect this list to change over time.
Books I have yet to read appear in bold.
Major area:
Unstable Realities in Contemporary World Fiction: Magic realism, postmodernism, and the fantastic
Minor area:
Native American Literature
Digital Pedagogy: Composition, Creative Writing, Professional Writing
Books I have yet to read appear in bold.
Major area:
Unstable Realities in Contemporary World Fiction: Magic realism, postmodernism, and the fantastic
Abe, Kobo - Woman in the Dunes
Allende, Isabelle - House of the Spirits
Ben Jelloun, Tahar - Sand Child
Borges, Luis - Ficciones
Bulgakov, Mikhail - The Master and Margarita
Butler, Octavia - Kindred
Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower
Calvino, Italo - If On A Winter's Night A Traveler…
Calvino, Italo - Invisible Cities
Carpentier, Alejo - The Kingdom of This World
Carter, Angela - The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman
Carter, Angela - The Magic Toy Shop
Casares, Adolfo Bioy - The Invention of Morel
Castillo, Ana - So Far From God
Chabon, Michael - Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Chabon, Michael - The Yiddish Policeman's Union
Cheney-Coker, Syl - Last Harmattan on Alusine Dunbar
Cortazar, Julio - Blow-Up and Other Stories
Dick, Philip K. - The Man in the High Castle
Esquivel, Laura - Like Water for Chocolate
Ford, Jeffrey - Empire of Ice Cream
Fuentes, Carlos - Death of Artemio Cruz
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Grass, Gunter - The Tin Drum
Hong Kingston, Maxine - The Woman Warrior
Kafka, Franz - Short Stories
Kelley, James and John Kessel, ed. - Feeling Very Strange: Slipstream Anthology
Khatibi, Abdelkebir - Love in Two Languages
Kundera, Milan - Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Lethem, Jonathan - Fortress of Solitude
Link, Kelly - Magic For Beginners
Marcus, Ben - Age of Wire and String
Mieville, China - Perdido Street Station
Mieville, China - The Scar
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
Morrison, Toni - Song of Solomon
Murakami, Haruki - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Murakami, Haruki - Kafka on the Shore
O'Brien, Flann - The Third Policeman
Okri, Ben - Famished Road
Rickert, Mary - Map of Dreams
Roussel, Raymond - Locus Solus
Roy, Arundhati - God of Small Things
Rulfo, Juan - Pedro Paramo
Rushdie, Salman - Midnight's Children
Rushdie, Salman - Satanic Verses
Saunders, George - CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
Straub, Peter ed. - Conjunctions 39
Attendant critical works:
Bowers, Maggie - Magic(al) Realism
Chanady, Amaryll - Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antimony
Faris and Zamora, Ed. - Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community
Faris, Wendy - Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative
Freedman, Carl - Critical Theory and Science Fiction
Freud, Sigmund - "The Uncanny"
Jameson, Fredric - Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia
Jameson, Fredric - Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Keegan, Ken - "Why Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories in an Anthology Named ParaSpheres?" in ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Sphere of Literary and Genre Fiction
Kelly, James Patrick - "Slipstream"
Kelly, James Patrick and John Kessel."Introduction" in Feeling Very Strange: The
Slipstream Anthology.
Lem, Stanislaw - "Todorov's Fantastic Theory of Literature"
McHale, Brian - Postmodernist Fiction
Lyotard, Jean-François - The Postmodern Condition
Scholes, Robert - "On Lem on Todorov"
Todorov, Tzvetan - The Fantastic: A Structural Approach
Tolkien, J.R.R. - "On Fairie Stories"
VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer - "Introduction: Fantasy and the
Imagination."
(more coming...)
Minor area:
Native American Literature
Alexie, Sherman - Reservation Blues
Alexie, Sherman - Tonto and Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven
Bear, Young - Black Eagle Child
Carter, Forrest - Education of Little Tree
Crow Dog, Mary - Lakota Woman
Deloria, Vine - Custer Died for Your Sins
Earling, Debra - PermaRed
Erdrich, Louise - Love Medicine
Erdrich, Louise - Tracks
Henry, Gordon - Light People
Hogan, Linda - Mean Spirit
King, Thomas - Green Grass Running Water
King, Thomas - One Good Story
Louis, Adrian - Wild Indians and Other Creatures
Momaday, N. Scott - House Made of Dawn
Northrup, Jim - Walking the Rez Road
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Taylor, Drew Hayden - Me Funny
Treuer, David - Translation of Dr Apelles: A Love Story
Vizenor, Gerald - Bearheart
Vizenor, Gerald - Landfill Meditations
Welch, James - Fools Crow
Attendant critical works:
Cox, James H. - Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions
Owens, Louis - Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel
Parker, Robert Dale - Invention of Native American Fiction
Treuer, David - Native American Fiction: A Users Manual
Weaver, Jace - That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community
Digital Pedagogy: Composition, Creative Writing, Professional Writing
(in the works...)
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