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?
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