Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community
Book by Wendy B. Faris, Lois Parkinson Zamora; Duke University Press, 1995

Barnes has got it just right. His parodic pastiche of magical realism moves back and forth, as do many of the literary texts we consider here, between the disparate worlds of what we might call the historical and the imaginary. Propinquity -- Barnes' word -- is indeed a central structuring principle of magical realist narration. Contradictions stand face to face, oxymorons march in locked step -- too predictably, Barnes insists -- and politics collide with fantasy. In his reference to religion and banditry, and to the miracu- lous impregnation of the hacienda owner's haughty wife (clearly the kind of magical realist image he wishes would go away), Barnes implies that bad politics has become an expected ingredient of the form. His images reflect the popular perception of magical realism as a largely Latin Ameri- can event.

In ridiculing the forms and conventions of magical realism, Barnes helps us distinguish them. As in all effective parody, he turns the form against itself, uses its conventions to critique its conventions. His hyper- bole parodies the hyperbole of magical realism, for excess is a hallmark of the mode. His distillation of characters into types suggests the shift in emphasis in magical realism from psychological to social and political concerns. His refusal to sign on for the baroque "package tour" suggests the style of the cabin decor in many of these textual cruises. His comic curse on magical realism declares that its conventions have become ossi- fied, tedious, overripe.

Julian Barnes is fun to argue with because his prescription ("Pass!") is so self-consciously reductive. He invites refutation, because the resources of magical realist narrative are hardly exhausted. On the contrary, they have been enabling catalysts for the development of new national and regional literatures and, at the same time, a replenishing force for "main- stream" narrative traditions. Readers know that magical realism is not a Latin American monopoly, though the mastery of the mode by several re- cent Latin American writers explains Barnes' association. It is true that Latin Americanists have been prime movers in developing the critical concept of magical realism and are still primary voices in its discussion, but this collection considers magical realism an international commodity. Almost as a return on capitalism's hegemonic investment in its colonies, magical realism is especially alive and well in postcolonial contexts and is now achieving a compensatory extension of its market worldwide. Further- more Barnes' parodic suggestion that magical realism is a recent glut on that market ignores its long history, beginning with the masterful inter- weavings of magical and real in the epic and chivalric traditions and con- tinuing in the precursors of modern prose fiction -- the Decameron, The Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote. Indeed, we may suppose that the widespread appeal of magical realist fiction today responds not only to its innovative energy but also to its impulse to reestablish contact with traditions temporarily eclipsed by the mimetic constraints of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism. Contemporary magical realist writers self- consciously depart from the conventions of narrative realism to enter and amplify other (diverted) currents of Western literature that flow from the marvelous Greek pastoral and epic traditions to medieval dream visions to the romance and Gothic fictions of the past century.

It is a temptation to run Barnes' risk, to polarize the distinction between realism and magical realism in order to define the latter. In fact, realism and magical realism often spring from coherent (and sometimes identi- cal) sources. Consider the magical departures from realism by such mas- ter realists as Gogol, James, Kafka, Flaubert. Indeed, Barnes might have noticed that beside his daiquiri bird, mentioned in the passage quoted above, perches Flaubert's parrot, the presiding spirit and eponymous hero, as it were, of Barnes' own wonderful book, Flaubert's Parrot. Barnes' title refers to Flaubert short story, "A Simple Heart." In this story, Flaubert writes of the maidservant Felicité, whose banal reality eventually admits a transcendental parrot: "To minds like hers the supernatural is a simple matter." 2 In the magical realist texts under discussion in these essays, the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary mat- ter, an everyday occurrence -- admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort.

An essential difference, then, between realism and magical realism in- volves the intentionality implicit in the conventions of the two modes. Several essays in our collection suggest that realism intends its version of the world as a singular version, as an objective (hence universal) repre- sentation of natural and social realities -- in short, that realism functions ideologically and hegemonically. Magical realism also functions ideologi- cally but, according to these essays, less hegemonically, for its program is not centralizing but eccentric: it creates space for interactions of diver- sity. In magical realist texts, ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural cor- rective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation.