Yet, most commentators would also agree that in its present meaning and with its present scope the term gained acceptance primarily with reference to American, i. In the period in which "postmodernism" and "magic realism" gained their present meanings, then, their use was restricted, respectively, to North- and South-American prose developments. Only recently, and primarily since the early 80s, have these terms allowed for spillage into other linguistic or geographical areas. However, I think few would deny that since they have started doing so they have come to divide not just the New, but also the "Old" World between them.
They now seem almost the only shorthands available to categorize contemporary developments in western fiction. Increasingly, though, it has proved difficult to distinguish the categories covered by these terms clearly.
Often, this has not happened without considerable hesitation, as witnessed to by the ongoing discussion with regard to the French nouveau roman and nouveau nouveau roman.
Yet, judging from the definition I quoted at the beginning of this essay, it would be hard to deny that much of the work of many of these authors might just as easily be categorized as magic realist. This, in fact, is what has been happening. Thomas's The White Hotel. At the same time, though, he sees these novels as achieving their magic realist program by way of the very same techniques usually singled out as marking postmodernism.
Geert Lernout, in an essay on "Postmodernist fiction in Canada," claims that "what is postmodern in the rest of the world used to be called magic realist in South America and still goes by that name in Canada. Such, for instance, is already the attitude taken by two late 80s survey works on postmodern writing: Brian McHale's Postmodernist Fiction and Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism Looking at it from the other side, from that of Spanish American literature, a similar development can be deduced from a recent article by Julio Ortega on "Postmodernism in Latin America," in which he considers the work of a number of authors that until recently would have been discussed almost exclusively within a magic realist framework.
If magic realism, then, at present seems firmly established as part of postmodernism, the question remains as to what part it plays in this larger current or movement, and where and why. Even though these various movements may have thought of themselves as critical or subversive of one another, and of the respective societies they stemmed from, their issuing from "privileged centers" made their discourse suspect to those marginalized -- geographically, socially, economically -- by these same societies.
To write ex-centrically, then, or from the margin, implies dis-placing this discourse. My argument would be that magic realist writing achieves this end by first appropriating the techniques of the "centr"-al line and then using these not, as is the case with these central movements, "realistically," i. Magic realism thus reveals itself as a ruse to invade and take over dominant discourse s.
Alternatively, it is a means for writers coming from the privileged centers of literature to dissociate themselves from the concomitant discourses of power, and to speak on behalf of the ex-centric and un- privileged with the risk of being judged "patronising" by those on whose behalf such writers seek to speak.
That magic realism implicitly proposes this decentering, and that it does so also in other literatures than Spanish American ones, I will try and illustrate with regard to some recent English language novels that all single out some "privileged center" as embodied in traditional literary discourse, and then, via postmodernist and magic realist means, "dis-place" it.
In the autobiographical tale of its protagonist, Robinson Crusoe literally is the story of white male western colonialism, and thus serves an important symbolic function in the West's cultural conception of itself and its world: it is the epic of that hero of middle class ideology, homo economicus.
He is only moderately interested in her story of a morose, surly, and inept old man, uneasily and uncomfortably living on his island with an unruly and disgruntled slave. He is more interested in Susan's own past, and especially in her sexual experiences. Of course, we know that Robinson Crusoe as we now have it presents us with a totally different Crusoe and Friday, and makes no mention of a woman.
As Susan's story, in Coetzee's text, is the authentic or true version of Defoe's later fiction, we have to conclude that, from the perspective of Coetzee's novel, the English author removed Susan from the story, and re-imagined Crusoe and Friday for commercial purposes, thus adapting it to the ideological horizon of expectations of his public.
Looking at it from the opposite end, of course, the question is why Coetzee added Susan Barton to the classic story, and why he had her give her view of Crusoe, Friday and Foe.
Here, a passage from the end of part three of Foe can prove helpful. Friday is, literally, dumb: his tongue has been cut out. As Susan realizes that Friday's story is central to whatever happened on the island, she agrees to Foe's proposal that she teach Friday to write.
Her efforts remain largely unrewarded. Still, at the end of part three Friday is able to write a whole page of "o"s. Foe comments that next day she has to teach him the "a". This passage can be explained in two ways. Friday is thus made out to be functionally illiterate in eighteenth-century English society.
Alternatively, the "o" can be read as the Greek omega, and thus as a very pointed comment on the civilisation he has found himself landed in. As far as he is concerned, this civilisation is a "reverse" one, starting at things from the wrong end. Now we can also understand the symbolism of Friday's cut-out tongue: the civilisation that Crusoe embodies literally reduces all that do not speak its discourse to silence. To learn to write starting with the "a" or alpha of Foe's alphabet would then mean for Friday to also adopt the discourse, and the corresponding world view, of white colonial civilisation.
Mutatis mutandis the same thing holds for Susan Barton. She, of course, is not illiterate. Both orally and in writing, she can tell her own story, and she does so in Foe. Yet, history -- in first instance literary history, but by implication also history in general - - has written her out of the story.
Thus, she fares even worse than Friday who, in the story sanctioned by history, was at least allowed to linger on as a minor character. Now we can also turn our attention to the title of the book.
Robinson Crusoe, is both her and Friday's enemy, according to the dictates of a society that evaluated human beings in terms of their economic value, and for which blacks, indians, or members of any other race were useful as slaves, but for which women held no economic interest whatever.
Irony, of course, has it that "Foe" is the real name of the author we know as "Defoe," and that he was one of the first purely commercial writers in English literary history. Additional Information. Faris, eds. Magical realism is often regarded as a regional trend, restricted to the Latin American writers who popularized it as a literary form.
Faris show magical realism to be an international movement with a wide-ranging history and a significant influence among the literatures of the world.
It offers a broad range of critical perspectives and theoretical approaches to this movement, as well as intensive analyses of various cultural traditions and individual texts from Eastern Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and Australia, in addition to those from Latin America. In situating magical realism within the expanse of literary and cultural history, this collection describes a mode of writing that has been a catalyst in the development of new regional literatures and a revitalizing force for more established narrative traditions—writing particularly alive in postcolonial contexts and a major component of postmodernist fiction.
Table of Contents. Cover Download Save contents. Title, Copyright pp. Bontempelli, Massimo. Florence, Italy: Vallecchi, Print Camayd-Freixas, Erik. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, Carpentier, Alejo. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. New York: Garland, Chiampi, Irlemar. O realismo maravilhoso. Forma e ideologia no romance hispanoamericano.
Faris, Wendy B. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, Freud, Sigmund. James Strachey. London: Routledge, Civilization and Its Discontents []. New York: Norton, El olor de la guayaba: Conversaciones con Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza.
Bogota: Editorial La Oveja Negra, Guenther, Irene. Husserl, Edmund. New York: Collier, Leal, Luis. Lins, Alavaro. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, Menton, Seymour. Magic Realism Rediscovered, East Brunswick, N. Moreiras, Alberto. Mexico City: Tezontle, Roh, Franz. Wendy B. Magischer Realismus. Leipzig: Klinkhardt and Biermann, Donald Yates. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic []. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
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