Magical Realism and Other Experimental Genres-Magical realism seems to encroach on other genres and terms like allegory, realism, surrealism and the fantastic.
In magic realist painting, ‘magic’ is the mystery of life. In magical realist writing, magic is extraordinary occurrences, particularly anything spiritual or unaccountable by science such as ghosts, disappearances, miracles, extraordinary talents and strange atmosphere. As a narrative mode, magical realism depicts such magical occurrences in a realistic narrative.
Realism :
Aristotle defines realism in art as mimesis-art as an imitation of life. The novel particularly attempts to represent il realistically as Henry James said it. However, in the 20th century theories, realism in literature sees it not as mimesis. It is the reader who constructs reality out of the text, and it is not the text that reflects the author’s depiction of reality. Catherine Belsey states realism is plausible not because it reflects the world, but because it is developed out of what is discursively familiar.
It is this interpretation of realism that is relevant to magical realism that relies on the presentation of magical or imagined elements as if they were real. The narrative is constructed in such a way as to provide a realistic context to the magical events.
Surrealism :
Surrealism is the depiction of familiar objects that are distorted or placed out of context to express a nonphysical aspect of life. This has a similarity with magical realism that is the creation of a narrative in which magic is incorporated seamlessly into reality. Surrealism deals with the imagination and tre mind. exploring the inner life or psychology of humans through art, whereas, the magical in magical realism is rarely presented as a dream or a psychological experience.
Besides, surrealism is an artistic movement with a manifesto written by the French writer and most famous literary surrealist André Breton in 1924, titled The Surrealist Manifesto in which he defines Surrealism as a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “An absolute reality, a surreality.”
Amaryll Chanady differentiates the two that the irrational in magical realism represents the primitive American mentalities while in Surrealism it corresponds to European superstitions. Magic realism is based on an ordered, even if irrational, perspective, but surrealism includes artificial combinations,
The Fantastic :
Tzvetan Todorov defines fantastic literature as a piece of narrative in which there is a constant faltering between belief a non-belief in the supernatural or extraordinary event. Fantastic thus is associated with Magical realism. Neil Cornwell’s 1998 study The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism examines Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as examples of the genre of the fantastic. The baby ghost in Beloved and events like magic spells in Midnight’s Children are extraordinary events in a realist tale.
However, a magical realistic interpretation sees these events as ordinary events presented by the narrator in a realistic narrative. Unlike the fantastic, the supernatural in magical realism does not disconcert the reader, and this is the fundamental difference between the two modes. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is the story about a travelling salesman Gregor Samsa who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge bug.
It also talks about the shock and disgust of his family, his struggles to cope with this new form, his deterioration and finally his death. No explanation is given for the transformation. His tragic killing by his own family is proof of the rejection of his extraordinariness. Thus, it cannot be a magical realist narrative, which essentially makes the reader accept the improbable as real and acceptable. Kafka is not considered a magical realist writer, but his works are often seen as allegoric.
Allegory :
An allegorical work has at least two levels of meaning. At one level, the narrative works as a plot. At another, the plot has an alternative meaning or reference to another simultaneous structure of ideas and events. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are examples of allegories. The plot in such works is less important than the alternative meaning.
Like a fable, in which a story is told mainly for it moral, the autonomy of the content of the narrative is simply dismissed. This makes it difficult to incorporate allegory in magical realist writing. A novel like Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome which straddles as science fiction from magical realism. A science fiction has an imagined future world based on current scientific knowledge. Magic realism posits magical events as real.
Most of Rushdie’s novels, while widely acknowledged as magical realist, are also seen as allegorical. Midnight’s Childr is considered an allegory, but this does not undermine the vivid interweaving of the magical and the real in the narrative! Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is considered as allegorical, magical realist and even as science fiction by some.
Features of Magical Realism :-
The features of magical realism as a narrative mode, recognized and collated by Zamora and Faris in their monumental work Magical Realism Theory History Community are given below:
(1) A magical realist text features an element of magic, which cannot be explained by the laws of the nature.
These magical events cannot be explained in terms of cause and effect. Reactions to these events by ordinary people are familiar and disturbing, thus, serving as a critique of human nature.
(ii) Realism refers to the concrete descriptions of the natural or real world. In Realistic detailing, a fictional world is created and that resembles the real one.
(iii) Magical events are weaved together in a realistic narrative that creates the impression that the magic grows out of the real. It achieves a kind of defamiliarization.
(iv) It presents contradictory understandings of events and one is not sure whether to interpret it as hallucination, magic as allegory.
(v) This narrative mode is suited to explore and transgress boundaries whether political, ontological, geographical or generic.
Boundaries such as mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female, fact and fiction, ordinary and magical are erased, transgressed, blurred or refashioned.
(vi) The world of the ordinary or the mundane and the world of the magical are merged suggesting a plurality of worlds.
(vii) Magical realist texts question ideas about time, space and identity mainly because of their non-linearity of the narrative, oral story-telling style, reliance on myths and folktales.
(ix) These texts resist and subvert basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism.
(x) These texts also resist monologic political and cultural structures in their erasure of boundaries and thus, very useful to writers in postcolonial cultures and to women.
(xi) Magical realism is Jungian and not Freudian. It reflects collective relatednesss and not dreams or memories or visions.
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