introduction -...
TRANSCRIPT
CHAPTER - I
INTRODUCTION
Proliferation of the term - Magic Realism in academic and non-academic
circles certainly accounts for its popularity. However, an attempt to mark its
formal characteristics makes one realize the demarcation of Western European
and non-Western modes of thinking by theorists who have formulated definitions
of Magic Realism. It was Franz Roh, the German art critic who applied the term
'Magischer Realisms' for the first time in history. He used the term to comment
on the inter-war art of the Weimar Republic painters, which characterized a return
to Realism after Expressionism's more abstract style. He categorized their form of
naturalistic surrealism in painting by giving it this name in 1925. However, its
visual and painterly connotations dimmed along with time. Later, when the term
was introduced into a Spanish literary context, it referred to the fusion of
geography, history, myth, politics, culture, language and the oral traditions of
South and Central America.
In the 1960's, Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist devised a style of
fiction that came to be known as 'magic realism'. He coined 'lo real maravilloso '
while trying to distance himself from surrealism. It is in the famous prologue to
his novel El reino de este mundo (1949) that he coins this phrase. He uses more of
mnraviNoso than magico. He rejects the juxtapositions of the Surrealist movement
and accepts the representation of a reality in which such juxtapositions already
exist. It was in Haitian Voodoo that Carpentier initially encountered the
marvellous. After the highly formative trip to Haiti in 1943, he began to apply
the lessons of Europe to Latin America, seeing the maravilloso, as a daily feature
of life in his own subcontinent. Thus, just as his earlier Afro-Cuban novel Ecue
Yamba 0 (1933) opposed black primitivism to white dominance, the more
successful El reino de este mundo presents native values and voodoo as superior to
culture of European descent.
Carpentier's two most famous novels are Las pasos perdidos (1953) and - El
siglo de las luces (1962). The unnamed narrator of Las pasos perdidos pictures.the
Carpentarian dilemma of a Europeanized Latin American reviewing his
impressions of his homeland. The modem world of the North is presented as a
perversion of natural norms and the narrator's South American odyssey is
portrayed as a journey back in time towards a meaningful form of primitivism.
Carpentarian marvelous realism is all about the idea that communities of greatly
differing stages of development can exist side by side in this huge sub-continent.
I t is also linked with the search of a paradise of authenticity prior to the
devastation of the European invasion. The novel, however, shows that escape
into a world of timelessness is impossible. Carpenterian magic realism is more
clear if one understands William Spindler's anthropological magic realism. This
amounts to "....two contrasting views of the world (one rational, modem and
discursive; the other magical, traditional and intuitive) . . ." (Forum for the
Modem Language Studies 29 (1993) 76). To Spindler, the first view is closely
linked with Europe and the second with non-European folk culture.
Carpentier's most acclaimed work, El sinlo de las luces is one of the great
historical novels to emerge from Latin America. It is set between 1791 and 1808.
It deals with the French Revolution and the attempts to export it to the Caribbean.
The thrust of the novel is that history is a stammering process and the only way to
gain freedom is to work for change within that process. His later work El recurso
del metodo (1974) presents the deposing of the unscrupulous dictator at the centre
of the novel. His bewilderment in the face of modem art points up his status as an
outmoded phenomenon. In La consagracion de la primavera (1978), the triumph
of the Cuban Revolution is presented. Here, the occult reality of 'lo real
maravilloso' has become the unseen movement of collective, popular feeling
underlying the superficial pattern of history.
The entire Carpenterian notion of marvellous realism may foreclose reader
involvement. That is, the very idea of 'marvelling' at Latin American reality
suggests non-participation, looking on from the outside. Just how convincing it is,
is a matter for individual readers. Carpentier's version is contradictory, but so it's
blooming throughout Latin America, oscillating between the local and the
universal, the real and the unreal.
The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English offers a formal definition of
the genre: "It is characterized by a juxtaposition of apparently reliable, realistic
reportage and extravagant fantasy." [624]. The very broad nature of this
description explains the reason why texts usually thought not Magic Realist are
classified so. In fact Ian Connell uses a similar categorization while discussing
certain types of tabloid journalism. Patricia Merivale defines Magic Realism
thus :
"Magic Realism is not only ... a way of seeing but also a way of saying:
On a larger scale it is a way of telling a story; on a smaller scale, it
is a way of showing 'reality' more truly with the aid of the various magics
of metaphor." (ARIEL 2 1.3 ( 1 990) 12).
This magic helps the reader to transform himself. He is not merely an observer;
he participates in the story. David Punter talks about this emphasis on participant
observation in Magic Realism while discussing the novels of Angela Carter and
Russell Hoban :
"Magic, in the case of magic realism, is not a matter of being transported
to a distant and unrecognizable world; it is to do with seeing the
recognizable world .... through transformed eyes." (The British and Irish
Novel since 1960 143).
Laura Moss's version of Magic Realism tries to encapsulate its
mechanism:"Magic Realism is the accepted juxtaposition of the ordinary and the
extra ordinary in a narrative that otherwise appears to be 'reliable' and objective."
(ARIEL 29. 4 (1998) 121). These definitions very aptly bring in Toni Morrison's
novels under the genre of Magic Realism.
The broad generalizations about Magic Realism in The Cambridge Guide @
Literature in English makes it clear that Western democracy permits forms of
articulation which are not possible for writers struggling under the weight of
oppressive reglmes:
"...its method was first conceived, more importantly, as a response
to the nature of South American reality. In counties previously
ruled despotically as colonies and subsequently negotiating
independence with no long-established institutions or free-/ doms,
the fact that information can easily be manipulated or even
commandeered by power groups makes truth a far more provisional,
relative entity." (The Cambridge Guide 624 - 625).
However, this should be understood as just a stereotype about non-Western
restrictions that are placed on Western writers. The prohibition prior to 1961 on
Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's or the book - burning of Fascism are just
a few examples.
A similar attempt to define Magic Realism concentrating on certain social
characteristics can be seen in the Film and TV studies Discussion list on the
internet. A request by Jonathan Beasley Murray, < jbmurray@CSD 4. CSD UWM
EDU > asking for suggestions on Magic Realism and film is followed by a
response from Brian Taves <TAVES @ MAIL.LOC.GOV >, 24 January 1994,
saying that ;
". . ..the key if not the principal distinguishing element of magical realism
must be its basis in a certain social or sociological viewpoint behind the
narrative and frequent roots in folklore outside the dominant Western
Culture."
A destructive climax is common to almost all magic realist works. Brian.
Conniff s apocalyptic vision of magic realism corresponds to this common feature.
In his discussion of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Conniff asserts : "It can
depict events strange enough, and oppressive enough, to make apocalypse appear
not only credible but inevitable." (Modem Fiction Studies 36 (1990) 168).
Magic Realism can be distinguished from Modernism. William Spindler in
"Magic Realism : A Typology" offers a definition of anthropological magic
realism as he calls it. He categorizes Magic Realism as a culturally specific
project by identifying non-modern societies where myth and magic persist and
where Magic Realism might be expected to occur:
"The survival in popular culture of a magical or mythical Weltanschauung
which coexists with the rational mentality generated by modernity is not an
exclusively Spanish-American phenomenon. It can be found in areas of the
Caribbean, Asia and Africa where writers .... have resorted to Magic
Realism when dealing, in English or French, with similar concerns to those
of the Spanish American wirters." (Forum for Modem Language Studies 29
(1993) 8).
There are several objections to Spindler's analysis. It must be understood
that models of Westem rationalism may not actually describe Western modes of
thinking. Besides, modem rationalism and pre-modern thinking are
simultaneously possible in some instances. Thus formal definitions of Magic
Realism fundamentally depend on the dissimilarity of the two modes of thinking
because they tend to focus on an effect derived from the incongruity of myth and
rationalism.
An anthropological perspective is similarly taken by Frederic Jameson. He
asserts that what differentiates Magic Realism is the expression of an
anthropological attitude which confronts the modem with a non-modem
epistemology. However, anthropology itself now erases the dividing line between
Science and myth. That is, anthropology is a scientific discipline that studies
social organization; but it does this through a description of ritual and mythology.
'Therefore, it is ideal if one stops looking for an epistemic difference between
Western and non-Western modes of thought while defining Magic Realism :
"Definitions of Magic Realism . . ..mistake Western modernity for a
rationalist epistemology that is radically different &om modes of thinking
which retain a belief in magic, and in so doing conflate the non-Western
with the premodern." (ARIEL 29.2 (1998) 107).
The fabric of Magic Realism is woven with the warp of post-colonialism
and the weft of postmodernism. For instance, Catherine Cundy's major study of
Rushdie, which explores the diverse cultural influences that give his work a
hybridized'nature, discovers that Magic Realism is the ideal form to re-create
fragmented histories of postcolonial societies. To Cundy, it is not just his
characters, but Rushdie too is truly marginalized. He is pushed into the most
secret places of society as the fatwa on him has not been rescinded yet. Cundy
regrets the readedcritic's practice to look at his novel - The Satanic Verses (1988)
as a byword for trouble rather than an exhibition of the postcolonial subject.
Cundy's arguments stem off from Jean-Pierre Durix's citation of an
obvious and most natural link between post-colonial writing and Magic Realism.
Durix, while talking about the magic realism in Midnight's Children (1982) says
that magical realist texts are "....closely linked with the social and political reality
of the writer's homeland or region ...."( Commonwealth Essays and Studies 8:l
(1985) 57). Cundy takes this as the starting line of her arguments. She points out
that colonialism has lacerated the history of subjugated countries and Magic
Realism by offering an alternate history can liberate such countries totally. She
thus explains that in Midni~htht's Children, colonialism brings in a double
disruption in the historical narrative through the presence and the departure of the
British. The Satanic Verses shows how a cultural schizophrenia is induced in the
postcolonial subject as a result of the ill effects of colonialism. She vehemently
declares :
" ... [Mlagical realism can show the cultural and national identity of
postcolonial societies dividing and preserving their different versions of
exercise of a liberty within the text which can be politically
iiberating."(Salman Rushdie 97).
Homi Bhabha affirms that Magic Realism informs postcolonial writing
most strongly. He refers to it as ".....the literary language of the emergent post-
colonial world." (Nation and Narration 7). A similar view has been presented by
Lam Connell who says that Magic Realism has been distinguished "....as the
product of an oppressive social environment.. .."(ARIEL 29.2 (1998) 100). Laura
Moss reiterates this point by attributing a deliberate design behind Magic
Realism's gaining currency all over the world: "Some even see such an
appellation as a forced imposition of a Western term on a transcultural mode of
writing". (ARIEL 29.4 (1998) 127).
Magic Realism is the most suitable form for a writer who aims to counter
tendencies to be brought under the canon of English or American literature or be
regarded as 'other'. Slemon, for instance, argues that the label is ideal for texts
written on the margins as they "...signify resistance to central assimilation by
more stable generic systems." (Canadian Literature 116 (1989) 10). Slemon also
discusses how far language can be used to echo a similar calculated approach of
the post colonial writer who uses Magic Realism. This feature of Magic Realism
is also seen in the works of Toni Momson - so Linden Peach feels when Slemon's
argument, that Magic Realism brings to light two systems of language, is
observed. Slemon feels that Magic ~ e a l i s m helps to reveal the opposing systems
of language which eventually pose :
" ... a dialectic between ' codes of recognition' inherent within the inherited
language and those imagined codes - perhaps utopian or future - oriented -
that characterize a culture's 'original relations' with the world." (Canadian
Literature 116 ( 1 989) 11).
Theories of Postmodernism also simultaneously offer a promise of
validation for Magic Realism. Marguerite Alexander, while defining
Postmodernism in her study, Fights from Realism identifies a number of essential
features of Magic Realism. For instance, Postmodemist fiction is more openly
political than modernist fiction according to Alexander. Alienation, personal
despair and disintegration are some of the recumng themes that she finds in
Postmodernism. Playfulness is one of its distinguishing characteristics for her.
She also sees a number of metafictional techniques in Postmodemism like
interruptions of the narrative by the writer to remind the reader that it is not just
fiction and an insistence on the unreliability of the narrative voice. A new
preoccupation with language - both more powerful as a system of meaning than
before and more insufficient as a direct means of communicating the inner self, is
another feature of Postmodemism.
Alexander's contention is that post-structuralist theory becomes redundant
when it is, applied to postmodernist writing. Post-structuralism destabilizes
meaning in any text by exploiting possibilities within the text of which the writer
is usually not aware. The Postmodernist text which refuses to stabilize its own
meaning cannot be hrther destabilized. All the techniques of Postmodernism thus
subvert established literary practices. She finds a close affinity between Jacobean
drama and Postmodernist fiction as both are morally ambiguous. Finally when
meaning is stabilized, it is in terms of piety which immediately suggests parody.
Supportive systems of belief are undermined in Postmodernist texts. Traditional
models of human nature are attacked by fictionists and civil rights theorists saying
that these models are instruments of oppression. The autonomous self is rejected
in favour of the anti-hero who is completely at the mercy of events.
Marguerite Alexander's findings of the elements of Postmodernism are not
restricted in application to it alone; they also overlap the features of Magic
Realism. In fact she herself admits: "For this reason, I often use the term 'non-
realist' in preference to 'postmodemist' " (Flights from Realism 17). Robbie B.H.
Goh is another theorist who sees this diffusion of the two. Goh explains that in a
postmodem condition social reality itself is a textual creation and therefore it is
duly a magic realist text that can bring out reality through fiction. He quotes
Raymond Federman to support his view. Federman insists: ". . . . . ... The only
fiction that still means something is that kind of fiction that exposes the
fictionality of reality". (Surfiction 7). Goh thus establishes that the expression of
postmodemism itself is Magic Realism: "It is thus not surprising that for many
scholars, the exemplary textual manifestation of postmodemism is magic (or
magical) realism.. . ." (ARIEL 30.3 (1 999)66).
In the preface to his book, Postmodemist Fiction, Brian McHale provides a
definition that hinges on the distinction between 'modernist' and 'post-modernist':
".....Postmodemist fiction differs from modernist fiction just as a poetics
dominated by ontological issues differs from one dominated by epistemological
issues." (Postmodernist Fiction Xii). This implies that postmodernist texts pose
questions about the nature of reality whereas modernist texts are all about knowing
a reality whose existence is not ultimately in doubt. Accordingly McHale thinks
that postmodernist fiction is very similar to the fantastic because both are
governed by the ontological dominant.
An epistemological approach to fantastic writing is used by McHale to
prove that the fantastic is a genre of ontological poetics. He thinks that Tzvetan
Todorov has made the most influential contribution to the view that the fantastic is
an independent genre. Todorov believes that there are three conditions which
make up the 'pure' fantastic. The reader must hesitate between natural and
supematural explanations of what happens in the work till its conclusion. This
hesitation may be shared by a leading character in the work. The reader must
refuse to conduct a poetic and an allegorical reading of the work as both of these
destroy the hesitation which is essential for the fantastic. If there is no hesitation,
then we are in the realm of the uncanny where apparently supernatural events are
explained in terms of the laws of nature or of the marvelous where the
supernatural becomes the norm. Thus, to Todorov, a text belongs to the fantastic
proper only if it poses a hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations
till the very end of the story. Hesitation is the basic principle of the fantastic
according to Todorov.
McHale explains how he can justify his claim of affinity between
postmodemist fiction and the fantastic genre. Todorov takes as an example
Kaka's story, "Metamorphosis", a text characterized by a tone of banality. None
of the characters in it experiences any hesitation. Todorov concludes that Kafka's
text signifies the disappearance of the fantastic in twentieth century literature. He
says that this disappearance is prompted by the disappearance of representation in
contemporary literature. Without the representation of the real, the production of
the fantastic is impossible, says Todorov. On the other hand, McHale points out
that neither the absence of a hesitant character within the fictional world nor the
unfantastic banality of that world acts as a demerit in the case of Kaflca's story as
both are not necessary elements of Todorov's fantastic. McHale coaxes the reader
himself to do the hesitating as indeed seems to be the practice in
"Metamorphosis". His view is that postmodemist fiction does a little of
representation. The complete disappearance of representation in twentieth century
literature is just an exaggeration:
"Todorov has failed to see that in the context of postmodernism the
fantastic has been co-opted as one of a number of strategies of an
ontological poetics that pluralizes the 'real' and thus problematizes
representation." (Postmodemist Fiction 75)
McHale thus establishes the existence of postmodemist fantastic which uses
representation to overthrow representation.
Brian McHale makes further progress with his ontological structure of the
fantastic. He quotes another theorist called Rosemary Jackson who describes the
fantastic as an interrogation of the real. In other words, the fantastic involves face-
to-face confrontation between the possible (the real) and the impossible, the
normal and the paranormal. Another world encroaches upon our work or some
representative of our world penetrates the other world. The fantastic is still seen
as a zone of hesitation, not between the uncanny and the marvelous, but between
this world and the world next door.
Whereas McHale's exploration of the fantastic becomes part of his concern
with post modernist fiction, Kathryn Hume provides an exclusive discussion of the
problems of defining the fantastic in her Fantasy and Mimesis. She categorizes
these as one-, two-, three-, four- and five-element definitions. These elements
include the choice of subject matter; the changing of 'ground-rules' as discovered
by Alice in Wonderland; the persuasive establishment and development of an
impossibility; satisfying readers' desire for recovery, escape, consolation and
tracing the unseen of culture in a subversive manner.
There are some commentators who make an implied distinction between
fantasy and the fantastic. For example, Anne Cranny - Francis uses Fantasy as an
umbrella-term containing three different sub-types: other-world fantasy, fairy tale
and horror. She feels that feminist fantasists use three kinds of fantasy to write
about the experience of women in contemporary western society:
"Feminist fantasy explores the problems of being for women in a society
which denies them not only visibility but also subjectivity. It scrutinizes
the categories of the patriarchal real, revealing them to be arbitrary, shifting
constructs.. . ."(Feminist Fiction 77) .
Ann Swinfen, who conducts a study of Fantasy in English and Amercian
Literature since 1945, makes a differentiation between primary world fantasy and
secondaly world fantajy. To her, fantasy does not deal with marvelous beings; it
is all about Man instead. So the purpose of fantasy, according to Swinfen, is:
"...the exploration of enhanced imaginative experience of the primary
world itself, the deeper religious and philosophical foundations of some of
the novels and the social concern which employs utopias and dystopias as
the most effective means of presenting the writers' views." (In Defence of
Fantasy 10).
T.E. Apter acknowledges the fascination and brilliance of the great
psychoanalytic writers in her work - Fantasy Literature. She feels that the aim of
fantasy is the same as that of psychoanalysis -both attempts to investigate human
reality. Psychoanalytic theory is used to aid her interpretation of the genre of
fantasy.
A detailed analysis of Magic Realism reveals itself to be subsumed by both
Postmodernism and Postcolonialism. This convergence of postcolonialism and
postmodernism in Magic Realism has been discovered by Robbie. B.H. Goh who
feels that generic blumng itself is postmodernist and hence Magic realism:" ... is
often extended to refer to literatures with similar narrative strategies, but which
have very different socio-political contexts and motivations." (ARIEL 30.3(1999)
67). Thus in the place of the well-wrought urn, we have instead in Magic Realism
a kaleidoscope in which there are only multiple possibilities.
An overview of the achievement of some of the practitioners of Magic
Realism who are Toni Momson's contemporaries reveals their widely differing
modes of operation). For instance, Iris Murdoch, the English novelist, born in
1019, finds that her fiction is tom between an objection to form and the realization
that art cannot do without it. This tension is hrther enhanced by her fascination
for both controlling myths and symbolism. Under these strains, many of her
novels are flattened into allegorical maps. In The Bell (1958), set in an Anglican
lay community, the relations of the members of the community with one another
are submerged by the symbolic weight of the bell. The Bell represents the solid
mystery of the real, with the effect that the actual solid mystery of the real drains
away. In her other novels like The Sandcastle (1957) and A Severed Head (1961),
a mythic structure seems to hold greater aesthetic importance than the heavily
manipulated characters. Her best novels are A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970),
The Sea, the Sea (1978) and The Philosophers' Pupil (1983). In these three works,
Murdoch makes productive use of her own mistrust of art's powers to dramatise a
confrontation between the artist and the saint and between egotism and
selflessness. Charles Arroby, in The Sea, the Sea is a theatrical impresario who
has retired to a seaside village. In Murdoch's bestiary of enchanters and Prospero-
figures, he is a relatively benign manipulator. Charles' delusions of power are
contrasted with the selfless Buddhism of James, his cousin. But James has
genuine magical powers of manipulation and is certainly an ambiguous saint. One
of the reasons why Murdoch has become popular among - serious contemporary
novelists is her magic realist combination of macabre plots, elements of the
grotesque and supernatural and glimpses of social comedy. Like Murdoch,Toni
Morrison too makes use of these elements to weave tales of magic realism.
ltalo Calvino, the Cuban novelist born in 1923 is another contemporary of
Morrison who lets fantasy blossom in his fiction. The three fantastic novels that
he brought together as Our Ancestors (1960) includes The Cloven Viscount
(1952) whose protagonist is split into his good and bad halves by a canon-ball;
The Non-existant Knight (1959) whose hero is an inexorable will contained inside
a suit of amour and The Baron in the Trees (1957) in which a young eighteenth
century nobleman climbs into the trees in a fit of pique and stays there for the rest
of his life.
Much of the work that followed, culminating in the multiple
openings of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979) played combinatorial games
with different ideas and forms of fiction. Although the tricks Calvino played in
some of his books - particularly the Tarot-based The Castle of Crossed Destinies
(1973) - were too clever for some admirers of the earlier fables, an enormous
number of readers found in the later Calvino a distinctively pleasurable
exploitation of theatrical ideas. If on a Winter's Night for instance, plays games
with figures such as the Author (One Italo Calvino), the Critic, the Forger, the
female Reader (Ludmilla) and the Reader ('you'). He brings everything to a
satisfying fairy-tale conclusion when 'You' finally finds happiness by marrying
Ludmilla. This successful combination of lightness and seriousness itself is a
magic realist device, which continues to win admirers for him.
Going over to the Latin American writers of the 1960's, one sees a marked
increase in the production and availability of innovative and experimental novels.
For example, the freedom of the story- teller was asserted in Latin American
fiction of the sixties. The story-teller was a traditional figure forgotten in modem
European and North American fiction. The story-teller relays the community's
sense of itself, which may require extremes of fantasy for its expression, or
extreme mixtures of fantasy and a grimly fantastic reality. It is with Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's, One Hundred Years of Solitude that the full benefits of a retrieval of
both probable and improbable stories were recognized.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the unlikely tale of five generations of
a single South American family. They inhabit an unnamed country whose history
and geography much resemble those of Garcia Marquez's native Colombia. They
are visited by civil wars and by progress in many of its least manageable forms
(bureaucracy, railways, cinema, north American investment) and they die out in an
apocalyptic storm which destroys both their town and their story- except for what
a young writer in Paris remembers or invents of it. The great power of this very
famous book lies in its mingling of the fabulous (magic carpets, a levitating priest,
a man who suddenly spouts Latin without having learned a word of it) and the
horrific (the massacre of more than three thousand protesters, who become
historical ghosts because almost no one will admit they existed) and in its haunting
sense of a potentially intelligible but always misunderstood history. Toni
Momson's method is akin to that of Marquez's in that she too lets the marvellous
be a part of the horrifying tales of slavery.
Her first, Shadow Dance (1966), a detective novel, set in Bristol slums is
a grisly story of cruelty and vengeance. The Magic Toyshop (1967), which won
the Rhys Memorial Prize in 1968, is a novel about the painful passage from
innocence to experience of two teenaged siblings imprisoned above a London
Toyshop. Several Perceptions (1968) another novel about the violence of modem
life, won the Somerset Maugham Award for that year.
As a critique of the realist tradition and what it represents, Carter's next
novels depart contemporary settings for more magical terrain. She talked about
leaving the realist tradition for a more mythological direction. Heroes and Villains
( 1 969) is a novel of what has been called ' Gothic Science fiction' because it is a
fantasy set in a future resembling the Gothic period. Probably her most important
novel of this genre is The Infernal Desire Machine of Dr Hoffman. This is all
about the search for a machine that will replace reality with fantasy.
Aside from eight novels, Carter has also written hvo collections of short
stories, a screen play, children's stories, volume of poetry, a translation of French
fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and an analysis of sexual morality through an
exploration of de Sade's pornography called The Sadeian Woman (1979). Carter
has often been called a Magic Realist, a writer of science fiction, a mythological
writer, or even, a Gothic writer. Because one usually finds one or more of these
elements in many of her novels and stories, it is hard to say precisely to which
genre her works belong.
Alice Walker is another writer who has a lot in common with Toni
Momson. Like Monison's fiction, Alice Walker's life and writings reflects the
tensions and ideals of a womanist writer coming of age in the 1960s. It was a
period of renewed black consciousness that issued in the activism of the civil
rights and black power movements, followed by the women's movement. Much
of her work brings in the twin maladies of black women's lives - racism and
sexism. Yet her works have a larger purpose : they chronicle the fortunes of black
Americans in the twentieth century. The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)
and The Color Purple span the period from 1920 to 1942. Meridian extends this
chronology from 1960 to about 1975. Though she began in The Third Life by
defining the black experience in relation to white society, explaining the cruelties
of black men as a consequence of the psychological and economic exploitation of
the dominant culture, Walker has increasingly sought to embody the forms of
black life on their own terms. It is in this sense that The Color Purple represents
her most signal achievement .
Walker's technique is experimental and innovative, reflective of female
perceptions and genres. Critics have thus frequently commented on the epistollary
form of The Color Purple. Less examination has been given to the kaleidoscopic
or mosaic structure of Meridian or the way in which Walker weaves the ritual of
the marriage ceremony with the thoughts of his female character in "Roselily" as a
counterpoint to the distance between promise and fulfillment that is the theme of
the story.
Salman Rushdie is another contemporary of Toni Momson, whose novels
are all examples of Magic Realism. Born in Bombay in1947and educated at
Cambridge University, he now lives in London. Grimus (1975) a richly
entertaining story about a truism, is grandly conceived as an extravagant fable
about man's need for myths in a demythologized age. Rushdie's volcanic
imagination and narrative gifts came together superbly in Midnight's Children
(1981) where he succeeds in matching a grand subject, the multitudiousness of
India itself, with a narrator's microcosmic personal history and in fashioning out
of the absurd incongruity a novel about the creative process in a world under
constant threat. In Shame (1983) he is again concerned with creative process,
more than with the wretched of Pakistan, rewriting the history of a country
founded in the year of his birth and scarifying its elitist class so that a major
character is allegorized into Shame itself.
His next novel, The Satanic Verses (1988) raised questions of censorship
and freedom of expression. From its abrupt opening, when Gibreel Farishta and
Saladin Chamcha suffer their 'angelicdevilish fall' to earth and their hijacked
aircraft explodes, The Satanic Verses announces its purpose of addressing religion
- particularly Islam - not directly but with intense, proliferating and often comic
energy. Rushdie's mingling of history, realism and fiction is undoubtedly magic
realist; but his novel has less of an affinity with Morrison's mode.
Toni Momson is an African American writer who maps the terrain of
American cultural and social history using the technique of Magic Realism.
Though she needs no introduction, a brief account of her life and literary
achievement is ideal to understand her prominent rank in the literary history of
America. In the wake of her increasing presence in the international context - as
revealed by the multiplicity of languages into which her novels have been
translated and especially in the wake of her winning the Noble Prize for literature
In 1993, Morrison has become a figure that challenges pre existing notions of an
American writer, a black writer, a woman writer, and a black intellectual. On
October seventh, 1988, she entered the world ofliterary criticism with the Tanner
Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan. Her presentation was
entitled "Unspeakable Things Unspoken : The Afro-American Presence in
American literature". With this lecture she made clear her remarkable ability to
recognize, seize and intervene in the important happenings of her time . In
deciding to talk and write about literary criticism, Morrison joins Amiri Baraka,
Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Sterling Brown - a community of scholars who
have revised and remade critical history.
In 1975 @ had received the National Book Award nomination. In 1978,
National Book Critics' Circle Award was received for Song of Solomon. This was
the first Ahcan American novel since Richard Wright's Native Son which was
chosen as a main selection of the Book - of - the - Month Club. The 1988
Pulitzer Prize for fiction was won by Beloved. Her Tanner Lecture has now an
enlarged and enriched published fonn in Playing in the Dark which came out in
1992. She also helped to bring into being The Black Book in 1974 which was a
collection of material from black history - representations of blacks' lives as well
as black cultural expressions. It contains newspaper clippings, photographs, songs,
advertisements, slave bills of sale, Patent Ofice records, receipts, rent-party
jingles and other memorabilia-in short, African American history as revealed in
elements of material culture. While her name appears nowchere on it, the
collection was her own idea, her project. The Black Book was thus Morrison's
intervention into historical discourse. She has also produced two collections of
essays on topical issues: Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power (1992) and Birth of
a Nation' hood (1997). These essay collections addressing the Clarence Thomas
and Anita Hill controversy and the response to O.J. Simpson trial respectively, are
the result of her ability to make space for progressive politically-engaged
academic contributions to the concerned of the nation.
Momson's early life is full of signposts to her later creativity. She grew up
In a family of story tellers and musicians. Both her parents told ghost stories. Her
grandmother played the numbers by decoding dream symbols. She was born on
February 18, 193 1, in Lorain, Ohio as Chloe Antony Wofford, the second of four
children of George Wofford, a car washer, steel mill welder, and road construction
and shipyard worker. Her mother was Ramah Willis Wofford who worked at home
and sang in church. Her mother's parents had come north from Alabama via
Kentucky where her grandfather had worked in coal mines, to get away from
poverty and racism. Her father, who came from Georgia, born the imprint of
racial violence of that state. Although neither parent was especially optimistic
about the ability of whites to transcend their racism, they believed in
neighbourhood and community. Lorain was a steel town, multiracial and
consistently poor; but Morrison learned quite early in life what it meant to live in
an economically co operative neighbourhood.
From Lorain
Howard University
High School, Morrison went on to earn her B.A. degree from
f 7 0 ~
in 1953 and her M.A.,Cornell University in 1955. Momson
taught at Texas Southern University for two years and then until 1964 at Howard
University where the Black Power activists Stokely Carmichael was one of her
students. While teaching at Howard, she met and married Harold Morrison, a
Jamaican architect and gave birth to two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. She
left Howard in 1964 , divorced her husband and moved to New York where she
began her career as an editor at Random House. She continued to teach - at Yale,
at Bard College, at the State University of New York campuses at Purchase and at
Albany and at Rutgers University. In 1989 she became a member of Princeton
University's faculty. She also held the International Condorcet Chair at the E'cole
Normale Supe'rieure and College de France (1994) and spent one year (1998) as
the A.D.White Professor- at - Large at Cornell University. As might be expected,
Momson's literary and teaching careers are studded with awards - national and
international - and honorary degrees.
Equally important as the details of Morrison's biography and her writing
and academic careers are the contexts for the production of her books, the larger
history of African American men and women. The Bluest Eye [I9701 was written
during a period of an emerging black aesthetic, the cultural arm of the black
113~ .. .
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militancy movement. The book's opening lines imply the keeping of a secret. It
is a dirty little secret, not just of personal aesthetics but of race and of class.
Sula (1973) was produced in the midst of the reinvigorated feminist
movement and debate. Momson maintains that throughout their history in
America, black women have been protofeminists - aggressive, the objects of a
labour history as oppressive as men's and required to do physical labour in
competition with them. So their relationship turned out to be more of a
comradeship than the conventional patriarchal pattern. Within her family, her
parents confronted crises as they arose without adhering to a system of gender -
divided responsibilities. She views the comradely partnership within the
marriages of older generations of blacks as having died out as now blacks
participate more and more in the gender illness of the general culture.
Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981) and Beloved (1987) are
extended engagements with larger issues of group history. Song of Solomon sets
that group history with in the parameters of the family romance. Tar Baby
focuses on the relationship of colonialism and its attendant history to the family
dynamics and antithetical cultures within a multiracial household. Beloved
negotiates history as a narrative of the ownership of the most concrete fact of
human existence - the body - as well as the most abstract of human relationships
- love. Jazz (1992) is all about the contradictory dynamics of the making of a city
as well as the fractures and fissures of neighbourhoods. The same narrative is
repeated with infinite variation as the title suggests. Paradise (1998) continues the
parallel, intersectional, and contradictory attention to history that Jazz offers. At
the same time, it is also a further adventure into the constituting of community by
the means of the mechanism of story telling. As all these novels combine the
symbolic virtues of modernism, the politics of the Black Aesthetic and a rich
lyricism, they have certainly followed the African American literary tradition -
they have been richly varied, in both ideology and form. This has prompted an
interest in tracing the cultural origin of Momson's fiction. This dissertation
therefore has its focus on delineating different features of Momson's magic
realism which are all born out of her distinctive cultural experience. Thus, this
study tries to establish that it is her African-American heritage that helps her to
achieve success with her model of Magic Realism.
The thesis in five chapters makes an attempt to analyse the elements of
Magic Realism in the novels of Toni Morrison. It is surprising to note that
writers who are labeled Magic Realists by critics and readers are reluctant to
accept that label. Alejo Carpentier, who devised this style of fiction in the 1960's,
had a deep rooted resentment towards the phrase. Salman Rushdie seems to be its
only practitioner who defends the form. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gaele Mgowe,
Githa Hariharan and Nuruddin Farah - all contemporary practitioners of Magic
Realism resist the attribution of the label to their works. Toni Monison is also
vocally against the term. Morrison's principal complaint is that Magic Realism
negates the cultural origins of her fiction. This is precisely the reason why this
study attempts to explore Momsonian magic realism.
The introductory chapter presents a brief history of magic Realism. This
is followed by an overview of the literary achievement of a few practitioners of
Magic Realism who are Toni Momson's contemporaries. This shows the
diversity in the use of Magic Realism.
The nature of magic in Morrison's model of Magic Realism forms the
subject of both the sccond and third chapters. How magic becomes a utopian
construct is analysed in the second chapter. Momson's conception of utopia is
refreshingly different. The Afro-American community and its importance in black
culture is glorified and presented as the utopian ideal by her. A carefit1 analysis of
various neighbourhoodslcommunities in Morrison's fiction reveals that they are
synonymous with integrity and courage in the face of racial and sexual oppression.
The extremely close-knit ties within the Afro-American community is another
utopian feature, and its practice of sharing is romanticised by Monison. This
chapter also includes the rendering of folk beliefs, superstitious and folk medicine
which becomes part of her attempt at unravelling the utopian features of her
community.
Morrison's magic also brings in alarmingly unpleasant portrayal of typical
Afro-American ways of living. This certainly requires the presentation of
dystopian elements in her fiction which is done in the third chapter. Thus non-
conservative only-women households are proved to exhibit the complex way in
which marginalized black women construct and experience a community of their
own. These households epitomise non-accumulation and the economic
independence of cottage industry; but there is an utter lack of warmth, care and
concern that one associates with a normal family here. Secondly, the city is often
presented by Morrison as a space of terror and segregation thus attributing
dystopian characteristics to urbanness. Another manifestation of the dystopia
projected by Morrison is madness and other personality disorders encountered by
her characters who have been subjected to race, class and sexist oppression. A
dystopia always makes use of inverted or undesirable use of utopian elements.
Hence, the grotesque which features largely in her fiction is the fourth element of
Morrisonian dystopia. The extreme forms of physical and mental deformity that
she lists for us make us see the reality of the trials and tribulations of Afro-
Americans with more clarity. Momson firmly believes that only a dystopia can
deal with what has been repressed.
The fourth chapter is all about the element of fantasy in Morrison's fiction.
As fantasy challenges the reader with novel perspectives, Morrison's fiction too
permeates its fantastical elements through different areas like the uncanny,
elements of folktale, dreams and songs. As a result of the newness of these
strands of fantasy, the reader's standard concepts of permitted thought in story
telling are cast aside.
According to Freud, the uncanny belongs to the class of the temfying
which leads back to something long known by us. On the other hand, T.E. Apter's
view is that it is arbitrary to relate the uncanny to the arousal of repressed material.
She explains that the uncanny touches upon material that is frequently ignored
because it is too elusive to fit into normal thought. Monison's fiction abounds in
the use of the uncanny cited by Apter. It is exaggeration actually; but only that
can assist the writer who uses fantasy to bring out the stark reality of slavery.
Descriptions of folklore are there in plenty in Morrison's fiction. This acts
as a unifying force in Momson's fantasy. Dreams are used by her for a special
reason: the perception of the secondary world in her Fantasy has an indistinct and
dreamlike quality. Songs are again used by her because music is central to black
culture. References to women's blues and Jazz are all dealt with in detail in this
chapter. The subversive nature of fantasy is also looked into. Momson firmly
believes that only a fantasy can deal with what has been repressed; the
inexpressible can be expressed with the aid of fantasy.
The fifth chapter analyses Momson's narrative techniques at length.
Fragmentary and elliptical narration that defies the normal patterns of storytelling
is her method. The same story is picked up by different characters and presented
with more and more details. These different accounts are sometimes more
confusing to the reader than the idea gleaned by him from the first point of view.
At other times this dialogical method of narration resolves the complex doubts in
the reader. All the different methods of narration are explored in this chapter.
The final section of fifth chapter dwells on Morrison's use of language.
This brings out her quest for the Afro-American woman's voice -an attempt to
create a recycling of typical black and feminist writing. For instance, she has a
habit of yoking together two extremes, so that the image portrayed startles the
reader. Her images and similes are all from the world of women. All kinds of
semantic derogation associated with Black English are abandoned by her when she
uses these characteristic expressions.
If Realism gives us a linear description of history, Magic Realism grants us
a more interesting rendering of history through legends and myths. If the realist
tradition is all about familiarization, then the magical mode is more of
defamiliarization which borders on a universal element. Realism indulges in a
chronological manner of narration. On the other hand Magic Realism revels in
meta-narration. As a contrast to the closure-ridden works of Realism, here one has
open-ended and baffling works. In the place of naturalism of Realism, Magic
Realism exults in romanticism and glorification. All these arresting elements of
the genre are worked out in Morrison's model, as the subsequent chapters shall
reveal.