Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie's Fiction

Ursula Kluwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136480959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Asiatische Literaturkritik

Kluwick breaks new ground in this book, moving away from Rushdie studies that focus on his status as postcolonial or postmodern, and instead considering the significance of magic realism in his fiction. Rushdie's magic realism, in fact, lies at the heart of his engagement with the post/colonial.

In a departure from conventional descriptions of magic realism—based primarily on the Latin-American tradition—Kluwick here proposes an alternative definition, allowing for a more accurate description of the form. She argues that it is disharmony, rather than harmony, that is decisive: that the incompatibility of the realist and the supernatural needs to be recognized as a driving force in Rushdie's fiction.

In its rigorous analysis of this Rushdian magic realism, this book considers the entire corpus— Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Shalimar the Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence. This study is the first of its kind to do so.

1 Defining Magic Realism

DOI: 10.4324/9780203134139-2

Historical and Theoretical Foundations

At the root of magic realism lies the wonder of reality. Magic as we think of it today played no role in the inception of the term, and although “magic realism” is nowadays regarded as an oxymoron, this was not always so. The term was coined by the German Romantic poet Novalis “at the end of the eighteenth century” (Guenther 34), but its later proliferation and success are associated with the German art critic Franz Roh, mostly held to be the first to have used the expression “magic realism.” Roh introduced the term in 1923 to describe a new style of painting which highlighted the mundane magic of being.¹ In his 1925 essay “Nachexpressionismus. Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei” Roh explained his choice of the epithet magic for what was, for him, essentially a new form of realism, with recourse to the natural wonder of reality: “With the word ‘magic,’ as opposed to ‘mystic,’ I wish to indicate that the magic does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” (16). Explicitly contrasting magic realism with the “fantastic” quality of expressionism, Roh praised magic realism for its ability to render visible the magic of being (17). A similar perception of reality informs Massimo Bontempelli's use of the mode.² Bontempelli, who seems to have coined the term “magic realism” simultaneously with Roh, was the first to apply it to literary texts as part of his new aesthetic programme for European literature. Like Roh, Bontempelli saw magic realism anchored in the realm of the prosaic and the everyday, and claimed that magic realism made visible the magic behind everyday objects.

As these definitions suggest, the “fathers” of magic realism were motivated by the desire to promote techniques for stressing the intrinsically wonderful aspect of reality. It is only logical, then, that the supernatural—so vital in contemporary theories of the mode—played no part in early definitions of magic realism: preoccupied with highlighting the magic of the natural, the founders of the mode had no time for, and in fact actively ignored, the supernatural, whose function they regarded as incompatible with magic realism. Hence one of the issues which have become central to modern definitions of magic realism and to attempts to distinguish it from other modes of writing, that is, the question of whether the realist and the non-realist are combined harmoniously or disharmoniously, is completely absent here. Where magic is understood to be an attitude towards reality, this distinction plainly does not apply.

The first step towards contemporary conceptions of magic realism was taken by the Flemish film critic and writer Johan Daisne, who adopted the term from Bontempelli and was the first to alter the parameters for the definition of magic realism (Scheffel 22). In tune with Roh and Bontempelli, Daisne saw in magic realism a possibility of rendering visible the magic of mundane reality; however, his definition of the term differs from theirs with respect to his concept of reality, as discernible in his insistence on the ability of magic realism to portray a “complete” reality, inclusive of the world of dreams (Scheffel 23–24). For Daisne, magic realist writing was characterised by the intermingling of everyday reality with dreams, and he put less emphasis on the exactness of description which had been essential in Roh and Bontempelli's definitions of magic realism as a vehicle for unveiling the magic within reality.³ The gradual development away from the original meaning of the term and towards contemporary theories of the mode continued in the work of Daisne's student Hubert Lampo, who distinguished “magisch-realisme” from “psychologisch-realisme” as an interpretation of the world incorporating the irrational and empirically inexplicable (Scheffel 25–27). As such, Lampo's view of magic realist literature is indicative of an enormous conceptual shift in the understanding of the magic aspect of the mode: with Daisne and Lampo, the magic element of magic realism lies no longer in everyday reality itself, but in its combination with the dreamlike and irrational.

Although this particular combination is the trademark of contemporary magic realist writing, it would be erroneous to trace modern magic realism directly to Daisne and Lampo. In between the conceptual shift magic realism underwent in the Netherlands and magic realist writing as an international phenomenon today lies the long story of magic realism in Latin America, a story that has been shaped by diametrically opposed interpretations and applications of the term “magic realism,” as well as by the wholly unforeseen international success of the mode. It is in Latin America that magic realism was finally “put on the map” of literary history; and it is to Latin America and its critics that we owe not only a vast plethora of magic realist writing, but also an entire range of definitions that have proved highly influential in the formulation of contemporary conceptions of the mode. If “magic realism” entered Latin America as a term mainly used to describe art, it returned as a popular label for literature. It is, moreover, also in its Latin American transformation that distinctions among various combinations of the natural and the supernatural began to become relevant.

The Latin American reception of the term started with the translation of Roh's essay into Spanish, which was published in Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente as early as 1927. Although the expression “magic realism” seems to have had an immediate impact among the intellectuals of Buenos Aires (Scheffel 41), it was not until 1948 that the term was first used in relation to Latin American literature by the Venezuelan author Arturo Uslar-Pietri in his book Letras y hombres de Venezuela.⁴ Ironically, however, when the concept which is nowadays mainly associated with Latin American magic realism finally made its appearance in the preface to Alejo Carpentier's novel El reino de este mundo a year later, it was under a different name—that of “lo real maravilloso (americano).”

Carpentier's coinage of the term “the marvellous real” was motivated by his desire to distinguish Latin American literature from European literary movements such as surrealism and to stress its independent character, as well as the “unique aspects of Latin America” (Bowers, Magic(al) 15) per se. Arguing that the marvellous real formed “the heritage of all of America” (Carpentier, “America” 87), he sought to define it as an indigenously (Latin) American phenomenon specific to Latin American reality because it “presuppose[d] faith” (86) in the marvellous, which he claimed the Europeans did not possess:

Therefore, it seems that the marvelous invoked in disbelief—the case of the Surrealists for so many years—was never anything more than a literary ruse, just as boring in the end as the literature that is oneiric ‘by arrangement’ or those praises of folly that are now back in style. . . . All they do is substitute the tricks of the magician for the worn-out phrases of academics or the eschatological glee of certain existentialists. (86)

The dichotomies with which Carpentier plays in this passage have become decisive for contemporary magic realist criticism—on the one hand, the notion that Europe and its literature are old and tired and that rejuvenation needs to come from without, and on the other hand, the idea that belief systems differ fundamentally between Europe and its (former) colonies. These two assumptions inform modern definitions of magic realism: the first is implicit in attempts to defend it against the charge of escapism by positing it as a case of reversed influence between centre and margin, or between Europe and its former colonies. The second notion lies behind Carpentier's insistence on the naturalness and pervasiveness of the marvellous real in Latin America: “the marvelous real that I defend and that is our own marvelous real is encountered in its raw state, latent and omnipresent, in all that is Latin American. Here the strange is commonplace, and always was commonplace” (Carpentier, “Baroque” 104). As we can see, Carpentier here essentially works with the harmony-disharmony distinction, linking it to the question of faith and clearly privileging the former. Warnes shows how in formulating his concept of the marvellous real, Carpentier seeks to break up the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational:

Carpentier uses the romantic accounts of European explorers against the rationality of modern Europe . . . in order to ‘identify’ a Latin America that exists outside of the possibility of rational understanding, one that he elsewhere asserts can only be understood through faith. For Carpentier, the fact that early explorers could only understand the New World through the language of romance was a cause of celebration because it supports his own attempts at establishing a founding myth for Latin America. Romance thus comes to support the early Carpentier's project in terms of both its objects of fascination—the exotic, the mysterious, the strange—and in terms of its modes of perception in which the antinomies of reason and unreason that characterise rational thought are undone. (37)

The assumption that “the strange is commonplace” in the former colonies has become characteristic of definitions of magic realism which see the coexistence of the supernatural and the natural as related to the different ontologies typical of Western and Eastern countries. Since magic, such readings suggest, is an integral part of reality in the colonies, it should not be surprising that in their literatures magic and realism can coexist without ontological contradiction. The harmonious integration of the natural and the supernatural was originally responsible for much of the appeal of magic realist literature, and this partly explains its particular tenacity also as far as the critical perception of magic realism is concerned.

The above already indicates the tremendous impact of Carpentier's formulations of the marvellous real, and it is one of the ironies in the history of magic realism that a critic as hostile to magic realism as Carpentier was to shape the definition and development of the mode which came to be known so decisively under precisely this name. The reason for this lies in a conflation of terms: although Carpentier explicitly juxtaposed his concept of the marvellous real with magic realism, which he considered to convey “an unrealistic image, impossible but fixed there nonetheless” (Carpentier, “Baroque” 103), later critics, despite continuing to use the term magic realism, adopted significant elements of Carpentier's definition of the marvellous real in their descriptions of the mode.

Other Latin American critics also sought to define what they called magic realism as the new trend in Latin American fiction, and some of their propositions have indeed left their traces in contemporary theories of the mode. Angel Flores's essay “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction” (1954),⁵ for instance, presents magic realism as an “amalgamation of realism and fantasy” (Flores 112), and this is a view on which the majority of contemporary magic realist criticism is based. Indeed, the fact that magic realism combines realist with fantastic elements appears to be one of the only aspects of the mode upon which all critics agree. Interestingly, we face a paradox here, since the common notion discussed above, namely that magic realism is informed by non-Western concepts of reality with a tolerance of magic much higher than Western understandings of reality, should be expected to preclude readings of magic realism as an “amalgamation of realism and fantasy.”⁶ After all, once magic is regarded as a normal aspect of reality, the epistemological difference between the two vanishes, and the opposition between magic and realism ceases to make sense. Nevertheless, the two views happily coexist within magic realist criticism, and can often be detected within one and the same theory.

In contrast to Carpentier, who vigorously emphasised the inherently Latin American nature of the marvellous real, Flores highlighted the European origins of magic realism, which he traced back to the writings of Cervantes and Kafka (Flores 110–11). Both of these views are acknowledged by contemporary definitions. Yet although the European roots of the term are indisputable, and although critics also recognise the existence of European precursors of magic realism, the fact that the magic realist boom started in Latin America has helped invest its Latin American variant with a fair degree of prominence whereby magic realism is frequently regarded as a predominantly Latin American genre. Hence the privileged position of the Latin American version on the magic realist literary map, which has caused critics to model their definitions of the mode on Latin American literature as its main representative. The consequences are easy to discern: whereas Latin American magic realism might be adequately defined, other regional or individual variants of the mode tend to receive little separate attention, causing their idiosyncrasies to remain obscure.

Another Latin American critic who shaped the direction of magic realist studies is Luis Leal, who followed Carpentier in viewing the marvellous real as a genuinely Latin American phenomenon, and who seems to have been the first to link the marvellous real with magic realism:

In the stories of Borges himself, as in those by other writers of fantastic literature, the principal trait is the creation of infinite hierarchies. Neither of those two tendencies permeates works of magical realism, where the principal thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances. The existence of the marvelous real is what started magical realist literature, which some critics claim is the truly American literature. (Leal 121–22)

This passage already indicates another of Leal's legacies: wishing to prove magic realism authentically Latin American, he was concerned with establishing a clear distinction between magic realism and recent European trends of writing, such as surrealism, the fantastic, science fiction, psychological, and modernist literature. Once again, we find that the notion of harmony is implicitly used in order to distinguish magic realism from other forms of literature:

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 analysis 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.⁷ (Leal 121)

The differences between magic realism and related genres such as the fantastic, fantasy literature, and science fiction have become a major concern in contemporary magic realist criticism, and efforts to define magic realism in opposition to these genres continue today. Of special importance here is the relation between magic realism and the fantastic, an issue which already attracted Leal's special attention, presumably since it allowed him to stress the natural quality of the “magic” in magic realism, and thus to implicitly link it with the marvellous real once again, despite citing Roh in the process:

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.’ (Leal 123)

Leal's attempt to discriminate between the fantastic and magic realism has proven highly influential. The definition of magic realism which has most decisively shaped magic realist criticism in the past decades is based on a comparative analysis with the fantastic and derives its description of magic realism from their distinction: Amaryll Chanady's Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy, which shall presently serve as the starting point of our discussion of contemporary magic realist criticism. And as we shall see, the notion of harmony (as opposed to disharmony) takes centre stage here as well.

MAGIC REALISM AS A MODE OF HARMONY

The emphasis on the relation between magic realism and the fantastic is connected with the contemporary critical interest in the interaction between natural and supernatural elements in magic realist texts which I have already referred to. Indeed, this interaction seems to be the decisive factor for many definitions of the mode—my own attempt to define Rushdie's magic realism is no exception here. Melissa Stewart sums up the three main current explanations of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural:

In order to define magical realism, it seems necessary to identify the nature of the relationship between the magical and the rational, and indeed, several descriptions of this relationship have been offered. Some of these descriptions evoke an “antagonistic struggle”: the magical “collides” with the rational, as David Young and Keith Hollaman state, or “another world [intrudes] into this one,” according to Brian McHale (borrowing a phrase from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49). Other descriptions suggest a more harmonious combination: the “two realms” of the magical and the rational “merge” or “intersect.” A third group proposes that the magical is part of the rational or, as Robert Gibb states, “in magical realism, the real isn't abandoned; it is extended.” Similarly, George McMurray believes that magical realism presents “an expanded sense of reality,” and Wendy B. Faris speaks of magic that “grows almost imperceptibly out of the real.” The validity of all these descriptions indicates, I believe, that the potency of magical realism lies...