Magical Realism and the Great Goddess in Two Novels by Alejo Carpentier and Alice Walker

THE COMPARATIST MAGICAL REAUSM AND THE GREAT GODDESS IN TWO NOVELS BY ALEJO CARPENTER AND AUCE WALKER Oralia Preble-Niemi The presence of magical realism in Alejo Carpentier's novels, including The Kingdom of This World (El reino de este mundo), has already been well established,1 and, although it is a quality heretofore considered exclusive to Latin American fiction, I propose that magical realism is present in Walker's The Temple of My Familiar. In this study, I will highlight its presence in Walker's novel and compare her use ofit with Carpentier's. The two authors use magical realism as the means to achieving radically different ends. While Carpentier employs it to maintain the patriarchal institutions of his novelistic society, Walker uses it to reconcile two ofher characters with the matriarchal ethos of their subculture from which they have been alienated. Ideally, a thumbnail definition ofthe term magical realism would appear at this juncture. However, such a concise presentation is difficult because, as Alexis Marquez Rodríguez has stated, "the concept of magical realism has not been clearly defined, nor backed up by a sufficiently authorized, doctrinaire declaration" (Rodriguez 36; my trans.) such as a literary school's manifesto might provide. The diffuseness of its definition is due in part to relationships which both writers and critics have drawn between it and two other concepts: "Io real maravilloso " (the marvelous reality), and Surrealism. Carpentier himself coined the term "Io real maravilloso" to refer to the supernatural qualities ofLatin American reality as reflected in his fictional worlds. In his opinion, "the prodigy, the marvel, the magic is in the surrounding reality itself, in that which is tangible of the American world, in that which man perceives around him" (Rodriguez 45; my trans.). As Jean Franco points out, it concerns "a conviction held by a number of authors that American 'reality' is of a different order from that of Europe" (Franco 234). That difference stems, as Ariel Dorfman suggests, from the fact that Latin American reality is "miraculous and wildly surreal" (28; my trans.), and Latin America itself "is the place where History is blended with fantasy, where reality is fictitious without losing its concretion and its coherence" (28). Some of the writers identified with this trend (Alejo Carpentier himself, Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Rulfo, Arturo Uslar Pietri, and others) take exception to the suggestion that "Io real maravilloso" is nothing but Surrealism à la Latin America. Surrealism , Carpentier argues, "sought the marvelous through books, through prefabricated things [. . .] very rarely sought it in reality" (Tovar 77), while he sought it in reality itself. That is not to say that Surrealism did not affect the works of these writers. It led them to look into their unconscious; and, when they did so, states one of them (Miguel Angel Asturias), they encountered an "Indian unconscious" (López Alvarez 101 MAGICAL REALISM IN CARPENTIER AND WALKER 80). This Indian (American) unconscious informs the esthetic production of the group. In the perception of some, the divergence between the concepts of "Io real maravilloso" and magical realism lies in that, while the former purports to reflect Latin American reality as it is, the latter is admittedly an esthetic manifestation in literature of that American reality which Franco qualified as being "of a different order from that of Europe" (Franco 234). rJefining magic realism as "the perception ofmagic and its acceptance as a normal fact," Sáinz de Medrano asserts that this feature "is not something peculiar to the heirs of ancestral, aboriginal cultures, not, in short, a matter for initiates, but an American experience within reach of any mortal" (434). Underlining the accessibility ofthe supernaturalinmagicrealism , Gabriel GareíaMárquez, perhapsthe magical realist writer best known to the American reading public, also insists that "the fusion ofthe marvelous onto everyday life is a usual situation in Hispanic America" (Sáinz de Medrano 435). The kinship between "Io real maravilloso" and magical realism is thus plainly discernible. Indeed , many critics use the two terms interchangeably, as does this study, to depict a fictional ambient in which prosaic reality coexists with supernatural events which challenge the natural laws ofphysics— and which include not only hyperbolic exaggeration...