Ordinary Enchantments

Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative

Wendy B. Faris

Publication Year: 2004

Ordinary Enchantments investigates magical realism as the most important trend in contemporary international fiction, defines its characteristics and narrative techniques, and proposes a new theory to explain its significance. In the most comprehensive critical treatment of this literary mode to date, Wendy B. Faris discusses a rich array of examples from magical realist novels around the world, including the work not only of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but also of authors like Salman Rushdie, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, and Ben Okri. Faris argues that by combining realistic representation with fantastic elements so that the marvelous seems to grow organically out of the ordinary, magical realism destabilizes the dominant form of realism based on empirical definitions of reality, gives it visionary power, and thus constitutes what might be called a "remystification" of narrative in the West. Noting the radical narrative heterogeneity of magical realism, the author compares its cultural role to that of traditional shamanic performance, which joins the worlds of daily life and that of the spirits. Because of that capacity to bridge different worlds, magical realism has served as an effective decolonizing agent, providing the ground for marginal voices, submerged traditions, and emergent literatures to develop and create masterpieces. At the same time, this process is not limited to postcolonial situations but constitutes a global trend that replenishes realism from within. In addition to describing what many consider to be the progressive cultural work of magical realism, Faris also confronts the recent accusation that magical realism and its study as a global phenomenon can be seen as a form of commodification and an imposition of cultural homogeneity. And finally, drawing on the narrative innovations and cultural scenarios that magical realism enacts, she extends those principles toward issues of gender and the possibility of a female element within magical realism.

Published by: Vanderbilt University Press

Contents
Search Inside This Book
Book Details

Cover

pdf icon Download PDF (110.1 KB)

pdf icon Download PDF (67.8 KB)

Acknowledgments

pdf icon Download PDF (58.8 KB)
pp. ix-

Many thanks to Stacy Alaimo, Jon Thiem, and Lois Zamora for their thoughtful readings of parts of the book and their helpful suggestions, and to Dave Faris for presenting me with several of the books that eventually became central to this study. ...

Preface

pdf icon Download PDF (58.6 KB)
pp. xi-

This book probably has its distant origins in the Fijian cannibal fork with which my mother livened up her performance during the “show and tell” period at her girls’ school in Australia. The fork, given to my grandfather by the native Fijians, so the story goes, had been used to eat an earlier missionary. ...

Introduction

pdf icon Download PDF (75.8 KB)
pp. 1-5

In this book I investigate magical realism in contemporary literature. The term magical realism, coined in the early twentieth century to describe a new, neo-realistic, style in German painting, then applied to Latin American fiction, now designates perhaps the most important contemporary trend in ...

1 - Definitions and Locations

pdf icon Download PDF (227.7 KB)
pp. 7-42

As a basis for investigating the nature and cultural work of magical realism, I suggest five primary characteristics of the mode. First, the text contains an “irreducible element” of magic; second, the descriptions in magical realism detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world; third, the reader may experience some unsettling doubts in the effort to reconcile two contradictory understandings of events; fourth, ...

2 - "From a Far Source Within"

pdf icon Download PDF (268.9 KB)
pp. 43-87

In magical realism, the focalization—the perspective from which events are presented—is indeterminate; the kinds of perceptions it presents are indefinable and the origins of those perceptions are unlocatable.¹ That indeterminacy results from the fact that magical realism includes two conflicting kinds of perception that perceive two different kinds of event: magical events and images not normally reported to the reader of realistic fiction because they are not empirically verifiable, and verifiable ...

3 - Encoding the Ineffable

pdf icon Download PDF (267.8 KB)
pp. 88-132

“You must use language in a manner which permits God to exist —the divine to be as real as the divan I am sitting on,” Rushdie writes, describing the special style he needs in order to portray contemporary India. “Realism,” he continues, “can no longer express or account for the absurd reality of the world we live in—a world which has the capability of destroying itself at any moment.” ¹ This combination of divinity and absurdity characterizes magical realism as it ...

4 - "Along the Knife-Edge of Change"

pdf icon Download PDF (235.9 KB)
pp. 133-169

The irreducible elements and narrative techniques we have been observing, which compose the defocalized narrative of magical realism, question the perceived reliability of realism, as well as the assumptions of empirical thinking on which realism is based, and hence weaken the connection between world and text that it seems to embody. ...

5 - "Women and Women and Women"

pdf icon Download PDF (297.7 KB)
pp. 170-219

The issue of gender is as problematic in magical realist narrative as it is in modern and postmodern discourses of all kinds. The dialogical, polyphonic, decentered forms that characterize postmodernism as it grows out of modernism correspond to what are often imagined to be female ways of being and knowing.¹ From this perspective, magical realism participates in ...

E-ISBN-13: 9780826591777
Print-ISBN-13: 9780826514417
Print-ISBN-10: 0826514413

Page Count: 280
Publication Year: 2004