Ordinary Enchantments. Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (review)

and Feminist Studies, he provides invaluable historical information related to cross-cultural studies ranging from the Discovery and Conquest to the present. This innovative approach to Hispanic literature is not only crucial to the understanding of the inception of more global perspectives promulgated by the discovery of the New World, it is also significant in that it opens up a relatively new and unexplored field of study for contemporary literary critics. PATRICIA L. SWIER Wake Forest University Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments. Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004. In this book, Wendy B. Faris brings to fruition her reflections on a topic that has occupied a major part of her scholarly work. Ordinary Enchantments is the culmination of the theoretical considerations on magical realism that she had already started to develop in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995),1 edited with Lois Parkinson Zamora, as well as in the study of authors such as Carlos Fuentes and Salman Rushdie. The essays included in Magical Realism, addressing works from several continents, offer a global view of a narrative mode that has its roots in Latin America. In Ordinary Enchantments Faris reinforces that worldwide dimension of magical realism, bringing together authors such as Günter Grass, Wilson Harris, Salman Rushdie , Carlos Fuentes, Toni Morrison, Patrick Süskind, Gabriel García Márquez , Ben Okri and Isabel Allende, among others. Faris does not study the works of these authors individually: the five chapters of the book offer a comparative analysis of different aspects of the novels in order to illustrate and support Faris’s arguments about magical realism. This type of analysis allows the author to widen the scope of her study and to interweave in her literary and cultural study an impressive array of critical sources from a variety of disciplines . Even though this fragmented examination of the works helps establish the transnational and transcontinental aspects of magical realism for which Faris argues, it leaves in the reader now and again a rather disjointed view of the relevance of the particular works within their cultural and socio-historical environments. As its title indicates, Chapter 1, “Definitions and Locations. Magical Realism between Modern and Postmodern Fiction,” outlines the parameters under Reseñas 111 1 Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory , History, Community. Duke: Durham UP, 1995. which a text can be considered magical realist. Faris’s criteria are: the presence of an irreducible element of magic; the presence of the phenomenal world; unsettling doubts in the reader to explain the nature of the events; the merging in the narrative of different realms; disruptions of time, space and identity. Of all these characteristics, the irreducible element of magic (as opposed to empirically based knowledge of events) figures more prominently in Faris’s deliberations of whether a text can be considered magical realist or not. The chapter also traces the different conceptualizations of this narrative mode since Franz Roh coined the term in 1925. Faris extends the more prevalent use of the term to refer to a specific Latin American reality, as formulated by Alejo Carpentier in his definition of “lo real maravilloso,” and sets up magical realism as an agent of decolonization, as a postcolonial style. The writer is aware of the shortcomings associated with the term magical realism to address the political, social and cultural reality of the so-called First and Third Worlds. However, for her, the benefits of recognizing “significant similarities that indicate a worldwide trend” outweigh the danger of making of magical realism a “monumentalizing category,” as Stephen Slemon warns, that will eliminate the very difference it seeks to establish (41). For Faris this consideration of magical realism as a worldwide trend is inextricably tied to its use as a critical tool with which “to address the lack of attention given to the spirit in contemporary theory” (40). In fact, the connection of magical realism to the realm of the spirit and of the sacred is the point that unites the book, and that ultimately enables Faris to compare geographically and chronologically disparate texts. Chapter 2, “‘From a Source Within.’ Magical Realism as Defocalized Narrative,” explains how magical realism brings...