Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English (review)

Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English, ed. Elsa Linguanti et al. Cross/Cultures 39. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. ISBN 9042004487.

The editors of Coterminous Worlds have put together a valuable collection of essays that consider magical realism in light of post-colonial studies. The introduction notes that magical realism offers ways for writers to engage with Otherness within the text itself. A number of the contributors point out the dry nihilism of postmodernism and, by contrast, the inventiveness of magical realism, in its efforts to find ways to depict simultaneous (and often contradictory) cultural traditions and world-views. The title of the volume, actually a quotation from the prose work of Robert Bringhurst, aptly describes this project of depicting not mimetic reality but the complex felt experience of human beings. Authors whose works form the "canon" of magical realist literature--from Carpentier to García Márquez--are discussed, though the volume is devoted mostly to commentaries on the works of other, newer authors, many from outside the literary traditions of the West. Readers of this journal will note that the works of a number of African writers are featured in the essays: Ivan Vladislavic, Ben Okri, Zakes Mda, Kojo Laing, Mia Couto, and Syl Cheney-Coker.

The essays in Coterminous Worlds cover a wide range of literature (mostly fiction, though a little poetry), which includes works of authors such as Janet Frame, Wilson Harris, Jack Hodgins, Robert Kroetsch, Gwendolyn MacEwen, David Malouf, Michael Ondaatje, Joe Rosenblatt, Salman Rushdie (represented in several of the essays), and Patrick White--in addition to the works of authors mentioned above. With its discussions of new and marginalized writers, Coterminous Worlds makes a fitting, up-dated companion to the compendious and ground-breaking Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Zamora and Faris, which dates from 1995.

The quality of the essays is a little uneven, though most are clear, strong, and well-documented. Several are especially noteworthy. A discussion that links biography and textual analysis, Tommaso Scarano's "Notes on Spanish-American Magical Realism" chronicles Carpentier's dissatisfaction with Surrealists and goes on to list important distinctions between Surrealism and magical realism; the essay also presents Carpentier's definition of the baroque in literature. Carmen Concilio's "The Magic of Language in the Novels of Patrick White and David Malouf" skillfully works elements of Levinas's thought into a discussion of the limitations of the rational structure of language; the essay goes on to show how magical realists defy monolithic language structures in their efforts to more accurately describe human experience. Lucia Boldini's study of the novels of Jack Hodgins, "The Ragged Edge of Miracles," makes valid and useful distinctions between realist and magical realist novels and goes on, using Bakhtin, to posit the close relationship between human and natural worlds, a frontier often traduced in modernist and post-modernist traditions.

Midway through the book, the editors have inserted the edited work of Robert Bringhurst, selected by Elso Linguanti and Carmen Concilio. In these prose snippets, Bringhurst compellingly describes the revitalizing effects of magical realism within the "negative, exhausted cultural outlook" (139) of a world "sterilized by greed" (143). For Bringhurst, the pre-industrial origins and anti-imperial nature of magical realism offer a needed alternative approach to the literary representation of humans and the world.

Bill Hemminger

Bill Hemminger teaches English and French at the University of Evansville where he is an associate professor.

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