I've been on here for almost two months now. I guess it's time I wrote a piece for my English-speaking friends. It's not really an academic piece of writing yet, it's more like an attempt at one. So here it is:
As far as the definition is concerned, magic realism is a term used to describe a literary mode rather than a particular genre. It is distinguished by a paradox of a union of opposites and conflicting perspectives. The opposites that are brought into play include subjects such as life and death or precolonial and post-colonial existences. The rational and supernatural are placed together in the literary work, giving different perspectives of reality. Historical and imaginary realities may and do coexist in the fiction.
As Robert Kroetsch and Linda Kenyon observe, magic realism as a literary practice seems to be closely coupled with a perception of "living on the margins," encoding within it, perhaps, concept of resistance to the imposing imperial center and its totalizing systems. Therefore, the use of the concept of magic realism, then, can itself signify resistance to central assimilation by more stable generic systems and more monumental theories of literary practice, a way of suggesting that there is something in the nature of the literature it identifies that confounds the capacities of the major systems to come to terms with it.
Given the lack of theoretical specificity or theoretical vacuum, Stephen Slemon believes that magic realism can provide a way of effecting important comparative analyses between separate post-colonial cultures, and that it can facilitate the recognition of continuities within individual cultures that the established genre system might blind us to: continuities, that is, between present-day magic realist texts and apparently very different texts written at earlier stages of a culture's literary history. To this end, Stephen Slemon has chosen two magic realist texts from within a single post-colonial culture, namely, English Canada. He has decided to focus on Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World and Robert Kroetsch's What the Crow Said.
Since the magic realism suggests a binary opposition between the representational code of realism and fantasy. Such opposition is reflected in the language of narration where a peculiar battle between these two systems takes place. Each one of them is trying to create a different kind of fictional world from the other. It is self-evident that the ground rules of these two worlds are somewhat conflicting therefore neither one can fully come into being, and each remains suspended, locked in a continuous dialectic with the "other." Slemon suggests that despite its precise form "the act of colonization initiates a kind of double vision or 'metaphysical clash' within the colonial culture, a binary opposition withing the language that has its roots in the process of either transporting a language to a new land or imposing a foreign language on and indigenous population."(12) To put it simply, the magic realist text mirrors real conditions of speech and cognition within the actual social relations of a post-colonial culture, a reflection Gabriel Garcia Marquez calls a "speaking mirror."
In The Invention of the World Jack Hodgins portrays Vancouver Island community, especially The Revelations Colony of Truth, renamed the Revelations Trailer Park. Its depiction is always set in the real world of familiar space. However, the realism of the site is somehow impaired by the historical as well as metaphorical re-enactment of the process of colonization which, in turn, transforms the novel's regional setting into a metonymic focal point for not only English-Canadian culture but also for post-colonial culture as a whole. According to Slemon, the novel epitomizes a process of psychic liberation from Old World domination and its cognitive codes. What Slemon finds interesting is the fact that the re-enactment process triggers a release from historical domination.
Robert Kroetsch's novel, What the Crow Said, is set in a region lying "ambiguously on the border between the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan," and the people there have absolute control over the horizontal dimension whereas the "vertical world" is a mystery to them. Kroetsch uses a series of motifs such as the stranding of the dying Martin Lang between the sky and earth or JG's fatal fall from the tree to prove that human control in the second dimension represents an impossible goal. Apart from the binary opposition between horizontal control and vertical incompetence, there are also two conflicting time schemes, for example, the passage of a few seasons contains several years of calendar time. Stephen Slemon believes that the site of the novel can be seen as a metonym for post-colonial space.
There are a few things worth keeping in mind. Firstly, both texts present a sort of post colonial discourse involving the recuperation of silenced voices as axial to a "positive imagined reconstruction of reality." Secondly, both texts highlight plurality as well as the fact that marginalized presences gravitate towards the centre. Thirdly, the site of each text as a localized region epitomizes the post-colonial culture as a whole. And last but not least, each text foreshortens history "so that the forces operating in the real social relations of the culture are brought metaphorically into play."(20)
more to follow ...
Work cited:
Stephen Slemon, "Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse"
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