(Major Field) Magic Realism

RATIONALE I. "Magic realism" has become a ubiquitous term to describe various contemporary works, yet a certain ambiguity surrounds it. Much of the critical work on magic realism has focused on the history and usage of the name itself, rather than the actual characteristics of the movement, which I see as an evolution of traditional mimesis initially exploring changing perceptions of the visual and the real, and culminating in a totalizing epic view of history based on the representation of the collective memory of a people. The term originated in Europe during the 1920's, in the writings of the German art historian Franz Roh who presented magic realism as a reaction to expressionism, and independently in the Italian journal Novecento, edited by writer and critic Massimo Bontempelli. It was adopted during the 1940's by Latin American authors who combined the theories of Roh and Bontempelli with French surrealist concepts of the marvelous, and incorporated indigenous mythologies within traditional mimetic conventions in their quest for the original Latin American novel. From the 1960's to the present, there has been a strong current of magic realism within the general movement of post-modernism, especially in British and North American literature. While a considerable body of criticism exists on twentieth-century responses to realism and the role of fantasy and the imaginary, the term "magic realism" in the context of the literatures of Europe and the United States appears, for the most part, only obliquely or as a passing reference. Recently in Germany there has been a renewed interest in the art and literature of the 1920's, especially the "neue Sachlichkeit" movement on which Roh based his theory of "magischer Realismus." I plan to demonstrate not only that magic realism exists as a continuous presence in twentieth-century literature, but that it presents an alternative to more established movements such as surrealism and post-modernism through its privileging of the mimetic function and its emphasis on the representation of history. For the purposes of this study, I will work within three subcategories: — the novel of the 1920's and 1930's: theories of Roh and Bontempelli; works by Kafka, Junger and Musil, and the German movement "neue Sachlichkeit" (originally called "magischer Realismus") represented by Doblin; French novels by Breton, Aragon and Gracq which develop the new theories of "le merveilleux." — the Latin American movement of the 1940's and 1950's: theories of Carpentier and Flores; works by Carpentier, Borges, Asturias, Uslar Pietri. — the contemporary novel: the fabulists such as Grass, Rushdie, Garcia Marquez and Carter; works structured around multiple layers of reality: the Anglo-American tradition (Fowles, Barth, Pynchon and Nabokov); the French tradition growing out of the Nouveau Roman (Simon, the later novels of Aragon). The topics I wish to consider include the relationship of magic realism to pre-established genres, the questions of derealization and defamiliarization; fabulation, historiography and the role of history. II. The representation of the banal and the quotidian is a central tenet of nineteenth-century realism, and magic realism continues this project. Like many modernist movements, however, magic realism rejects nineteenth-century positivism, the privileging of science and empiricism, returning instead to mythologies, folklore and mysticism in what Jameson calls "a reaction against the reification of realism." This in no way represents an abandonment of history; in fact, the representation of historical conflict is central to magic realist prose, and I would argue that in contemporary literature magic realism presents a way of restoring a historical dimension to the post-modern novel. Central to early magic realism is the emphasis on perception. There is nothing inherently new about this: both the nineteenth-century fantastic, which excels in the representation of unreal or uncanny effects, and nineteenth-century realism strongly privilege the role of the visual. However, new visual technologies (electricity, photography) which challenge traditional conceptions of space and time lead to a new perception, taking the form of a sudden apparition within the context of the quotidian and characterized by simultaneity, unusual juxtapositions and an extreme precision of language. The advent of psychoanalysis also contributes to this phenomenon by establishing the importance of perception in the structuring of the Unconscious, and leads to a conscious interest in the Repressed. While the surrealists draw on paradigms of the Freudian Unconscious and its fantasies, magic realists, with their gaze typically turned outward rather than inward, generally prefer the Jungian Unconscious and its collective archetypes. Both movements use the word play and collage/montage techniques of dadaism, but for the magic realists the mimetic function remains primary. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, for example, the city as a historical and ontological reality is the constant referent of Doblin's montages, mythologizing and formal word play. How does this compare to the representation of Paris in Nadja and Le paysan de Paris, or to Joyce's and Dos Passos' representations of the metropolis? The original theory of magic realism as defined by Roh expresses a desire to go beyond traditional mimesis and to represent the hidden, hitherto unperceived connections between objects within the quotidian. This heightened reality perception (Ringer's Das Abenteuerliche Herz) leads to the principal characteristics of magic realism, already strongly evident in Kafka, Mann and Musil: derealization (a sudden sense of detachment from the reality of the surrounding object world) and defamiliarization (the representation of familiar objects through a language or descriptive technique that causes them to appear new or shocking). In the derealized and defamiliarized world(s) of magic realism, the unusual juxtaposition of objects throws traditional descriptive systems into disarray, and the boundaries of an assumed "real" are stretched until levels of reality obeying different ontological laws coexist metonymically. In post-modern magic realism, the multiplicity of realities reaches such a point that it is no longer a question of alternate worlds flowing into one another while still maintaining a certain internal coherence (as in Nabokov or Queneau) but rather the interfacing of what Jameson refers to as "semiautonomous subsystems" which are themselves in a constant state of mutation (Pynchon). The disconcerting multiplicity of realities in magic realism emphasizes rather than denies the historical dimension of these narratives. The exploration of the quotidian in early magic realism increasingly gives way to the representation of conflict, which is often but not exclusively generated by a crisis of national/cultural identity resulting from the overlap of several layers of history and culture within a given geographic area, such as Latin America or the Indian subcontinent. Many magic realists write in the language of an established national literature from which they feel excluded, such as Kafka's use of German, Nabokov's use of English, and the post-colonial writers' use of the language of their colonizers, be it Spanish, French or English. The movement follows a pattern of increasing historiography, the creation of elaborate genealogies (Borges, Nabokov) and mythologies (Jahnn) as a means of writing the "history" of a people or geographic area, and culminates in the contemporary fabulist movement. Although this development is often dismissed as mythomania, I would argue that it is a new form of the historical novel, which can be interpreted either as the reflection of a historical reality already of a fantastic nature (as Carpentier and Garcia Marquez claim) or as the result of a sense of historical impotence brought about by the reduction of all discourse, including history, to an amalgamation of semiotic systems.

PRIMARY READINGS GERMAN Kafka, Franz — "Meditation" (1913) — "Metamorphosis" (1915) — "Ein Landarzt" (1919) — "In the Penal Colonoy" (1919) — The Trial (1925) — The Castle (1926) Mann, Thomas — The Magic Mountain (1924) Doblin, Alfred — Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (1929) Musil, Robert — The Man Without Qualities (1930-1932) — Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (1936) Junger, Ernst — The Adventurous Heart (1929) — On the Marble Cliffs (1939) Jahnn, Hans Henny — Shoreless River (1949-1950) Grass, Gunter — The Tin Drum (1959) — The Flounder (1977) Weiss, Peter — The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975-1981) FRENCH / FRANCOPHONE Aragon, Louis — The Peasant of Paris (1926) — La mise à mort (1965) — Blanche ou l'oubli (1967) Breton, Andre — Nadja (1928) Celine, Louis-Ferdinand — Journey to the End of Night (1932) Gracq, Julien — The Castle of Argol (1938) Queneau, Raymond — The Skin of Dreams (1944) Schwartz-Bart, Andre — The Last of the Just (1959) Simon, Claude — The Flanders Road (1960) — Story (1967) Labou-Tansi, Sony — La vie et demie (1979) LATIN AMERICAN Uslar Pietri, Arturo — "Rain" (1928) Borges, Jorge Luis — Ficciones (1944) Asturias, Miguel Angel — Men of Maize (1949) Carpentier, Alejo — The Kingdom of this World (1949) — The Lost Steps (1953) — "Voyage to the Seed" (1964) Garcia Marquez, Gabriel — Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1955) — One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) — The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) — Love in the Time of Cholera (1988) ENGLISH/AMERICAN Joyce, James — Ulysses (1922) Dos Passos, John — Manhattan Transfer (1925) Barth, John — The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) Nabokov, Vladimir — Pale Fire (1962) — Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) Pynchon, Thomas — V (1963) — Gravity's Rainbow (1973) Carter, Angela — The Magic Toyshop (1967) — Nights at the Circus (1984) Fowles, John — The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) Rushdie, Salman — Midnight's Children (1980) — Shame (1983) — The Satanic Verses (1988) Winterson, Jeannette — Sexing the Cherry (1989) SLAVIC (RUSSIAN, CZECH, YUGOSLAVIAN) Bulgakov, Mikhael — The Master and Margarita (written in 1930's, pub. 1966) Kundera, Milan — The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978) Pavic, Milorad — The Dictionary of the Khazars (1988)

SECONDARY READINGS Alter, Robert — Partial Magic: the Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975) Auerbach, Erich — Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1968) Barthes, Roland, et. al. — Littérature et réalité (1982) Baudrillard, Jean — Simulations (1983) Benjamin, Walter — "On the Mimetic Faculty" in Reflections (1986) — "Surrealism" in Reflections. — "Some Reflections on Kafka" in Illuminations (1969) — "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations. Bessiere, Irene — Le récit fantastique: la poétique de l'incertain (1974) Bontempelli, Massimo — "900" (1926-1927) Borges, Jorge Louis — "Narrative Art and Magic" in Borges: A Reader, eds. Emir Rodriguez and Alistair Reed (1981) Breton, André — L'art magique (1957) — Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) Brooke-Rose, Christine — A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) Caillois, Roger — Approches de l'imaginaire (1974) Carpentier, Alejo — Preface to The Kingdom of this World (1949) Chanady, Amaryll — "The Origins and Development of Magic Realism in Latin American Fiction" in Magic Realism and Canadian Literature, eds. Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski (1986) — Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy (1985) Chldovski, Victor — "L'art comme procédé" (1925) in Théorie de la littérature: Textes des formalistes russes réunis, présentés et traduits par Tzvetan Todorov, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (1966) Flores, Angel — "Magic Realism in Spanish American Fiction" (1955) — The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives for our Time (1977) Forster, Leonard — "Uber den 'magischen Realismus' in der heutigen deutschen Dichtung" (1950) Foster, Hal — The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) Freud, Sigmund — "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts" in Totem and Taboo (1913) Frye, Northrop — Anatomy of Criticism (1957) Guilbert, Jean-Claude — Le réalispie fantastique: 40 peintres européens de l'imaginaire (1973) Hancock, Geoff — "Magic or Realism: the Marvelous in Canadian Fiction" in Magic Realism and Canadian Literature (1986) — Introduction to Magic Realism (an Anthology), ed. Geoff Hancock (1980) Hulsewig-Johnen, Jutta, ed. — Neue Sachlichkeit, Magischer Realismus (1990) Hume, Kathryn — Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (1984) Hutcheon, Linda — The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) Jameson, Fredric — The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) — Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) — "On Magic Realism in Film" in Signatures of the Visible (1992) Janik, Dieter — Magische Wirklichkeitsauffassung im hispanoamerikanischen Roman des 20 (1976) Jung, Carl — The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1936) Kim, Seong-Kon — Journey into the Past: the Historical and Mythical Imagination of Barth and Pvnchon (1985) Koselleck, Reinhart — Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1985) Lefebvre, Henri — The Production of Space (1981) Lethen, Helmut — Neue Sachlichkeit, 1924-1932: Studien zur Literatur des "Weissen Sozialismus" (1970) Lukacs, George — The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1963) Mabille, Pierre — Le merveilleux (1946) Menton, Seymour — Magical Realism rediscovered, 1918-1981 (1983) Robbe-Grillet, Alain — For a New Novel (1961) Roh, Franz — Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925) Scheffel, Michael — Magischer Realismus: die Geschichte eines Begriffes und ein Versuch seiner Bestimmung (1990) Schmied, Wieland — Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties (1978) Scholes, Robert — Fabulation and Metafiction (1979) Todorov, Tzvetan — The Fantastic (1970) Walker, Nancy — Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women (1990) Weisberger, Jean, ed. — Le réalisme magique: Roman, peinture et cinéma (1987) Wilson, Robert — "The Metamorphoses of Space: Magic Realism" in Magic Realism and Canadian Literature (1986)