CHAPTER - I

INTRODUCTION

Proliferation of the term - Magic Realism in academic and non-academic

circles certainly accounts for its popularity. However, an attempt to mark its

formal characteristics makes one realize the demarcation of Western European

and non-Western modes of thinking by theorists who have formulated definitions

of Magic Realism. It was Franz Roh, the German art critic who applied the term

'Magischer Realisms' for the first time in history. He used the term to comment

on the inter-war art of the Weimar Republic painters, which characterized a return

to Realism after Expressionism's more abstract style. He categorized their form of

naturalistic surrealism in painting by giving it this name in 1925. However, its

visual and painterly connotations dimmed along with time. Later, when the term

was introduced into a Spanish literary context, it referred to the fusion of

geography, history, myth, politics, culture, language and the oral traditions of

South and Central America.

In the 1960's, Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist devised a style of

fiction that came to be known as 'magic realism'. He coined 'lo real maravilloso '

while trying to distance himself from surrealism. It is in the famous prologue to

his novel El reino de este mundo (1949) that he coins this phrase. He uses more of

mnraviNoso than magico. He rejects the juxtapositions of the Surrealist movement

and accepts the representation of a reality in which such juxtapositions already

exist. It was in Haitian Voodoo that Carpentier initially encountered the

marvellous. After the highly formative trip to Haiti in 1943, he began to apply

the lessons of Europe to Latin America, seeing the maravilloso, as a daily feature

of life in his own subcontinent. Thus, just as his earlier Afro-Cuban novel Ecue

Yamba 0 (1933) opposed black primitivism to white dominance, the more

successful El reino de este mundo presents native values and voodoo as superior to

culture of European descent.

Carpentier's two most famous novels are Las pasos perdidos (1953) and - El

siglo de las luces (1962). The unnamed narrator of Las pasos perdidos pictures.the

Carpentarian dilemma of a Europeanized Latin American reviewing his

impressions of his homeland. The modem world of the North is presented as a

perversion of natural norms and the narrator's South American odyssey is

portrayed as a journey back in time towards a meaningful form of primitivism.

Carpentarian marvelous realism is all about the idea that communities of greatly

differing stages of development can exist side by side in this huge sub-continent.

I t is also linked with the search of a paradise of authenticity prior to the

devastation of the European invasion. The novel, however, shows that escape

into a world of timelessness is impossible. Carpenterian magic realism is more

clear if one understands William Spindler's anthropological magic realism. This

amounts to "....two contrasting views of the world (one rational, modem and

discursive; the other magical, traditional and intuitive) . . ." (Forum for the

Modem Language Studies 29 (1993) 76). To Spindler, the first view is closely

linked with Europe and the second with non-European folk culture.

Carpentier's most acclaimed work, El sinlo de las luces is one of the great

historical novels to emerge from Latin America. It is set between 1791 and 1808.

It deals with the French Revolution and the attempts to export it to the Caribbean.

The thrust of the novel is that history is a stammering process and the only way to

gain freedom is to work for change within that process. His later work El recurso

del metodo (1974) presents the deposing of the unscrupulous dictator at the centre

of the novel. His bewilderment in the face of modem art points up his status as an

outmoded phenomenon. In La consagracion de la primavera (1978), the triumph

of the Cuban Revolution is presented. Here, the occult reality of 'lo real

maravilloso' has become the unseen movement of collective, popular feeling

underlying the superficial pattern of history.

The entire Carpenterian notion of marvellous realism may foreclose reader

involvement. That is, the very idea of 'marvelling' at Latin American reality

suggests non-participation, looking on from the outside. Just how convincing it is,

is a matter for individual readers. Carpentier's version is contradictory, but so it's

blooming throughout Latin America, oscillating between the local and the

universal, the real and the unreal.

The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English offers a formal definition of

the genre: "It is characterized by a juxtaposition of apparently reliable, realistic

reportage and extravagant fantasy." [624]. The very broad nature of this

description explains the reason why texts usually thought not Magic Realist are

classified so. In fact Ian Connell uses a similar categorization while discussing

certain types of tabloid journalism. Patricia Merivale defines Magic Realism

thus :

"Magic Realism is not only ... a way of seeing but also a way of saying:

On a larger scale it is a way of telling a story; on a smaller scale, it

is a way of showing 'reality' more truly with the aid of the various magics

of metaphor." (ARIEL 2 1.3 ( 1 990) 12).

This magic helps the reader to transform himself. He is not merely an observer;

he participates in the story. David Punter talks about this emphasis on participant

observation in Magic Realism while discussing the novels of Angela Carter and

Russell Hoban :

"Magic, in the case of magic realism, is not a matter of being transported

to a distant and unrecognizable world; it is to do with seeing the

recognizable world .... through transformed eyes." (The British and Irish

Novel since 1960 143).

Laura Moss's version of Magic Realism tries to encapsulate its

mechanism:"Magic Realism is the accepted juxtaposition of the ordinary and the

extra ordinary in a narrative that otherwise appears to be 'reliable' and objective."

(ARIEL 29. 4 (1998) 121). These definitions very aptly bring in Toni Morrison's

novels under the genre of Magic Realism.

The broad generalizations about Magic Realism in The Cambridge Guide @

Literature in English makes it clear that Western democracy permits forms of

articulation which are not possible for writers struggling under the weight of

oppressive reglmes:

"...its method was first conceived, more importantly, as a response

to the nature of South American reality. In counties previously

ruled despotically as colonies and subsequently negotiating

independence with no long-established institutions or free-/ doms,

the fact that information can easily be manipulated or even

commandeered by power groups makes truth a far more provisional,

relative entity." (The Cambridge Guide 624 - 625).

However, this should be understood as just a stereotype about non-Western

restrictions that are placed on Western writers. The prohibition prior to 1961 on

Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's or the book - burning of Fascism are just

a few examples.

A similar attempt to define Magic Realism concentrating on certain social

characteristics can be seen in the Film and TV studies Discussion list on the

internet. A request by Jonathan Beasley Murray, < jbmurray@CSD 4. CSD UWM

EDU > asking for suggestions on Magic Realism and film is followed by a

response from Brian Taves <TAVES @ MAIL.LOC.GOV >, 24 January 1994,

saying that ;

". . ..the key if not the principal distinguishing element of magical realism

must be its basis in a certain social or sociological viewpoint behind the

narrative and frequent roots in folklore outside the dominant Western

Culture."

A destructive climax is common to almost all magic realist works. Brian.

Conniff s apocalyptic vision of magic realism corresponds to this common feature.

In his discussion of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Conniff asserts : "It can

depict events strange enough, and oppressive enough, to make apocalypse appear

not only credible but inevitable." (Modem Fiction Studies 36 (1990) 168).

Magic Realism can be distinguished from Modernism. William Spindler in

"Magic Realism : A Typology" offers a definition of anthropological magic

realism as he calls it. He categorizes Magic Realism as a culturally specific

project by identifying non-modern societies where myth and magic persist and

where Magic Realism might be expected to occur:

"The survival in popular culture of a magical or mythical Weltanschauung

which coexists with the rational mentality generated by modernity is not an

exclusively Spanish-American phenomenon. It can be found in areas of the

Caribbean, Asia and Africa where writers .... have resorted to Magic

Realism when dealing, in English or French, with similar concerns to those

of the Spanish American wirters." (Forum for Modem Language Studies 29

(1993) 8).

There are several objections to Spindler's analysis. It must be understood

that models of Westem rationalism may not actually describe Western modes of

thinking. Besides, modem rationalism and pre-modern thinking are

simultaneously possible in some instances. Thus formal definitions of Magic

Realism fundamentally depend on the dissimilarity of the two modes of thinking

because they tend to focus on an effect derived from the incongruity of myth and

rationalism.

An anthropological perspective is similarly taken by Frederic Jameson. He

asserts that what differentiates Magic Realism is the expression of an

anthropological attitude which confronts the modem with a non-modem

epistemology. However, anthropology itself now erases the dividing line between

Science and myth. That is, anthropology is a scientific discipline that studies

social organization; but it does this through a description of ritual and mythology.

'Therefore, it is ideal if one stops looking for an epistemic difference between

Western and non-Western modes of thought while defining Magic Realism :

"Definitions of Magic Realism . . ..mistake Western modernity for a

rationalist epistemology that is radically different &om modes of thinking

which retain a belief in magic, and in so doing conflate the non-Western

with the premodern." (ARIEL 29.2 (1998) 107).

The fabric of Magic Realism is woven with the warp of post-colonialism

and the weft of postmodernism. For instance, Catherine Cundy's major study of

Rushdie, which explores the diverse cultural influences that give his work a

hybridized'nature, discovers that Magic Realism is the ideal form to re-create

fragmented histories of postcolonial societies. To Cundy, it is not just his

characters, but Rushdie too is truly marginalized. He is pushed into the most

secret places of society as the fatwa on him has not been rescinded yet. Cundy

regrets the readedcritic's practice to look at his novel - The Satanic Verses (1988)

as a byword for trouble rather than an exhibition of the postcolonial subject.

Cundy's arguments stem off from Jean-Pierre Durix's citation of an

obvious and most natural link between post-colonial writing and Magic Realism.

Durix, while talking about the magic realism in Midnight's Children (1982) says

that magical realist texts are "....closely linked with the social and political reality

of the writer's homeland or region ...."( Commonwealth Essays and Studies 8:l

(1985) 57). Cundy takes this as the starting line of her arguments. She points out

that colonialism has lacerated the history of subjugated countries and Magic

Realism by offering an alternate history can liberate such countries totally. She

thus explains that in Midni~htht's Children, colonialism brings in a double

disruption in the historical narrative through the presence and the departure of the

British. The Satanic Verses shows how a cultural schizophrenia is induced in the

postcolonial subject as a result of the ill effects of colonialism. She vehemently

declares :

" ... [Mlagical realism can show the cultural and national identity of

postcolonial societies dividing and preserving their different versions of

exercise of a liberty within the text which can be politically

iiberating."(Salman Rushdie 97).

Homi Bhabha affirms that Magic Realism informs postcolonial writing

most strongly. He refers to it as ".....the literary language of the emergent post-

colonial world." (Nation and Narration 7). A similar view has been presented by

Lam Connell who says that Magic Realism has been distinguished "....as the

product of an oppressive social environment.. .."(ARIEL 29.2 (1998) 100). Laura

Moss reiterates this point by attributing a deliberate design behind Magic

Realism's gaining currency all over the world: "Some even see such an

appellation as a forced imposition of a Western term on a transcultural mode of

writing". (ARIEL 29.4 (1998) 127).

Magic Realism is the most suitable form for a writer who aims to counter

tendencies to be brought under the canon of English or American literature or be

regarded as 'other'. Slemon, for instance, argues that the label is ideal for texts

written on the margins as they "...signify resistance to central assimilation by

more stable generic systems." (Canadian Literature 116 (1989) 10). Slemon also

discusses how far language can be used to echo a similar calculated approach of

the post colonial writer who uses Magic Realism. This feature of Magic Realism

is also seen in the works of Toni Momson - so Linden Peach feels when Slemon's

argument, that Magic Realism brings to light two systems of language, is

observed. Slemon feels that Magic ~ e a l i s m helps to reveal the opposing systems

of language which eventually pose :

" ... a dialectic between ' codes of recognition' inherent within the inherited

language and those imagined codes - perhaps utopian or future - oriented -

that characterize a culture's 'original relations' with the world." (Canadian

Literature 116 ( 1 989) 11).

Theories of Postmodernism also simultaneously offer a promise of

validation for Magic Realism. Marguerite Alexander, while defining

Postmodernism in her study, Fights from Realism identifies a number of essential

features of Magic Realism. For instance, Postmodemist fiction is more openly

political than modernist fiction according to Alexander. Alienation, personal

despair and disintegration are some of the recumng themes that she finds in

Postmodernism. Playfulness is one of its distinguishing characteristics for her.

She also sees a number of metafictional techniques in Postmodemism like

interruptions of the narrative by the writer to remind the reader that it is not just

fiction and an insistence on the unreliability of the narrative voice. A new

preoccupation with language - both more powerful as a system of meaning than

before and more insufficient as a direct means of communicating the inner self, is

another feature of Postmodemism.

Alexander's contention is that post-structuralist theory becomes redundant

when it is, applied to postmodernist writing. Post-structuralism destabilizes

meaning in any text by exploiting possibilities within the text of which the writer

is usually not aware. The Postmodernist text which refuses to stabilize its own

meaning cannot be hrther destabilized. All the techniques of Postmodernism thus

subvert established literary practices. She finds a close affinity between Jacobean

drama and Postmodernist fiction as both are morally ambiguous. Finally when

meaning is stabilized, it is in terms of piety which immediately suggests parody.

Supportive systems of belief are undermined in Postmodernist texts. Traditional

models of human nature are attacked by fictionists and civil rights theorists saying

that these models are instruments of oppression. The autonomous self is rejected

in favour of the anti-hero who is completely at the mercy of events.

Marguerite Alexander's findings of the elements of Postmodernism are not

restricted in application to it alone; they also overlap the features of Magic

Realism. In fact she herself admits: "For this reason, I often use the term 'non-

realist' in preference to 'postmodemist' " (Flights from Realism 17). Robbie B.H.

Goh is another theorist who sees this diffusion of the two. Goh explains that in a

postmodem condition social reality itself is a textual creation and therefore it is

duly a magic realist text that can bring out reality through fiction. He quotes

Raymond Federman to support his view. Federman insists: ". . . . . ... The only

fiction that still means something is that kind of fiction that exposes the

fictionality of reality". (Surfiction 7). Goh thus establishes that the expression of

postmodemism itself is Magic Realism: "It is thus not surprising that for many

scholars, the exemplary textual manifestation of postmodemism is magic (or

magical) realism.. . ." (ARIEL 30.3 (1 999)66).

In the preface to his book, Postmodemist Fiction, Brian McHale provides a

definition that hinges on the distinction between 'modernist' and 'post-modernist':

".....Postmodemist fiction differs from modernist fiction just as a poetics

dominated by ontological issues differs from one dominated by epistemological

issues." (Postmodernist Fiction Xii). This implies that postmodernist texts pose

questions about the nature of reality whereas modernist texts are all about knowing

a reality whose existence is not ultimately in doubt. Accordingly McHale thinks

that postmodernist fiction is very similar to the fantastic because both are

governed by the ontological dominant.

An epistemological approach to fantastic writing is used by McHale to

prove that the fantastic is a genre of ontological poetics. He thinks that Tzvetan

Todorov has made the most influential contribution to the view that the fantastic is

an independent genre. Todorov believes that there are three conditions which

make up the 'pure' fantastic. The reader must hesitate between natural and

supematural explanations of what happens in the work till its conclusion. This

hesitation may be shared by a leading character in the work. The reader must

refuse to conduct a poetic and an allegorical reading of the work as both of these

destroy the hesitation which is essential for the fantastic. If there is no hesitation,

then we are in the realm of the uncanny where apparently supernatural events are

explained in terms of the laws of nature or of the marvelous where the

supernatural becomes the norm. Thus, to Todorov, a text belongs to the fantastic

proper only if it poses a hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations

till the very end of the story. Hesitation is the basic principle of the fantastic

according to Todorov.

McHale explains how he can justify his claim of affinity between

postmodemist fiction and the fantastic genre. Todorov takes as an example

Kaka's story, "Metamorphosis", a text characterized by a tone of banality. None

of the characters in it experiences any hesitation. Todorov concludes that Kafka's

text signifies the disappearance of the fantastic in twentieth century literature. He

says that this disappearance is prompted by the disappearance of representation in

contemporary literature. Without the representation of the real, the production of

the fantastic is impossible, says Todorov. On the other hand, McHale points out

that neither the absence of a hesitant character within the fictional world nor the

unfantastic banality of that world acts as a demerit in the case of Kaflca's story as

both are not necessary elements of Todorov's fantastic. McHale coaxes the reader

himself to do the hesitating as indeed seems to be the practice in

"Metamorphosis". His view is that postmodemist fiction does a little of

representation. The complete disappearance of representation in twentieth century

literature is just an exaggeration:

"Todorov has failed to see that in the context of postmodernism the

fantastic has been co-opted as one of a number of strategies of an

ontological poetics that pluralizes the 'real' and thus problematizes

representation." (Postmodemist Fiction 75)

McHale thus establishes the existence of postmodemist fantastic which uses

representation to overthrow representation.

Brian McHale makes further progress with his ontological structure of the

fantastic. He quotes another theorist called Rosemary Jackson who describes the

fantastic as an interrogation of the real. In other words, the fantastic involves face-

to-face confrontation between the possible (the real) and the impossible, the

normal and the paranormal. Another world encroaches upon our work or some

representative of our world penetrates the other world. The fantastic is still seen

as a zone of hesitation, not between the uncanny and the marvelous, but between

this world and the world next door.

Whereas McHale's exploration of the fantastic becomes part of his concern

with post modernist fiction, Kathryn Hume provides an exclusive discussion of the

problems of defining the fantastic in her Fantasy and Mimesis. She categorizes

these as one-, two-, three-, four- and five-element definitions. These elements

include the choice of subject matter; the changing of 'ground-rules' as discovered

by Alice in Wonderland; the persuasive establishment and development of an

impossibility; satisfying readers' desire for recovery, escape, consolation and

tracing the unseen of culture in a subversive manner.

There are some commentators who make an implied distinction between

fantasy and the fantastic. For example, Anne Cranny - Francis uses Fantasy as an

umbrella-term containing three different sub-types: other-world fantasy, fairy tale

and horror. She feels that feminist fantasists use three kinds of fantasy to write

about the experience of women in contemporary western society:

"Feminist fantasy explores the problems of being for women in a society

which denies them not only visibility but also subjectivity. It scrutinizes

the categories of the patriarchal real, revealing them to be arbitrary, shifting

constructs.. . ."(Feminist Fiction 77) .

Ann Swinfen, who conducts a study of Fantasy in English and Amercian

Literature since 1945, makes a differentiation between primary world fantasy and

secondaly world fantajy. To her, fantasy does not deal with marvelous beings; it

is all about Man instead. So the purpose of fantasy, according to Swinfen, is:

"...the exploration of enhanced imaginative experience of the primary

world itself, the deeper religious and philosophical foundations of some of

the novels and the social concern which employs utopias and dystopias as

the most effective means of presenting the writers' views." (In Defence of

Fantasy 10).

T.E. Apter acknowledges the fascination and brilliance of the great

psychoanalytic writers in her work - Fantasy Literature. She feels that the aim of

fantasy is the same as that of psychoanalysis -both attempts to investigate human

reality. Psychoanalytic theory is used to aid her interpretation of the genre of

fantasy.

A detailed analysis of Magic Realism reveals itself to be subsumed by both

Postmodernism and Postcolonialism. This convergence of postcolonialism and

postmodernism in Magic Realism has been discovered by Robbie. B.H. Goh who

feels that generic blumng itself is postmodernist and hence Magic realism:" ... is

often extended to refer to literatures with similar narrative strategies, but which

have very different socio-political contexts and motivations." (ARIEL 30.3(1999)

67). Thus in the place of the well-wrought urn, we have instead in Magic Realism

a kaleidoscope in which there are only multiple possibilities.

An overview of the achievement of some of the practitioners of Magic

Realism who are Toni Momson's contemporaries reveals their widely differing

modes of operation). For instance, Iris Murdoch, the English novelist, born in

1019, finds that her fiction is tom between an objection to form and the realization

that art cannot do without it. This tension is hrther enhanced by her fascination

for both controlling myths and symbolism. Under these strains, many of her

novels are flattened into allegorical maps. In The Bell (1958), set in an Anglican

lay community, the relations of the members of the community with one another

are submerged by the symbolic weight of the bell. The Bell represents the solid

mystery of the real, with the effect that the actual solid mystery of the real drains

away. In her other novels like The Sandcastle (1957) and A Severed Head (1961),

a mythic structure seems to hold greater aesthetic importance than the heavily

manipulated characters. Her best novels are A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970),

The Sea, the Sea (1978) and The Philosophers' Pupil (1983). In these three works,

Murdoch makes productive use of her own mistrust of art's powers to dramatise a

confrontation between the artist and the saint and between egotism and

selflessness. Charles Arroby, in The Sea, the Sea is a theatrical impresario who

has retired to a seaside village. In Murdoch's bestiary of enchanters and Prospero-

figures, he is a relatively benign manipulator. Charles' delusions of power are

contrasted with the selfless Buddhism of James, his cousin. But James has

genuine magical powers of manipulation and is certainly an ambiguous saint. One

of the reasons why Murdoch has become popular among - serious contemporary

novelists is her magic realist combination of macabre plots, elements of the

grotesque and supernatural and glimpses of social comedy. Like Murdoch,Toni

Morrison too makes use of these elements to weave tales of magic realism.

ltalo Calvino, the Cuban novelist born in 1923 is another contemporary of

Morrison who lets fantasy blossom in his fiction. The three fantastic novels that

he brought together as Our Ancestors (1960) includes The Cloven Viscount

(1952) whose protagonist is split into his good and bad halves by a canon-ball;

The Non-existant Knight (1959) whose hero is an inexorable will contained inside

a suit of amour and The Baron in the Trees (1957) in which a young eighteenth

century nobleman climbs into the trees in a fit of pique and stays there for the rest

of his life.

Much of the work that followed, culminating in the multiple

openings of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979) played combinatorial games

with different ideas and forms of fiction. Although the tricks Calvino played in

some of his books - particularly the Tarot-based The Castle of Crossed Destinies

(1973) - were too clever for some admirers of the earlier fables, an enormous

number of readers found in the later Calvino a distinctively pleasurable

exploitation of theatrical ideas. If on a Winter's Night for instance, plays games

with figures such as the Author (One Italo Calvino), the Critic, the Forger, the

female Reader (Ludmilla) and the Reader ('you'). He brings everything to a

satisfying fairy-tale conclusion when 'You' finally finds happiness by marrying

Ludmilla. This successful combination of lightness and seriousness itself is a

magic realist device, which continues to win admirers for him.

Going over to the Latin American writers of the 1960's, one sees a marked

increase in the production and availability of innovative and experimental novels.

For example, the freedom of the story- teller was asserted in Latin American

fiction of the sixties. The story-teller was a traditional figure forgotten in modem

European and North American fiction. The story-teller relays the community's

sense of itself, which may require extremes of fantasy for its expression, or

extreme mixtures of fantasy and a grimly fantastic reality. It is with Gabriel Garcia

Marquez's, One Hundred Years of Solitude that the full benefits of a retrieval of

both probable and improbable stories were recognized.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the unlikely tale of five generations of

a single South American family. They inhabit an unnamed country whose history

and geography much resemble those of Garcia Marquez's native Colombia. They

are visited by civil wars and by progress in many of its least manageable forms

(bureaucracy, railways, cinema, north American investment) and they die out in an

apocalyptic storm which destroys both their town and their story- except for what

a young writer in Paris remembers or invents of it. The great power of this very

famous book lies in its mingling of the fabulous (magic carpets, a levitating priest,

a man who suddenly spouts Latin without having learned a word of it) and the

horrific (the massacre of more than three thousand protesters, who become

historical ghosts because almost no one will admit they existed) and in its haunting

sense of a potentially intelligible but always misunderstood history. Toni

Momson's method is akin to that of Marquez's in that she too lets the marvellous

be a part of the horrifying tales of slavery.

Her first, Shadow Dance (1966), a detective novel, set in Bristol slums is

a grisly story of cruelty and vengeance. The Magic Toyshop (1967), which won

the Rhys Memorial Prize in 1968, is a novel about the painful passage from

innocence to experience of two teenaged siblings imprisoned above a London

Toyshop. Several Perceptions (1968) another novel about the violence of modem

life, won the Somerset Maugham Award for that year.

As a critique of the realist tradition and what it represents, Carter's next

novels depart contemporary settings for more magical terrain. She talked about

leaving the realist tradition for a more mythological direction. Heroes and Villains

( 1 969) is a novel of what has been called ' Gothic Science fiction' because it is a

fantasy set in a future resembling the Gothic period. Probably her most important

novel of this genre is The Infernal Desire Machine of Dr Hoffman. This is all

about the search for a machine that will replace reality with fantasy.

Aside from eight novels, Carter has also written hvo collections of short

stories, a screen play, children's stories, volume of poetry, a translation of French

fairy tales of Charles Perrault, and an analysis of sexual morality through an

exploration of de Sade's pornography called The Sadeian Woman (1979). Carter

has often been called a Magic Realist, a writer of science fiction, a mythological

writer, or even, a Gothic writer. Because one usually finds one or more of these

elements in many of her novels and stories, it is hard to say precisely to which

genre her works belong.

Alice Walker is another writer who has a lot in common with Toni

Momson. Like Monison's fiction, Alice Walker's life and writings reflects the

tensions and ideals of a womanist writer coming of age in the 1960s. It was a

period of renewed black consciousness that issued in the activism of the civil

rights and black power movements, followed by the women's movement. Much

of her work brings in the twin maladies of black women's lives - racism and

sexism. Yet her works have a larger purpose : they chronicle the fortunes of black

Americans in the twentieth century. The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)

and The Color Purple span the period from 1920 to 1942. Meridian extends this

chronology from 1960 to about 1975. Though she began in The Third Life by

defining the black experience in relation to white society, explaining the cruelties

of black men as a consequence of the psychological and economic exploitation of

the dominant culture, Walker has increasingly sought to embody the forms of

black life on their own terms. It is in this sense that The Color Purple represents

her most signal achievement .

Walker's technique is experimental and innovative, reflective of female

perceptions and genres. Critics have thus frequently commented on the epistollary

form of The Color Purple. Less examination has been given to the kaleidoscopic

or mosaic structure of Meridian or the way in which Walker weaves the ritual of

the marriage ceremony with the thoughts of his female character in "Roselily" as a

counterpoint to the distance between promise and fulfillment that is the theme of

the story.

Salman Rushdie is another contemporary of Toni Momson, whose novels

are all examples of Magic Realism. Born in Bombay in1947and educated at

Cambridge University, he now lives in London. Grimus (1975) a richly

entertaining story about a truism, is grandly conceived as an extravagant fable

about man's need for myths in a demythologized age. Rushdie's volcanic

imagination and narrative gifts came together superbly in Midnight's Children

(1981) where he succeeds in matching a grand subject, the multitudiousness of

India itself, with a narrator's microcosmic personal history and in fashioning out

of the absurd incongruity a novel about the creative process in a world under

constant threat. In Shame (1983) he is again concerned with creative process,

more than with the wretched of Pakistan, rewriting the history of a country

founded in the year of his birth and scarifying its elitist class so that a major

character is allegorized into Shame itself.

His next novel, The Satanic Verses (1988) raised questions of censorship

and freedom of expression. From its abrupt opening, when Gibreel Farishta and

Saladin Chamcha suffer their 'angelicdevilish fall' to earth and their hijacked

aircraft explodes, The Satanic Verses announces its purpose of addressing religion

- particularly Islam - not directly but with intense, proliferating and often comic

energy. Rushdie's mingling of history, realism and fiction is undoubtedly magic

realist; but his novel has less of an affinity with Morrison's mode.

Toni Momson is an African American writer who maps the terrain of

American cultural and social history using the technique of Magic Realism.

Though she needs no introduction, a brief account of her life and literary

achievement is ideal to understand her prominent rank in the literary history of

America. In the wake of her increasing presence in the international context - as

revealed by the multiplicity of languages into which her novels have been

translated and especially in the wake of her winning the Noble Prize for literature

In 1993, Morrison has become a figure that challenges pre existing notions of an

American writer, a black writer, a woman writer, and a black intellectual. On

October seventh, 1988, she entered the world ofliterary criticism with the Tanner

Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan. Her presentation was

entitled "Unspeakable Things Unspoken : The Afro-American Presence in

American literature". With this lecture she made clear her remarkable ability to

recognize, seize and intervene in the important happenings of her time . In

deciding to talk and write about literary criticism, Morrison joins Amiri Baraka,

Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and Sterling Brown - a community of scholars who

have revised and remade critical history.

In 1975 @ had received the National Book Award nomination. In 1978,

National Book Critics' Circle Award was received for Song of Solomon. This was

the first Ahcan American novel since Richard Wright's Native Son which was

chosen as a main selection of the Book - of - the - Month Club. The 1988

Pulitzer Prize for fiction was won by Beloved. Her Tanner Lecture has now an

enlarged and enriched published fonn in Playing in the Dark which came out in

1992. She also helped to bring into being The Black Book in 1974 which was a

collection of material from black history - representations of blacks' lives as well

as black cultural expressions. It contains newspaper clippings, photographs, songs,

advertisements, slave bills of sale, Patent Ofice records, receipts, rent-party

jingles and other memorabilia-in short, African American history as revealed in

elements of material culture. While her name appears nowchere on it, the

collection was her own idea, her project. The Black Book was thus Morrison's

intervention into historical discourse. She has also produced two collections of

essays on topical issues: Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power (1992) and Birth of

a Nation' hood (1997). These essay collections addressing the Clarence Thomas

and Anita Hill controversy and the response to O.J. Simpson trial respectively, are

the result of her ability to make space for progressive politically-engaged

academic contributions to the concerned of the nation.

Momson's early life is full of signposts to her later creativity. She grew up

In a family of story tellers and musicians. Both her parents told ghost stories. Her

grandmother played the numbers by decoding dream symbols. She was born on

February 18, 193 1, in Lorain, Ohio as Chloe Antony Wofford, the second of four

children of George Wofford, a car washer, steel mill welder, and road construction

and shipyard worker. Her mother was Ramah Willis Wofford who worked at home

and sang in church. Her mother's parents had come north from Alabama via

Kentucky where her grandfather had worked in coal mines, to get away from

poverty and racism. Her father, who came from Georgia, born the imprint of

racial violence of that state. Although neither parent was especially optimistic

about the ability of whites to transcend their racism, they believed in

neighbourhood and community. Lorain was a steel town, multiracial and

consistently poor; but Morrison learned quite early in life what it meant to live in

an economically co operative neighbourhood.

From Lorain

Howard University

High School, Morrison went on to earn her B.A. degree from

f 7 0 ~

in 1953 and her M.A.,Cornell University in 1955. Momson

taught at Texas Southern University for two years and then until 1964 at Howard

University where the Black Power activists Stokely Carmichael was one of her

students. While teaching at Howard, she met and married Harold Morrison, a

Jamaican architect and gave birth to two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. She

left Howard in 1964 , divorced her husband and moved to New York where she

began her career as an editor at Random House. She continued to teach - at Yale,

at Bard College, at the State University of New York campuses at Purchase and at

Albany and at Rutgers University. In 1989 she became a member of Princeton

University's faculty. She also held the International Condorcet Chair at the E'cole

Normale Supe'rieure and College de France (1994) and spent one year (1998) as

the A.D.White Professor- at - Large at Cornell University. As might be expected,

Momson's literary and teaching careers are studded with awards - national and

international - and honorary degrees.

Equally important as the details of Morrison's biography and her writing

and academic careers are the contexts for the production of her books, the larger

history of African American men and women. The Bluest Eye [I9701 was written

during a period of an emerging black aesthetic, the cultural arm of the black

113~ .. .

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militancy movement. The book's opening lines imply the keeping of a secret. It

is a dirty little secret, not just of personal aesthetics but of race and of class.

Sula (1973) was produced in the midst of the reinvigorated feminist

movement and debate. Momson maintains that throughout their history in

America, black women have been protofeminists - aggressive, the objects of a

labour history as oppressive as men's and required to do physical labour in

competition with them. So their relationship turned out to be more of a

comradeship than the conventional patriarchal pattern. Within her family, her

parents confronted crises as they arose without adhering to a system of gender -

divided responsibilities. She views the comradely partnership within the

marriages of older generations of blacks as having died out as now blacks

participate more and more in the gender illness of the general culture.

Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981) and Beloved (1987) are

extended engagements with larger issues of group history. Song of Solomon sets

that group history with in the parameters of the family romance. Tar Baby

focuses on the relationship of colonialism and its attendant history to the family

dynamics and antithetical cultures within a multiracial household. Beloved

negotiates history as a narrative of the ownership of the most concrete fact of

human existence - the body - as well as the most abstract of human relationships

- love. Jazz (1992) is all about the contradictory dynamics of the making of a city

as well as the fractures and fissures of neighbourhoods. The same narrative is

repeated with infinite variation as the title suggests. Paradise (1998) continues the

parallel, intersectional, and contradictory attention to history that Jazz offers. At

the same time, it is also a further adventure into the constituting of community by

the means of the mechanism of story telling. As all these novels combine the

symbolic virtues of modernism, the politics of the Black Aesthetic and a rich

lyricism, they have certainly followed the African American literary tradition -

they have been richly varied, in both ideology and form. This has prompted an

interest in tracing the cultural origin of Momson's fiction. This dissertation

therefore has its focus on delineating different features of Momson's magic

realism which are all born out of her distinctive cultural experience. Thus, this

study tries to establish that it is her African-American heritage that helps her to

achieve success with her model of Magic Realism.

The thesis in five chapters makes an attempt to analyse the elements of

Magic Realism in the novels of Toni Morrison. It is surprising to note that

writers who are labeled Magic Realists by critics and readers are reluctant to

accept that label. Alejo Carpentier, who devised this style of fiction in the 1960's,

had a deep rooted resentment towards the phrase. Salman Rushdie seems to be its

only practitioner who defends the form. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gaele Mgowe,

Githa Hariharan and Nuruddin Farah - all contemporary practitioners of Magic

Realism resist the attribution of the label to their works. Toni Monison is also

vocally against the term. Morrison's principal complaint is that Magic Realism

negates the cultural origins of her fiction. This is precisely the reason why this

study attempts to explore Momsonian magic realism.

The introductory chapter presents a brief history of magic Realism. This

is followed by an overview of the literary achievement of a few practitioners of

Magic Realism who are Toni Momson's contemporaries. This shows the

diversity in the use of Magic Realism.

The nature of magic in Morrison's model of Magic Realism forms the

subject of both the sccond and third chapters. How magic becomes a utopian

construct is analysed in the second chapter. Momson's conception of utopia is

refreshingly different. The Afro-American community and its importance in black

culture is glorified and presented as the utopian ideal by her. A carefit1 analysis of

various neighbourhoodslcommunities in Morrison's fiction reveals that they are

synonymous with integrity and courage in the face of racial and sexual oppression.

The extremely close-knit ties within the Afro-American community is another

utopian feature, and its practice of sharing is romanticised by Monison. This

chapter also includes the rendering of folk beliefs, superstitious and folk medicine

which becomes part of her attempt at unravelling the utopian features of her

community.

Morrison's magic also brings in alarmingly unpleasant portrayal of typical

Afro-American ways of living. This certainly requires the presentation of

dystopian elements in her fiction which is done in the third chapter. Thus non-

conservative only-women households are proved to exhibit the complex way in

which marginalized black women construct and experience a community of their

own. These households epitomise non-accumulation and the economic

independence of cottage industry; but there is an utter lack of warmth, care and

concern that one associates with a normal family here. Secondly, the city is often

presented by Morrison as a space of terror and segregation thus attributing

dystopian characteristics to urbanness. Another manifestation of the dystopia

projected by Morrison is madness and other personality disorders encountered by

her characters who have been subjected to race, class and sexist oppression. A

dystopia always makes use of inverted or undesirable use of utopian elements.

Hence, the grotesque which features largely in her fiction is the fourth element of

Morrisonian dystopia. The extreme forms of physical and mental deformity that

she lists for us make us see the reality of the trials and tribulations of Afro-

Americans with more clarity. Momson firmly believes that only a dystopia can

deal with what has been repressed.

The fourth chapter is all about the element of fantasy in Morrison's fiction.

As fantasy challenges the reader with novel perspectives, Morrison's fiction too

permeates its fantastical elements through different areas like the uncanny,

elements of folktale, dreams and songs. As a result of the newness of these

strands of fantasy, the reader's standard concepts of permitted thought in story

telling are cast aside.

According to Freud, the uncanny belongs to the class of the temfying

which leads back to something long known by us. On the other hand, T.E. Apter's

view is that it is arbitrary to relate the uncanny to the arousal of repressed material.

She explains that the uncanny touches upon material that is frequently ignored

because it is too elusive to fit into normal thought. Monison's fiction abounds in

the use of the uncanny cited by Apter. It is exaggeration actually; but only that

can assist the writer who uses fantasy to bring out the stark reality of slavery.

Descriptions of folklore are there in plenty in Morrison's fiction. This acts

as a unifying force in Momson's fantasy. Dreams are used by her for a special

reason: the perception of the secondary world in her Fantasy has an indistinct and

dreamlike quality. Songs are again used by her because music is central to black

culture. References to women's blues and Jazz are all dealt with in detail in this

chapter. The subversive nature of fantasy is also looked into. Momson firmly

believes that only a fantasy can deal with what has been repressed; the

inexpressible can be expressed with the aid of fantasy.

The fifth chapter analyses Momson's narrative techniques at length.

Fragmentary and elliptical narration that defies the normal patterns of storytelling

is her method. The same story is picked up by different characters and presented

with more and more details. These different accounts are sometimes more

confusing to the reader than the idea gleaned by him from the first point of view.

At other times this dialogical method of narration resolves the complex doubts in

the reader. All the different methods of narration are explored in this chapter.

The final section of fifth chapter dwells on Morrison's use of language.

This brings out her quest for the Afro-American woman's voice -an attempt to

create a recycling of typical black and feminist writing. For instance, she has a

habit of yoking together two extremes, so that the image portrayed startles the

reader. Her images and similes are all from the world of women. All kinds of

semantic derogation associated with Black English are abandoned by her when she

uses these characteristic expressions.

If Realism gives us a linear description of history, Magic Realism grants us

a more interesting rendering of history through legends and myths. If the realist

tradition is all about familiarization, then the magical mode is more of

defamiliarization which borders on a universal element. Realism indulges in a

chronological manner of narration. On the other hand Magic Realism revels in

meta-narration. As a contrast to the closure-ridden works of Realism, here one has

open-ended and baffling works. In the place of naturalism of Realism, Magic

Realism exults in romanticism and glorification. All these arresting elements of

the genre are worked out in Morrison's model, as the subsequent chapters shall

reveal.