Magical Realism in Postcolonial British Fiction: History, Nation, and Narration

Introduction

What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.

- Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four

Essays

Novel Beginnings: The Novel and the Nation

The early twentieth century saw the emergence of a narrative mode, namely magical realism, that seems to resist the very practice of literary categorisation as the discussions as to its origin, conceptual definition and genuine practitioners have not ceased ever since its inception. The ambiguity and confusion surrounding the term do not only stem from the literal oxymoron, magical realism, which suggests a relationship of irreconcilable realms, but also from the intricate history behind it, spanning ninety-five years with three major turning points.[1] Pictorial in origin, the term first appeared in Germany in the 1920s. It was only two years later that it crossed the Atlantic and came to be associated with an innovative literary style in Latin America. By the end of the 1960s, magical realism had already established itself as a literary style unique to Latin American literature, which found its finest expressions in the works of Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. Starting from the 1980s, magical realism has come to enjoy a global appeal with the rise of postcolonial literatures. Today, it functions as an umbrella term, referring to the characteristics of a literary mode which makes it possible to hold together such a diverse group of writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and many others. The present study focuses on the last phase of magical realism, that is the postcolonial period, and aims at exploring the cultural work of magical realism in postcolonial Anglophone fiction by specifically pursuing answers to questions related to its widespread popularity in the former colonies. A particular focus of attention is, as the title suggests, the novelistic representations of the nation and history.

The framework of the present study is largely indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel that he laid out in his famous essays, which were later collected in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). Particularly important and relevant to the theoretical framework of this study are Bakhtin’s ideas concerning the resolute contemporaneity of the novel, and his emphasis on the necessity to deploy a contextual approach for the study of the novel. Bakhtin states that he decided to formulate his own theory of the novel because of the inadequacy of the existing literary theories to elucidate the profound originality of the genre. For Bakhtin, much of the difficulty of providing a theory of the novel rises from the fact that it is a genre of a new and changing world, and it is “yet uncompleted” and “continues to develop,” as he notes in “Epic and Novel” (3). It is precisely this ceaseless process of development that does not allow the novel a fixed generic definition. Bakhtin takes this quality of the novel not as a problem to be overcome, but as its defining characteristic. For Bakhtin, the novel is, above all, “a genre-in-the-making,” one in “a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (7). Unlike the novel, other genres, such as epic and tragedy, have already lost their literariness and become obsolete. These dead genres “preserve their rigidity and canonic quality in all classical eras of their development; variations from era to era, from trend to trend, or school to school are peripheral and do not affect their ossified generic skeleton” (8).

Bakhtin offers three characteristics to help distinguish the novel in principle from the epic and other obsolete genres,

(1) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness. (11)

These three characteristics are all organically interrelated since they came into being as a result of a significant event in European history: capitalist expansion. For Bakhtin, the rise of the novel coincides with European countries’ coming into contact with other cultures and widening their linguistic repertoire. The novel is, as Bakthin puts it, “powerfully affected by a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: Its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships” (11). As a literary outcome of this multitude of different languages, cultures and times, the novel is in a constant flux, “ever questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established forms to review” (39). The aptness for self-criticism is the source of the novel’s immense capacity for change and experimentation, which Bakhtin calls “stylistic three-dimensionality” (39).

Temporality is the central concept in Bakhtin’s distinction between the novel and completed genres, including the epic. “In general,” Bakhtin notes, “the world of high literature in the classical era was a world projected into the past, on the distanced plane of memory, but not into a real, relative past tied to the present by uninterrupted temporal transitions; it was projected rather into a valorized past of beginnings and peak times” (19). The epic is, by definition, a poem about an absolute past, shared by the collective national memory. However, Bakhtin alerts us to the fact that “‘absolute past’ is not to be confused with time in our exact and limited sense of the word; it is rather a temporally valorized hierarchical category” (18). Bakhtin believes that the epic depicts a fixed idealised image of the national past, which demands a pious attitude as it is hierarchically above the reader. It is, as he puts it, the world of “firsts” and “bests.” (15). It follows that the epic is monochromic since it does not have any organic connections with the present. Although the author and his/her audience share the same temporal plane, the present, “the represented world of the heroes stands on an utterly different and inaccessible time-and-value plane, separated by epic distance” (14). It is, therefore, impossible to rethink and re-evaluate the present in the zone of an absolute distant image created by the epic. It does not serve the future but “the future memory of a past” and therefore the epic creates “a world that is always opposed in principle to any merely transitory past” (19 emphasis original).

For Bakhtin, the novel marks the shift of the temporal centre of artistic orientation from the absolute past to living contemporaneity with all its multiplicity. The creative impulse behind the novel is not the memory, but “experience, knowledge and practice (the future)” (15). It is contemporary reality that forms the novel’s point of view. Anchored in evolving contemporary reality rather than the distant past, the novel “reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of unfolding” (7).[2] According to Bakhtin, it is laughter that destroys the hierarchical epic distance and thus the closed world of the epic: “[t]he ‘absolute past’ of gods, demigods and heroes is here, in parodies and even more so in travesties, ‘contemporized’: it is brought low, represented on a plane equal with contemporary life, in an everyday environment, in the low language of contemporaneity” (21). In this narrative plane opened by the novel, different voices, styles, and languages come into play, giving rise to what Bakhtin terms as ‘dialogism.’ As Bakhtin explains in his Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, the term dialogism refers to “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” (6). In stark contrast with the monologism of traditional authorial discourse as in the epic tradition, in dialogic texts characters speak for themselves, representing different social strata and ideological concerns. However, it should be noted that in Bakhtinian theory ‘dialogue’ does not mean a mere exchange of words or ideas as the everyday use of the word suggests. On the contrary, it entails “a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view” (“Discourse” 273). As an example of dialogic imagination, Bakhtin points to Dostoevsky’s ability to create textual spaces in which several voices maintain equal dominance where the contestation among socio-linguistic points of view results in resistance to discursive unities.

In addition to contesting worldviews, the novel also incorporates in its body different types of texts, or in Bakhtin’s own words, “extraliterary genres,” “the genres of everyday life” and “ideological genres” (“Epic” 33). That is to say, different texts and discourses come into play within the textual plane of the novel, providing a meaningful context for the analysis of the socio-cultural changes taking place in a given society. Bakhtin writes,

The novel makes wide and substantial use of letters, diaries, confessions, the forms and methods of rhetoric associated with recently established courts and so forth. Since it is constructed in a zone of contact with the incomplete events of a particular present, the novel often crosses the boundary of what we strictly call fictional literature – making use first of a moral confession, then of a political tract, then of manifestos that are openly political, then degenerating into the raw spirituality of a confession a “cry of the soul” that has not yet found its formal contours […] After all, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between literature and nonliterature and so forth are not laid up in heaven. Every specific situation is historical. And the growth of literature is not merely development and change within the fixed boundaries of any given definition; the boundaries themselves are constantly changing. (“Epic” 33; emphasis added)

Here, Bakhtin anticipates one of the fundamental postulates of poststructuralist theories, such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: all texts, literary or non-literary, are part of the same sign system and they are inevitably embedded in a given historical context. This equal weighting between history and literature that rejects any hierarchical separation between the two is succinctly put forward by Louis Montrose in his famous assertion of “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history” (23).[3]

The above excerpt is also important in that it underscores the condition of interdependency among texts, literary or otherwise. It was Julia Kristeva who reformulated the Bakhtinian notion of the dialogic through her semiotic study of text, textuality and their relation to wider ideological structures. According to Kristeva, Bakhtinian theory is characterised by his conception of “‘literary word’ as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context” (65). In her interpretation of Bakhtin, Kristeva substitutes the concept of literary word with that of text. For Kristeva, the act of writing means interweaving of already existing texts. In other words, the author does not create anything new, but re-writes existing contemporary or earlier texts into his or her own text. Thus, Kristeva concludes that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66). In the Bakhtinian theory of dialogism and its extension in Kristeva’s intertextuality, the novel with its ability to incorporate different texts and discourses in its textual body stands as a quintessential register of humankind’s social and political existence and its attendant problems.

It is difficult to subscribe to some of Bakhtin’s ideas concerning the novel, for instance his proposition that the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop, or that the novel does not have a generic canon of its own. However, his proposition of the novel as a critical cultural medium for tracing social and cultural changes in history is still relevant and widely influential today. In keeping with Bakhtinian theory, the novel in this study is taken to mean a historically engaged explanatory genre, which in its attempt to describe an evolving contemporary reality challenges and subverts the established paradigms of knowledge and perception.

Described by Mikhail Bakhtin as a literary genre most sensible to social and historical changes, the novel came to the fore in the emerging postcolonial literatures in the second half of the twentieth century. The 1950s and the 1960s witnessed a period of rapid decolonisation as colonial countries one after another gained independence through a process of anti-colonial resistance that ranged from legal and diplomatic manoeuvres to wars of independence (Mishra and Hodge 282). In the early phases of decolonisation, postcolonial writers saw literature as yet another means of national self-assertion through which they could reclaim their past overshadowed by European interpretation. To this end, writers, poets and playwrights alike turned to their pre-colonial cultural heritage and endeavoured to help reconstruct themselves as the subjects of their own histories. The novel became a major agent in the process of forging national consciousness in the wake of new nation states. In “The National Longing for Form,” Timothy Brennan notes,

Nations […] are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role. And the rise of European nationalism coincides especially with one form of literature – the novel.

It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ of national life, and by mimicking the structures of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles. Socially, the novel joined the newspaper as the major vehicle of the national print media, helping to standardize language, encourage literacy, and remove mutual incomprehensibility. But it did more than that. Its manner of presentation allowed people to imagine the special community that was the nation. (173; emphasis original)

Brennan proceeds to argue that “it is especially in Third World countries after the Second World War that the fictional uses of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are most pronounced” (170).[4] As such, the postcolonial novel with its rich thematic concerns and strong historical rootedness has brought literary studies an exciting dynamism in the last forty years or so, serving as one of its central mobilising tropes.

The novelistic representation of national identity has changed along with the question of what constituted that identity. In the early independence period, the nationalist ideologies in former colonies adopted an essentialist outlook, rejecting the influence of the colonial culture to a great extent. However, as people have become more attuned to a multicultural postcolonial perspective, an awareness of cultures and identities as heterogeneous hybrids, inseparable from the influence of the colonising culture, has grown stronger. The transformation in the novelistic representations of the nation followed a similar course. Nineteenth-century realism dominated the early period of the postcolonial novel, giving rise to a large body of works that tend to promote the pre-colonial indigenous culture as authentic. Concomitant with the advent of postcolonial theories that see postcolonial cultural identity essentially as a combination of the indigenous people and the coloniser’s cultural practices, magical realism replaced conventional realism as the dominant mode of literary representation (Ashcroft at al., Key 21-22). As Maggie Anne Bowers points out, many postcolonial critics have come to see magical realism as “a highly appropriate and significant concept for cultural production created in the context of increasing heterogeneity and cross-culturalism at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first” (6).[5]

The mode’s capacity to represent hybrid identities seems to lie in the definition of the term itself. A basic definition of magical realism, Christopher Warnes notes, “sees it as a mode of narration that naturalizes or normalizes the supernatural; that is to say, a mode in which real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of rigorous equivalence – neither has a greater claim to truth or referentiality” (2). The two opposing narrative elements, the realistic and the fantastic, are presented in a harmonious integrity so that the supernatural in the text seems to grow out of everyday reality. As a fusion of traditionally incompatible fictional worlds, magical realism is thought to reflect the situation of peoples from former colonies living in an essentially hybrid cultural environment where the elements of indigenous cultural heritage such as myths, legends and folk tales and those of the coloniser’s exist side by side. Critics like Brenda Cooper, Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Slemon, among others, consider magical realism as a decolonising agent that gives voice to the suppressed or silenced communities. They maintain that there is a natural correlation between the formal characteristics of the mode and its cultural work. For instance, Elleke Boehmer succinctly summarises the relationship between magical realism and postcolonialism as follows:

Drawing on the special effects of magic realism, postcolonial writers in English are able to express their view of a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement. […] [T]hey combine the supernatural with local legend and imagery derived from colonialist cultures to represent societies which have been repeatedly unsettled by invasion, occupation, and political corruption. Magic effects, therefore, are used to indict the follies of both empire and its aftermath. (Colonial 235)

In more recent scholarship, however, it has been acknowledged that magical realism should be regarded as a global literary phenomenon whose roots can be found in different cultural and literary traditions. For instance, Anne C. Hegerfeldt claims that “[t]o disconnect magic realism from postcolonial literatures is not to say that the mode is not essentially a postcolonial one. In challenging the rational-empirical world-view’s claim to hegemony and revaluing alternative modes of thought, magic realism pursues decidedly postcolonial aims” (303). In keeping with this view, the scope of the present study is not restricted to postcolonial literatures and extends to a discussion of magical realism as a global literary mode. In other words, magical realism, in this exegesis, is not treated as a strictly postcolonial literary narrative mode, and its relation to postcolonial literatures, particularly its cultural work as a decolonising agent, is investigated in a longer historical perspective and a broader literary context.

Accordingly, the aim of this study is twofold: (i) to survey the historical evolution of magical realism from its pictorial origins to the present in order to identify the characteristics of the mode that make its wide dissemination and appropriation in different cultural contexts possible, (ii) to delineate the place of magical realism in postcolonial Anglophone fiction through analyses of four novels selected from the two major postcolonial locations, India and Africa: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) from postcolonial Indian literature; Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990) from postcolonial African literature. Given the impossibility of comprehensive coverage of magical realist writing, the present study is necessarily and unavoidably selective in its attempt to discuss the mode in relation to postcolonial literature. The above-mentioned four novels are not, of course, the only texts that could be chosen, and they should not be treated as paradigmatic of postcolonialism. Nor do they represent the wide-ranging magical realist writing in an exhaustive fashion. Rather, it is their shared thematic concerns and technical experimentation with magical realism that bind these novels together as a meaningful group of texts to be studied in a single framework. In sum, the selected novels technically reflect the generic characteristics of magical realism as a literary mode, and thematically they are endowed with postcolonial issues of culture, identity and nationality and therefore present a compelling context for a study of this highly problematic literary mode.

Magical realism, like other literary modes, such as allegory and satire, has been adopted and modified by writers and critics in order to articulate a wide range of political, social and cultural realities. The cultural work of magical realism has also evolved and diversified along with its historical development, turning it into one of the most complicated and disputed literary terms. The present study does not seek to settle the ongoing debates around magical realist literature by offering a restrictive definition for the term. Such a project is doomed to failure given the intricate history and theoretical background of the mode. It is therefore necessary to turn to the history of the term in order to understand how and why it has taken on its current meanings and implications. To this end, chapter 1, “From Painting to Literature: A Genealogy of Magical Realism,” surveys the development of magical realism from its origin in European painting to its appropriation into literature by European and Latin American writers and critics. The contested definitions of magical realism and critical questions surrounding these are also explored here. In an attempt to conclude the survey commenced in chapter 1, the remainder of the study focuses on the last phase in the development of magical realism, namely the postcolonial period, and aims at studying the relationship between magical realism and representations of postcolonial identity in Anglophone Indian and African novels. Chapter 2, “From Latin America to the Globe: DissemiNation of Magical Realism,” provides historical contextualisation for the discussion of the selected novels, outlining the generic and thematic preoccupations in postcolonial literatures in Africa and India immediately before and after independence. Then, it proceeds to analyse the relation between the paradigmatic transformation in postcolonial studies and the concomitant rise of magical realism as the literary expression of Third World countries. This chapter also provides a brief history of postcolonial studies and specifies terminology related to the field of study with particular attention to the difference among such terms as “commonwealth,” “postcolonial” and “neo-colonial.” Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to a thorough analysis of the selected novels. The main focus of attention in these chapters will be the ways in which the novelists in question have exploited magical realism to represent their national identities and history. The conclusion brings together debates conducted in the course of the research work and attempts to provide some insights that may help to understand the cultural work of magical realism in postcolonial Anglophone fiction.