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

Chapter 1

From Painting to Literature: A Genealogy of Magical Realism

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

- Jorge Luis Borges

It seems that the term magical realism, as Frederick Jameson puts it, has “a strange seductiveness” (302), for despite all the terminological and conceptual problems, it has survived as one of the key literary concepts. It can now be found in university curricula, theses, dissertations and academic articles. It has also received significant attention in popular culture, particularly in children’s literature and cinema. As the theoretical attempts to pin down the concept have proved to be inconclusive, critics have subsequently come to acknowledge the fact that the usefulness and popularity of the term is due in large measure to its elusive conceptual definition and complex history. The task of defining magical realism, therefore, entails tracing the genealogy of the term first in the context of European art and then in Latin American and postcolonial literatures respectively. Such a survey with special emphasis on the nuances between the applications of the term in different contexts as well as its development through history will allow the fundamental nature of magical realist literature to be revealed.

One of the main sources of confusion surrounding the term seems to be taxonomy. Different labels have been offered to define the works of art and literature that have come to be classified under the rubric of magical realism: “magic realism,” “new objectivity,” and “lo real maravilloso americano” (the American marvellous real). While some critics make subtle distinctions between these terms in order to eschew obfuscation, others use them indiscriminately to refer to both works of art and literature. Maggie Ann Bowers, for example, employs “magic realism” and “magical realism” in different contexts: the former refers to paintings and the latter to literary works, particularly fiction. Bowers offers the catch-all term “magic(al) realism” to refer to works of art and literature where they have common features (3). However, most of the scholars and critics whose works were consulted in the course of the present study tend to use the two terms interchangeably, which indicates the fact that the terms “magic realism” and “magical realism” have conflated in theoretical use. It is interesting to note that the use of the term can vary within the same critical work. For instance, although Lois P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, the editors of Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, favoured “magical realism” for the title of their study of the mode, the contributors to the compendium employed both terms, “magic realism” and “magical realism,” interchangeably in their analysis of literary works. In the present study, the mode, as indicated in the title, shall be referred to as “magical realism” in the context of literature except when other sources are quoted verbatim. The term “magic realism” shall be used specifically in art-historical context in keeping with Wendy B. Faris” translation of the term from German Magischer Realismus into English as “magic,” not “magical” realism. The other related terms, such as “new objectivity,” and “lo real maravilloso americano” shall be examined within their specific historical contexts.

The changes the term underwent were not limited to taxonomy. Although certain traits of its pictorial origin have stayed with the term along the way, magical realism has gained new connotations as it has been (re)located geographically and (re)defined theoretically. Each variation of the term, despite certain common features, has its own history and conceptual definition, making it almost impossible to scribe a unified history for such an immense artistic phenomenon. There have been numerous attempts to unravel the complexity of the term. Perhaps the most interesting of such attempts was the International Congress of Latin American Literature (Congreso Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana) held at Michigan University in 1974. The declared objective of the congress was to reach a standard definition of the term, thereby resolving the discrepancies in its theoretical use and application. The participants’ efforts were, however, inconclusive. In the course of the congress it became clear that such a scheme was not applicable to magical realism, an international artistic phenomenon with several different locations, theoretical models and a vast number of practitioners. Nine years after the congress, Seymour Menton writes in recollection, “many papers were read, heated discussions ensued, and some scholars even argued that, because of the lack of agreement, the term should be eliminated completely” (Magic 9). [6]

There is also a disparity of views among scholars and critics with regard to the classification of magical realism whether as a genre or as a mode. This seemingly trivial disagreement is, in fact, of great significance since the literary classification of magical realism should account for its capacities for adaptation to various generic, cultural and other conditions of expression. In her seminal study, Magical Realism and the Fantastic, Amaryll Chanady contends that magical realism should be classified as a literary mode rather than a genre, making a distinction between the two based on their ability to articulate the characteristics of literary categories that transcend historical and national boundaries. Chanady argues that a genre is “a well-defined and historically identifiable form,” whereas a mode is a “particular quality of a fictitious world that can characterize works belonging to several genres, periods or national literatures” (Magical 1-2). Similarly, Maggie Anne Bowers points out that “[t]he flexibility of the mode resides in the fact that it is not a genre belonging to one particular era, and therefore is not related to a particular critical approach” (63). This distinction also provides the grounds for understanding the appearance of magical realism in different forms of art, such as painting, cinema and literature, its global appeal and above all, the critical tendency to trace its origins back in the oral literature.[7] In view of its ability to transcend genres, schools, movements and national boundaries, magical realism shall be referred to as a literary and when appropriate, as an artistic mode in the present study.

The term “magic realism” entered the cultural lexicon in 1925 with the publication of the German art historian Franz Roh’s (1890-1965) seminal study entitled Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (Post-expressionism, Magic Realism: Problems of the Most Recent European Painting).[8] Roh coined the term to describe a new tendency flourishing in European painting after Expressionism, which he labelled Magischer Realismus (magic realism). Roh was not the only intellectual interested in the changes European painting was undergoing. In 1923, two years before the publication of Roh’s book, Gustav Hartlaub (1884-1963), the director of the Mannheim museum, recognised the significance of the emerging artistic trend and offered the name “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) for it. He also organised an exhibition with the same name that would travel Germany to introduce and popularise the representative works of the new art. Hartlaub’s new objectivity overshadowed Roh’s magic realism as the more popularly recognised name for the art form until around the 1960s. Ultimately, it has been Roh and not Hartlaub, who is predominantly remembered as the initial theoretician of magical realism, for his ideas played a crucial role in the conceptualisation of magical realism first in the sphere of art and then in literature.[9]

Magic realism was not an art movement in the sense that it was pronounced by a cohesive group of artists with a manifesto; it was rather the predominant artistic style of the early 1920s that appeared under different labels in several countries, including Austria, Holland, Italy, France and Russia (Guenther 44-45; Bowers 11). The common denominator that held this large of group artists together was their repudiation of Expressionism. Hence, Roh did not attempt to formulate a strict conceptual definition for the term. Instead, he tried to identify the new art’s points of departure from the tenets of Expressionism. As Lois P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris point out in their note to the excerpt from Franz Roh’s theoretical writing, for Roh magic realism, above all, signified “a return to Realism after Expressionism’s more abstract style” (15). Contrary to Expressionism that “shows an exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects [… and] resorts to the everyday and the commonplace for the purpose of distancing it, investing it with a shocking exoticism,” magic realism is more sober in subject matter and representational in style (Roh 16). The abandonment of the religious and transcendental themes in favour of the familiar and the mundane has become the hallmark of magic realist art; a fact also evident in Roh’s own study. “Our real world re-emerges before our eyes,” Roh rejoices as he writes after a decade of Expressionist interval (17).

Interested in the aesthetic qualities of the new art more than its historical background, Roh dispenses with the context in which magic realism developed in only a few lines. When explaining the difference between magic realism and Expressionism, Roh writes, “instead of the remote horrors of hell, the inextinguishable horrors of our own time” were drawn onto the canvas (17). What Roh referred to as “the inextinguishable horrors of our time” was the realities of post-war Germany. Unlike Roh, the later critics have become increasingly interested in the historical context of magic realism, for they tend to view the artists’ departure from abstract aesthetic forms as a response to the unprecedented destruction caused by the First World War. Maggie Anne Bowers, for example, argues that “democratically distanced from the rest of Europe and caught between the demolition of their old world and the uncertainty of the future, a desire for “Sachlichkeit” [Objectivity] was the growing focus of the nation” (8). This desire found its expression in art in the form of magic realist paintings, which Franz Roh describes as “the mirror of palpable exteriority” (18). Magic realists concentrated on urban themes and used them to offer social and political criticism of the difficult situation in which Germany found herself during the period between the World Wars (Bowers 43-44).

The works of art produced by the magic realists were found “degenerate” by the Nazi standards. Several painters such as Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Otto Dix and George Grosz, whose works Roh included in his book, were accused of being Bolshevists by the Nazi Chamber of Culture and prohibited from exhibiting their paintings. Hartlaub was removed from his position as museum director and Roh, denounced as a cultural Bolshevist, was taken to the Dachau concentration camp in 1933 only to be released with the intercession of a respected friend (Guenther 55). Certainly, the Nazi reaction to magic realist artists cannot be interpreted as a typical reception of the mode in other countries. It, nevertheless, pinpoints an important fact: magical realism is from the outset associated with socio-political agendas. The ability of magic realism to provide political criticism and social commentary would proliferate after its appropriation into literature. Lois P. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, for example, define magical realism as a literary mode “suited to exploring – and transgressing boundaries – whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic” (Zamora and Faris 5). Similarly, Brenda Cooper notes, “[m]agical realism at its best opposes fundamentalism and purity; it is at odds with racism, ethnicity and the quest for tap roots, origins and homogeneity” (22). Its resistance to and refusal of monologic political and cultural structures offers a possible explanation for the widespread popularity of the mode in postcolonial countries and Latin America.

Another aspect of the pictorial origin of the term that has proved its relevance to literary studies is its innovative spirit. Notwithstanding its return to a more representational style, magic realism was, as Roh notes, “still alien to the current idea of Realism,” and it was to the admirers of nineteenth-century Realism “as inappropriate as Expressionism itself” (Roh 17). The artists whom Roh listed in his book as magic realists produced paintings anchored in the objective world, but they did not reproduce nature like photography. Instead, they reconstructed the external reality through spiritual phenomenon. “For the new art,” Roh asserts, “it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world” (24; emphasis original). Whilst using real objects and familiar scenes as their starting point, the artists tried to show the hidden behind the surface of things and offered “a magical gaze opening onto a piece of mildly transfigured reality” (Roh 20). The “magic” of the binominal denotes the innovative characteristics of this new artistic mode that shows a significant deviation from the mimetic tradition with its intuitive recreation of objects.

As an art historian, Roh regards the innovative strand of magic realist painting as an endeavour to overcome the limitations of “simple external imitation” produced by then-new art forms, which he refers to as “marvellous machines (photography and film) that imitate reality so incomparably well” (25). Following Roh’s lead, it can be argued that the innovative spirit of magic realism is an attempt to revitalise realistic conventions, made impasse by the new art forms, through technical experimentation. Magic realists, according to the art historian Irene Guenther, set out to reach a new definition of the object through “clinically dissected, coldly accentuated, microscopically delineated” painting (36). Exposing objects down to their minute details, this intensified realism, in turn, paradoxically gives the picture a sense of unreality. In other words, unlike Expressionism that completely rejects art’s traditional figurative concepts, experimentalism inherent in magic realism works from within the conventions of realism. This also holds true for magical realist literature. “Magical realism,” Wendy B. Faris asserts, “radically modifies and replenishes the dominant mode of realism in the West, challenging its basis of representation from within” (Ordinary 1).[10]

The concept of “magic” in magic realism, then, does not denote the fantastic or supernatural; on the contrary, it belongs to the phenomenal world and is captured in the course of artistic creation. It is for this reason that Roh does not describe “magic” in metaphysical terms. “With the word “magic,”” Roh urges, “as opposed to “mystic,” I wished to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” (16). Roh’s definition provides another important link between magic realist painting and magical realist literature. With this definition, Roh, as Zamora and Faris note, “anticipates the practice of contemporary magical realists” who treat the supernatural as part of everyday life in their novels (15). In magical realist narratives, the improbable or the fantastic events are presented as an integral part of everyday life and narrated in a matter-of-fact style.

The magic realist artists, as noted above, did not have a coherent style. It was their search for a new kind of realism rather than an easily recognisable uniform style that identified them as the representatives of the same artistic phenomenon. The major reason for this stylistic variation seems to be the fact that magic realism began as a hybrid style, embodying the characteristics of both realism and the experimental art movements before it. Kenneth Reeds maintains, “magical realism was a return to reality, but not simply going back to the realism which existed before Expressionism – a homecoming which carried with it the baggage from the trip through Expressionism’s existential voyage – a mix of wild flights anchored in reality” (178). Like their predecessors in art, magical realist writers vary in their stylistic inclinations. Magical realism, which Wendy Faris refers to as “[p]erhaps the most important contemporary trend in international fiction,” found expression in diverse cultures in different fashions (Ordinary 1). It is, therefore, almost impossible to formulate a standard definition of magical realism to include all its stylistic variations; a fact that both enriches and complicates the mode.

In the light of what has been said so far, it can be argued that the pictorial origin of magical realism is crucial to the term’s contemporary relevance in literary context not only because it marks the inception of the term historically, but also because the early denotation of the term in the context of art provides a solid theoretical ground for literary studies. There seem to be three major characteristics of magic realism in its art-historical context that anticipate the application of the term in literature. Firstly, magic realism began as a socially and historically conscious, if not overtly political, form of art. Turning away from the fantastic dreamscape of Expressionism, the artists produced paintings with social contents. Secondly, magic realism is an innovative artistic mode that works from within the conventions of realism in order to revitalise its exhausted artistic potential through experimentation. Last but not least, as a result of its hybrid theoretical foundation and stylistic variations among its practitioners, magic realism, from its inception, has strongly defied easy categorisation. The remaining portion of this chapter shall focus on the ways in which the two essential strands of magic realism, its cultural work of providing socio-political criticism and innovative spirit, have evolved after its appropriation into literature with special emphasis placed on the contested theoretical attempts aimed at defining the ever broadening margins of the concept.

The initial influence of Roh’s art-historical argument on literary studies was seen in Italy. Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960), a prominent critic of the time and the editor of the literary review 900 (Novecento), forged a theory and practice of realismo magico (magical realism). Writing essays on the new art almost simultaneously as Roh, Bontempelli is generally credited as the first critic to use the term in the context of literature (Faris, Ordinary 39; Bowers 12; Warnes 4; Guenther 60, Walter 13). It should, however, be noted in passing that the transposition of the concept into literature was not completely realised until its introduction to Latin America, where several acknowledged masterpieces of the mode were written. Bontempelli’s formulation of magical realism echoes that of Roh’s with his emphasis on the necessity of discovering the magic quality of everyday life. According to Seymour Menton, Bontempelli viewed magical realism as a narrative mode that “rejects both reality for the sake of reality and fantasy for the sake of fantasy, and lives with the sense of magic discovered in the daily life of human beings and things” (Magic 131). In spite of their similar theoretical views, Bontempelli and Roh differ in their artistic methods. While Roh, as mentioned before, endeavours to reveal the magic in everyday life through estrangement of the familiar, Bontempelli seeks the same effect in the reconciliation of the real and the miraculous (Walter 13).

The Fascist ideals had a central place in Bontempelli’s theory of magical realism. “Fascist Italy,” as Keala Jewell notes, “became the model in [Bontempelli’s] view for a new European collectivity rooted in Latin and Mediterranean culture (Italy being the link)” (288). He believed that myths were instrumental in creating a collective identity. In keeping with this view, Bontempelli defined the writer’s task in modern society as “the invention of new myths” (Jewell 288) and the prime function of a properly modern literature as “[acting] on the collective consciousness by opening new mythical and magical perspectives on reality” (Dombroski 522). His call for creating new myths was more like an expansion of his Fascist historical vision than a purely literary exercise. According to Bontempelli, there were three epochs of history: classical (from Homer to Christ), romantic (from Christ to World War I) and Fascist (starting from World War I). In the Fascist epoch, the creation of modern myths was imperative to help humankind rise out of its ashes after the First World War. The new myths, reflecting the renovating power of Fascism, would mark this rebirth and herald the new era. Therefore, Bontempelli urged the writers not to imitate old myths and naïve imaginings, but to create a new, self-conscious idea of primitivism (Witt 109-110).

Bontempelli’s ideas concerning the promotion of a collective European cultural identity and his critique of twentieth-century literary practices consolidated into an influential critical voice in Italy between the First and Second World Wars (Jewell 286). However, contemporary critics attribute varying significance to Bontempelli’s place in the history of magical realism. Some critics, for example, point out his pivotal role in spreading Roh’s ideas in Europe with his bilingual magazine, relegating him to a position of secondary importance (Guenther 60, Hegerfeldt 15). For other critics like Erik Camayd-Freixas, however, “Bontempelli is a more relevant figure than Roh to magical realism’s genealogy in terms of both concept (the reconciliation of the everyday and the miraculous; but also “conscious primitivism”) and terminology (the specific use of the phrase itself)” (qtd. in Warnes 4). Both arguments are equally valid in their own right, but for the scope of this study, the most significant contribution of Bontempelli’s work to the history of magical realism is his intention to employ the mode to create a collective cultural identity which would become the central tenet of Latin American magical realist writers in the second half of the twentieth century.

As Anne C. Hegerfeldt notes, “[a]fter its brief flourishing in the 1920s, the term seems to have languished in comparative disuse” (15). Magical realism resurfaced in the 1940s in Latin America with the publication of numerous magical realist works of literature, which, according to most critics, marks the second phase in the genealogy of term (Echevarría 109, Reeds 179, Bowers 7). In fact, Franz Roh’s ideas had been introduced to Latin America two decades earlier, in 1927, with the partial translation and publication of his book in José Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente. With this translation, the term did not only cross the Atlantic, but it was also transferred from the domain of art to that of literature. In the years to follow, the term was applied in variations to describe works of literature, particularly fiction, rather than paintings.

Although based in Madrid, Revista de Occidente helped the term’s dissemination in Latin America as it was circulated widely among Latin American writers as the primary source for texts translated from European languages (Bowers 12, Reeds 179-180). That the term magical realism started to be used in the literary circles of Buenos Aires as early as 1928 to describe certain European novels is a clear indication of the sphere of influence of Gasset’s magazine (Spindler 76-77, Reeds 180).[11] In the ensuing years, however, the application of the term changed completely with the influence of the theoretical works written by Arturo Uslar Pietri, Alejo Carpentier and Ángel Flores, and it started to be employed in a strictly national context to define and label the works of literature produced by Latin American writers. It is, therefore, pertinent to draw an outline of the cultural atmosphere in which Franz Roh’s magic realism was transposed into its new context prior to the discussion of theories produced by Latin American writers and critics.

Historically, the introduction of magical realism into Latin American literature coincided with