Freie Universität Berlin
John-F.-Kennedy-Institute
Abteilung für Literatur und Kultur Nordamerikas
Hauptseminar

Magical Realism in Toni Morrison′s Beloved
and Ana Castillo′s So Far from GodJasmina Murad

by:
Jasmina Murad
Teilstudiengänge:
Spanisch, Englisch (Lehramt L4)
Fachsemester: 9

Wintersemester 2004/05

Contents

1. Introduction ... 2

2. Magical Realism ... 2

3. Magical Realism in Toni Morrison′s Beloved and Ana Castillo′s So Far from God ... 4
3.1 Toni Morrison′s Beloved ... 4
3.2 Ana Castillo′s So Far from God ... 11

4. Conclusion ... 18

5. List of Works Cited ... 23

1. Introduction

In this paper I focus on two considerable U.S. authors: Toni Morrison and Ana Castillo. The fact that these writers - who do not share the same ethnic background - both deploy the literary mode of magical realism in their works has engaged my interest to analyze and compare their novels Beloved and So Far from God. The purpose of this paper is not only to probe into the nature of magical realism in the two novels, but also to examine this narrative form as a socio-cultural practice which is connected to a special Weltanschauung. To enter this vast territory, it will be useful to situate the term magical realism in a theoretical and cultural framework which happens in the following chapter. Subsequently, I will expose how Morrison and Castillo employ magical realism in Beloved and So Far from God, and, in particular, I try to identify its function and the role it plays in terms of Morrison′s and Castillo′s cultural and historical background. In the conclusion I will expose the parallels which can be drawn between the novels, coming up with the thesis that for these parallels, there are two underlying main functions of magical realism.

2. Magical Realism

The term magical realism, this strange oxymoron which combines two contrasting components, refers to the amalgamation of realism and fantasy in art, film, and literature. It combines realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the reality portrayed. According to the Dictionary of Twentieth Century Culture: Hispanic Culture of South America¹, magical realism involves […] fiction that does not distinguish between realistic and non-realistic events, fiction in which the supernatural, the mythical or the implausible are assimilated to the cognitive structure of reality without a perceptive break in the narrator′s or characters′ consciousness. That is, in the magical realist text, characters encounter elements of magic and fantasy with the same acceptance that they meet those settings and figures commonly associated with "reality" and "fact". The magical realist label originated in 1925 when German art historian Franz Roh applied the expression Magischer Realismus to post- Expressionist paintings that combined realism with an emphasis on expressing the miracle of existence².

Roh, for the first time using the term in an essay on Karl Haider′s paintings, regarded magical realism as an aesthetic art category, a way of representing the enigmas of reality pictorially. Scholarly consensus, however, points to exiled Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier as the key figure in establishing the link between Latin American fiction and the phenomenon that he called lo real maravilloso. In his classic 1949 essay, "On the Marvelous Real in America"³, Carpentier sought to differentiate Latin American magical realism from European Surrealism by highlighting the distinction between the arbitrary – even contrived – alteration of reality that characterized the work of the Surrealists, and the organic representation of the Latin American world view in lo real maravilloso. For Carpentier, magical realism mirrored an understanding throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America of a more permeable boundary between the real and the fantastic than was commonly accepted in North America and Europe.

In the Americas, magical realism has been linked to indigenous and black Weltanschauungen - that is, world views deeply steeped in the myths and legends of cultures with a ritualistic-religious foundation. Postcolonial scholar Brenda Cooper explains that "magical realism arises out of particular societ[ies] - postcolonial, unevenly developed places where old and new, modern and ancient, the scientific and the magical views of the world co-exist."⁴

This notion that magical realism arises out of those colonial and postcolonial moments which create a considerable population of subjects whose interests may be counter-hegemonic, explains the contradiction between the relative absence of magical realist texts produced in Europe – and by Euro- American writers in Canada and the United States – and the growing proliferation of such texts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America – and among European, Canadian, and U.S. authors of African, Asian, and Latin descent. As a discourse and worldview of cultural difference and resistance to domination, magical realism reorganizes the elements of hegemonic paradigms investing them with new, expanded meanings. Magical realism realizes the hybridization of the natural and the supernatural by focusing on specific historical moments in order to problematize present-day disjunctive realities. It is a form of writing characterized by a dual character: an inward doubleness - the natural and the supernatural - which reflects an outward direction toward (post)colonial cultural relations through revisionary memory.⁵ In the following analysis I want to examine this dual character of magical realism in the abovementioned novels by Toni Morrison and Ana Castillo.

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1 Standish, Peter, ed. Dictionary of Twentieth Century Culture: Hispanic Culture of South America. Detroit: Gale, 1995. 156-157.

2 Roh, Franz. Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerei. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925.

3 Carpentier, Alejo. "On the Marvelous Real in America," translated by Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora. In: Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Edited by Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. London: Duke University Press, 1995.75-88.

4 Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. London: Routledge, 1998. 216.

5 Walter, Roland: "Pan-American (Re)Visions: Magical Realism and Amerindian Cultures in Susan Power′s The Grass Dancer, Gioconda Belli′s La Mujer Habitada, Linda Hogan′s Power, and Mario Vargas Llosa′s El Hablador." In: American Studies International. Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, October 1999. 4.