Naturalizing the Supernatural: Faith, Irreverence and Magical Realism

Christopher Warnes

Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Introduction

The term magical realism has appeared in print with increasing frequency over the past few decades. It can now be found in a vast number of university course descriptions, dissertations and academic articles, and it has received notable coverage in the popular press.Even the advertising industry has recently begun to take an interest in the term, though it long ago learned how to capitalize on magical realist visual techniques in its quest for ever more novel ways of marketing products.The main force of the attraction seems to be that the termrsquo;s distinctive oxymoronic nature suggests a numinous quality to the everyday, and it thus promises somehow to reconcile the modern, rational, lsquo;disenchantedrsquo; subject of the West with forgotten but recoverable spiritual realities.

In the domain of literary studies this popularity has not been matched by any certainty over what magical realism actually is, and scholars new to the field are likely to be confronted by a number of contradictory attitudes towards the term. One eminent critic has referred to magical realism as lsquo;the literary language of the emergent postcolonial worldrsquo;,while another has called it lsquo;little more than a brand name for exoticismrsquo;.It can be lsquo;a major, perhaps the major, component of postmodernist fictionrsquo;,or it can be lsquo;a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernismrsquo;.Magical realism has by turns been praised for founding lsquo;a new multicultural artistic realityrsquo;and denigrated as lsquo;dangerous and shallowrsquo;.It has even been accused of being underpinned by lsquo;pernicious – even racist – ideologiesrsquo;.While such discrepancies are partly to be accounted for by ideological differences, as a critical term magical realism has, until recently, lacked widespread definitional and theoretical legitimacy.

Some critics have responded to this state of affairs by suggesting that we ought to do away with the term magical realism altogether.The problem with such a suggestion, even if it were possible to implement, is that it ignores the fact that the tenacity of the term is due in large measure to its explanatory value. There is a growing corpus of literary works that draws upon the conventions of both realism and fantasy or folktale, yet does so in such a way that neither of these two realms is able to assert a greater claim to truth than the other. This capacity to resolve the tension between two discursive systems usually thought of as mutually exclusive must constitute the starting point for any inquiry into magical realism. A brief survey of canonical magical realist texts – Gabriel Garciacute;a Maacute;rquezrsquo;s Cien antilde;os de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Isabel Allendersquo;s La casa de los espiacute;ritus (The House of the Spirits), Laura Esquivalrsquo;s Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate), Salman Rushdiersquo;s Midnightrsquo;s Children and The Satanic Verses, Toni Morrisonrsquo;s Beloved, Angela Carterrsquo;s Nights at the Circus, and Ben Okrirsquo;s The Famished Road, for example – will reveal that what these otherwise different texts all have in common is that each treats the supernatural as if it were a perfectly acceptable and understandable aspect of everyday life. As Rushdie says, talking of Garciacute;a Maacute;rquez, lsquo;impossible things happen constantly and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sunrsquo;.A basic definition of magical realism, then, sees it as a mode of narration that naturalizes 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. Pressing this formal definition further, this essay proposes to distinguish between an attitude of faith and one of irreverence in magical realist writing.

A Brief History of Magical Realism

The term, or at least a form of it, was first used to signal something very similar to the promise that it now seems to hold in the popular imagination. In 1798 the German Romantic poet and philosopher, Novalis, speculatively described in one of the fragments in his notebooks a lsquo;true prophetrsquo; or an lsquo;isolated beingrsquo; who would not be bound by the limits that govern the lives of ordinary humans. Such a prophet, Novalis wrote, should be referred to as a lsquo;magical idealistrsquo; or a lsquo;magical realistrsquo;.Novalisrsquo;s idealism was an essential part of his Romantic philosophy, and functioned, throughout his work, as a means of resolving oppositions between self and other, subject and object, in order to attain a higher, miraculous truth. Importantly, though, this idealism still maintained a place for the physical world.Clearly, Novalisrsquo;s project was a response to the lsquo;disenchantingrsquo; logic of the Enlightenment, and provides a relevant, though almost entirely unexplored, point of connection with the ways modern magical realism, similarly responding to a disillusionment with the relentlessly rational nature of modernity, also seeks ways of resolving the tension between miracle and truth, the magical and the real.

Novalis never developed the concept of lsquo;magical realismrsquo;, and it resurfaced in an aesthetic context only in 1925 when, again in Germany, it appeared in the title of a book of art-historical analysis by Franz Roh.Roh felt that the new forms of art emerging in Germany in the Weimar years (today better known as Neue Sachlichkeit) managed to synthesise the (relative) naturalism of Impressionism with the transcendentalist overtones of Expressionism. Thus, once again the term magical realism proved a useful means of naming a process whereby a set of antinomies crucial to rational discourse is undone. Roh, a former student of Heinrich Wouml;lfflin, was an erudite and respected figure in art circles in Germany for more than forty years, and it is quite plausible that he inh

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Naturalizing the Supernatural: Faith, Irreverence and Magical Realism

Christopher Warnes

Stellenbosch University, South Africa

介绍

在过去几十年里，魔幻现实主义的出现日益频繁。现在可以在广泛的大学课程描述，论文和学术论文中找到，并且在受欢迎的新闻界中已经获得了显着的报道。虽然广告业最近才开始对这个术语感兴趣，但很久以前就知道如何利用魔幻现实主义的视觉技术来寻求更新颖的营销产品的方式。产生吸引力的主要力量似乎是，这个术语独特的矛盾性意味着每天生活状态不佳，因此它以某种方式保证将西方现代，理性，“不认同”的主题与被遗忘但可追溯的精神现实相协调。

在文学研究领域，这种人气与实际上是什么魔幻的现实主义并没有得到任何确定性的匹配，而对这个领域来说新的学者很可能会面对一些矛盾的态度。一位杰出的评论家把魔幻现实主义称为“后殖民地位新兴的文学语言”，另一个则称之为“异国情调的品牌名称”，它可以是“后现代主义的主要组成部分小说”，也可能是“现代后现代主义叙事逻辑的可能替代”。现代主义已经被称为“新的多元文化艺术现实”，被诋毁为”危险和肤浅”。甚至被指责为“恶毒甚至种族主义的意识形态”所支配。尽管这种差异部分由意识形态的差异所抵消，但作为一个关键术语，魔幻现实主义，直到最近还缺乏广泛的定义和理论上的合法性。

有些评论家对这个事态做出了反应，建议我们应该完全消除魔幻现实主义。这样建议的问题即使它可以实现，但它忽略了一个事实，即该术语的韧性在很大程度上是由于其解释价值。有越来越多的文学作品取材于现实主义和幻想或民间故事的惯例，但却以这样一种方式，即这两个领域都不能比另一个领域更为主张。这种能力，以解决两个话语系统之间的紧张关系通常被认为是相互排斥的，必须构成任何调查的起点魔幻现实主义。典型魔幻现实主义小说比如Gabriel Garciacute;a Maacute;rquezrsquo;s Cien antilde;os de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude)、Isabel Allendersquo;s La casa de los espiacute;ritus (The House of the Spirits)、Laura Esquivalrsquo;s Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate)、Salman Rushdiersquo;s Midnightrsquo;s Children和The Satanic Verses、Toni Morrisonrsquo;s Beloved、Angela Carterrsquo;s Nights at the Circus以及Ben Okrirsquo;s The Famished Road这些将会揭示出这些不同的小说共同之处在于，好像它是日常生活中完全可以接受和可理解的方面。Rushdie说，谈到Garciacute;a Maacute;rquez，“不可能的事情不断发生，相当合理，在中午的阳光下开放”。对魔幻现实主义的一个基本定义就是把这种超自然的归纳为一种叙事模式;也就是说，是一种真正和梦幻般的，自然的和超自然的，以严谨等价的状态连贯地代表的模式，即没有更多的要求真实和参照。进一步推动这种正式的定义，本文提出将信仰的态度与魔幻现实主义写作中的不信任之间区分开来。

魔幻现实主义简史

这个术语，或至少是一种形式，首先用于表达与现在似乎在大众想象中所承诺的非常相似的东西。1798年，德国浪漫诗人和哲学家Novalis在他的笔记本中的一个片段中推测出一个“真正的先知”或“孤立的人”，他们不受限于普通人生活的限制。Novalis所写的这样的先知应该被称为“神奇的唯心主义者”或者是一个“神奇的现实主义者”。Novalis的理想主义是他浪漫哲学的重要组成部分，在他的整个工作中，作为一种解决自我之间的对立的手段和其他，主体和客体，以达到更高，奇迹的真理。重要的是，这种理想主义仍然为物质世界保留了一个地方。很明显地，Novalis的这个课题是对“启蒙运动”的“不抱幻想”逻辑的回应，并提供了一个相关的，几乎完全未被探索的与现代魔法现实主义，同样以对现代性无情理性的幻想的反应，也寻求解决奇迹与真理，神奇与真实之间紧张关系的方法。

Novalis从来没有发展出“魔幻现实主义”的概念，只有在1925年，在德国再次出现在一本由Franz Roh.Roh的艺术历史分析书的标题中再次出现的审美情境下，新的形式在魏玛时代（今天被称为Neue Sachlichkeit）设法将印象派的（相对）自然主义与表现主义的超验主义泛音合成。因此，魔幻现实主义再一次证明是一个有用的手段，命名一个过程，一个对理性话语至关重要的反义词被撤消。Roh是HeinrichWouml;lfflin的前学生，在德国艺术界是一个博学和受人尊敬的四十多年的人物，他从Novalis继承了这个词，这是相当合理的。即使他没有，在什么之间重叠他和诺瓦利斯旨在表达他们对这一术语的使用对于重建这个术语的智力史来说是重要的，因为它显示出将重要的意义集合在一起，是指现实和神奇的意义。

Roh不是唯一对魔幻现实主义或其支撑的概念感兴趣的魏玛知识分子。Jeffrey Herf已经表明，Ernst Juuml;nger是一位反思派，他的想法在某种程度上授权纳粹主义者，也用这个词来表明和解德国浪漫主义与技术接轨的可能性。虽然Juuml;nger的小说并没有表明我们今天所说的是什么魔幻现实主义，但在他的社会评论中，他把Roh的这个用语扩大到了思想上和高度保守的方向。这个术语的使用虽然对魔幻现实主义的兴起不是至关重要的一个批判性的概念，但至少在其概念上提醒人们，魔幻现实主义并不适用于任何特定的政治取向，远远不是是许多评论家似乎认为的颠覆性的修正力量。第三个魏玛知识分子在这里值得一提的是Oswald Spengler。Spengler像Juuml;nger（不像Roh）那样，是一个反动思想家，专注于德国民族认同受到自由资本主义和马克思主义双重力量威胁的感觉。像Juuml;nger一样，Spengler寻求答案，解决危机中真实与和谐的和解非理性：在他的情况下神话与历史。明显地受到德国浪漫主义理想主义思想的影响，他的相关性并不在于他使用这个术语，而是在任何虚构的生产中，但在某种程度上，他能够在某种特定政治范式内为非国家提供一个空间。后来这个综合证明对于拉美的魔幻现实主义者如Alejo Carpentier来说是很重要的。

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