American Magic Realism: Crossing the Borders in Literatures of the Margins

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 6 (1997) : 25-33. American Magic Realism: Crossing the Borders in Literatures of the Margins Magdalena Delicka The term magic realism exerts, what Fredric Jameson calls, “a strange seductiveness” (302), and is today as prevalent as ever despite attempts on the part of critics to modify or abandon it. (Note 1) It has already been applied to describe European Post-Expressionist painting of the 1920s, Kafka’s works and especially the literature of South America. Recently, the concept of magic realism has been used to refer to the literary expressions of the groups who consider themselves to be marginalized, such as women, lesbians and gays; and also to the literary expressions of the nations that are ethnically or socially marginalized borderlands. Critics and writers have observed the presence of magic realism in the literatures of Canada, India or Nigeria. (Note 2) Little emphasis, however, has been placed so far on this literary mode as a means of literary expression characteristic of the majority of American ethnic literatures whether they be African-American, Native American, Asian American or Latino/a. Although magic realism has thus had several incarnations, the immediate associations of the term are of course with Latin American literature. In the 1940s and 1950s, the concept came to denote, as we know, an autonomous and distinct literature in Central and South America. “Lo real maravilloso americano” was a phrase coined by Alejo Carpentier to refer to the distinctive quality of Latin American reality understood as a place of collision of two different cultures: the one of the natives and the one of the white colonizers. Magic realism reflected the duality that resulted from this cross-cultural intersection and accommodated the popular myths, legends and folklore inherent in the lives of the indigenous people, while adhering at the same time to the conventions of realistic fiction. However, apart from cultural references, magic realism also echoed social and political issues in Latin America. It was a literary reaction to undemocratic, often dictatorial, strategies of the majority of the governments in South America, and, as such, functioned as a voice for the repressed, whose presence was ignored in everyday reality. Despite arguments made on the part of Latin American critics that it should be considered only within the context of South American and Caribbean reality, magic realism has been gaining popularity as a means of literary expression for the majority of ethnic literatures in the US since the late 1960s. The US has been the place of confrontation of different ethnic cultures, and the social and political aspects of this confrontation have had multiple implications for the ontological status of the ethnic minorities in America. This has been reflected in their literatures. I would like to discuss magic realism in American ethnic writing by examining two novels by two ethnic writers, the Native American Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1989) and the Chinese-American Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses (1995). I view magic realism as a mode which crosses the borders between two different forms of reasoning. The very term “magic realism” already suggests a binary opposition between two separate discourses: the realistic and the magical. To apply S. Erin Denney’s definition, in their most polarized forms, of the two, “realism” represents those aspects of the world open to empirical investigation and characteristic of the perception of the west-European, industrialized communities; whereas “magic” presupposes the existence of the supernatural in explaining events, characteristic of many ethnic peoples. (“To Be and/or Not To Be”). The coexistence of magic and realism is presented in a matter-of-fact way as being natural, so that “the reader does not react to the supernatural in the text as if it were antinomious with respect to our conventional view of reality” (Channady 23-24). In the fusion of these two opposite epistemological concepts, the former boundaries between the real and the supernatural fade, and the improbable becomes objectively possible. Although their cultural and ethnic backgrounds are different, both Erdrich and Tan use the literary mode of magic realism in their works. Written from a Native American perspective, Tracks displays many formal parallels with The Hundred Secret Senses, written from a Chinese-American perspective. The essential structural element in both novels is the collision of two realities: the rational and discursive one, and the irrational and intuitive one. The dichotomy of magic and realism allows Tracks and The Hundred Secret Senses to be expressions of Erdrich’s and Tan’s own ethnic identities, while enabling such fiction to remain accessible to the wider audience due to the interesting plot, memorable characters, familiar geographical and historical settings, and the English language in which the novels are written. David Young and Keith Hollaman observe that “magic realism is not as much a challenge to the conventions of literary realism as it is to the basic assumptions of modern positivist thought, the soil in which literary realism flourished” (3). Using the juxtaposition of two different epistemological systems in magic realism, Erdrich and Tan project their ideological concerns with the socio-cultural and political borders of ethnic communities in the US, such as, English/Non-English, white/colored, Christian/Non-Christian. The “ethnic” is in a constant dialogue with the “whiteness” in Tracks and The Hundred Secret Sensesbut “[s]ince the ground rules of these two worlds are incompatible,” Stephen Slemon observes, “neither one can fully come into being and each remains suspended, locked in a continuous dialectic with the ‘other,’ and each working toward a different kind of fictional world from the ‘other’” (11). Such a textual structure echoes the Socratic idea of the nature of thought and of truth itself, according to which truth is not born nor of itself found in the head of the individual person; it is born between people collectively searching for the truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. In the novels the dialogic quality can be observed in a number of dualities which, as I discuss below, affect firstly the narrative structure, which itself shapes characterization, the two thus being interrelated, and secondly the constructs of time and place. As we, the readers, enter the discourse between the two dimensions of reality, we are challenged to stretch out our imagination and to pose questions about our values, ideas and beliefs. Structurally, both Tracks and The Hundred Secret Senses are built by alternating stories told by two different narrators. Tracks interlaces the narratives of Nanapush, an elder of a Chippewa tribe, and Pauline, a mixed blood Chippewa woman aspiring to be a Catholic nun. The Hundred Secret Senses features the stories told by two half-sis (...truncated)