“Magic that Battles Death”: Pauline Melville's Marvellous Realism

Abstract

Situating three stories from Pauline Melville's short story collection The Migration of Ghosts in relation to Wilson Harris's refiguring of Carl Jung's concept of the “alchemical imagination” as well as in relation to notions of magical and marvellous realism, I argue that Melville uses her alchemical imagination to transmute marvellous realism from a mode that represented a “strange”, but “commonplace” New World reality to a mode that reconnects to the unifying philosophic underpinnings of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Drawing on its historic roots as a Latin American/Caribbean reaction to conquest, Melville's marvellous realism reconnects with a philosophic era that rejects the fragmentation of thought, disciplines and eras. By re-establishing a connection to an era that promoted the unity of magic, science and all living things, Melville's alchemical imagination restores memory, transmutes consciousness and dispels fragmentation.