Magical Realism as Postcolonial Romance

Abstract

In the previous chapter it was noted that magical realism has recently benefited from several critical works that have sharpened our ability to describe more accurately the fictional operations of the mode. Increased awareness of magical realism’s distinctive characteristics and qualities has generated a clarity that will hinder the efforts of both those who would rather the term disappeared from use, and those who are tempted to celebrate it as the answer to all the aesthetic and literary problems of the postcolonial world. Welcome as these developments are in rehabilitating magical realism as a critical term, it was pointed out that they often tend to separate out form and narrative structure from context, history and ideology. The desire to affirm the category of magical realism often takes place at the expense of developing an understanding of the particular ways in which each work of magical realism uses the mode for its own ends: texts are used to understand magical realism, rather than magical realism being used as a tool to unpack and interpret texts. Literary critical category construction of this nature is a synchronic activity, depending as it does on the decontextualisation and comparison of textual features rather than a diachronic location of them within their social, literary and cultural trajectories.