Magical realism is the language of the emergent Post‐Truth world

Abstract

AbstractDrawing on a number of new readings of ‘Post‐Truth’, defined as ‘Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’, our essay interrogates the extent to which magical realism may be understood as the paradigmatic and quintessential discourse of the Post‐Truth era. We paraphrase Homi Bhabha’s famous statement, made in the 1990s, that ‘magical realism is the language of the emergent postcolonial world’, and propose that, in the twenty‐first century, magical realism is the language of the emergent Post‐Truth world. In this essay we analyze and compare the Post‐Truth techniques used in novels such as García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips and Murakami’s 1Q84. We combine Matthew d’Ancona’s robust call that we should fight against the follies of political Post‐Truth with Anne Hegerfeldt’s argument that magical realism is designed to teach the general public how to read between the lines of politicians’ speeches in order to become a mature defender of truth, and therefore propose that the magical‐realist novelist, in effect, ends up telling ‘lies that tell the truth’.