Response to “Women, Violence, and Magical Realism in the Fiction of Mohammed Hanif” by Pooja Sancheti

Abstract

Response to “Women, Violence, and Magical Realism in the Fiction of Mohammed Hanif” by Pooja Sancheti Sanjukta Banerjee, Respondent “The storyteller,” says Irish novelist Colm Tóibín about the process of creating illusion in fiction, “has to deal with reality and all its details to make magic work” (Tóibín interview). The observation could apply to magical realism, especially when explored in relation to world literature in the twenty-first century. It is the understanding of shifting tensions and resonances between local stories, individual sensibilities, and global consciousness, between national interests and world ethics, that can add to the conceptual richness of the idea of world literature. Pooja Sancheti’s analysis of women, violence, and magical realism in Mohammed Hanif’s fiction adds to the [End Page 227] exploration of these relationships. Its highlighting of magical realism’s potential for questioning the limits of realism and the possibility of reading the “abnormal” (4), hidden in plain sight, sets the stage for thinking about the mode’s relevance to foregrounding literature’s role in ceaselessly reexamining all assumptions and polarities. Sancheti argues that magical realism in Hanif’s novels is distinct from the mode’s more conventional iterations insofar as magic in these works has a discrete rather than continuous presence (140). The point brings to mind Valerie Henitiuk’s analysis of the creation of a feminist space in Angela Carter’s feminist novel Nights at the Circus (1984). If Carter’s more conventional magical realism, unlike Hanif’s, thrives on a sustained tension or “antinomy between the magical and the real” (Henitiuk 411), the functions of magic also overlap in their works: much like the antinomy in Carter’s novel that does not get resolved, because “antinomies are inherently not resolvable” (411), in Hanif’s fiction magic “does not provide fanciful and unrealistic potential for an overnight feminist revolution” (Sancheti 151). Therefore, the impact of magic for the reader at large may not depend on its pervasiveness but on the nature of the “antinomic web” (Henitiuk 412) that holds in tension the plural subjectivities of women, elsewhere, everywhere. One reason why magical realism has played an active role in literary decolonization is that many of its texts reconfigure structures of autonomy and agency (Faris 111). Sancheti’s observation that magic in Hanif’s works is brought into play by individuals rather than communities (Sancheti 140) can be instructive for reflecting on these structures, implicating the individual as much as the community, as either self-contained or marked by irreducible duality between the self and the other. Hanif’s attention to the pervasive and differentiated experiences of neoimperialism and its enabling ills, rather than to colonial rule, is of particular interest to me. It brings a diachronic dimension to understanding the continual and changing role of travel, migration, and translation in the rearticulation of the magical in literatures of the world. The confluence of questions around climate, gender, race, and the power of imagination in exposing social values that have been accepted as the norms make studies like this more urgent than ever before. If Hanif’s stories are specific, their concerns are local and universal, and implicate all of us. They remind us that magical realism is a site for artistic and critical explorations in a world that is, as Glissant put it, “sans axe et sans visée.” Works cited Faris, Wendy B. “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism.” Janus Head, vol. 5, no. 2, 2002, pp. 101-19. Google Scholar Henitiuk, Valerie. “Step into My Parlour: Magical Realism and the Creation of a Feminist Space.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, vol. 30, no. 2, 2003, pp. 410-27. Google Scholar Tóibín, Colm. Interview with William Atkins. Granta, 24 Mar. 2022, granta.com/interview-colm-toibin/. Google Scholar Copyright © 2022 Canadian Comparative Literature Association / Association Canadienne de Littérature Comparée