3 - Fertile Ground
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
The previous chapter explored perspectives of causation; the communities of people in each text had different ways of explaining the world around them, which the narrator presented as valid. Where these clashed with the reader's perspectives, this produced the atmosphere we have come to label ‘magical realist’ in literature.
Latin American scholars and writers at the first appearance of the genre in Latin American literature, towards the middle of the last century, construed a theory of magical realism in territorial terms, claiming that it was the specific circumstances of Latin America that produced magical realism. In an expanded version of the prologue to his novel El reino de este mundo, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1995, 88) wrote the following:
Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black man, the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund racial mixing, America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies. After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvellous real?
Carpentier's formulation of magical realism, as a genre of literature emerging essentially from the largely untapped and baroque magnificence of his continent's geography, history, diversity and mythology, has been taken by many scholars as seminal in its field.
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- Gabriel García Márquez and OvidMagical and Monstrous Realities, pp. 86 - 126Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013