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this perspective, we are all virtual magical realists, even to the point where our reality (signs, codes, messages) becomes more “real” than the Real we constantly try to recapture. Thus, the hyperreal is nothing but a spectacle without origins, very much like magical realism is the representation of events (seemingly) without a history, or the re-creation of an absence that first needs to be acknowledged before it can be assigned any meaning. However, magical realism creates more than just a depthless hyperreal, a multilayered reality of images of other images without any original referents. In a number of cases, magical realist hyperreality is meant to be a reconstruction, a re-presentation, of events that were “missed” in the first place because of their traumatic nature. Magical realist hyperreality is an affective (empathic) kind of reality, capable of bringing the pain and the horror home into the reader’s affective world: while it might not need to explain the unspeakable event (and perhaps, it neither could nor should), it can certainly make it felt and re-experienced in a vicarious way.
If fairy tales, fantasy, and science fiction require the suspension of the reader’s disbelief as the sine qua non of the literary experience, magical realism, on the contrary, expects the reader to keep aware of its textual constructs and accept them as part of his or her “real” reality, as unreal as they may seem. Although realistic details may render images believable to readers, traditional realism usually stumbles at their transmission as reflections of rational, understandable experiences. Slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war have constituted themselves as “histories” of extreme events hardly open to rational reflection or understanding. I consider the traumatic imagination as an expression of the consciousness of survival that so many authors of violent histories have come to share. While drawing on concepts such as collective memory and transgenerational trauma, my analyses do not approach the shock chronotopes of slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war from a comparative perspective but, rather, within individualized historical contexts characterized by a common socio-cultural marker: trauma. Without setting up a dialogue between historical memories, I view memory as multidirectional, a term recently proposed and defined by Michael Rothberg.