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traditional, mimetic sense) as a coherent history, magical realist writing takes on the daunting task of reconstructing history in order to bring it closer to the readers’ conceptual system and their affective world.
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The magical realist effect has its roots in the reader-text relationship, and draws its exceptional suggestiveness from the apparently oxymoronic pairing of the real and the imaginary in this interaction. “The possible and the magic/imaginary subvert and open up the borders of the real. Both the real and the potential or the conceivable are rendered as ‘consorting together’ and enjoying the same level of legitimacy” (Manzanas, “Romance” 57). Indeed, the cohabitation of what is with what could be, of the natural with the supernatural, of the logical with the unexplainable, would not make reality magical in such a seamless manner if these antithetical elements were not treated on equal footing by narrators, characters, and readers. As with most postmodernist writing, the textualization of the reader is crucial in exposing all three sides of the mirror: the opaque, the reflective, and the reflected. In her 2004 study on magical realism as a literary and a cinematic narrative, Maggie Ann Bowers recognizes the narrative mode as “an intimate affair between the reader/viewer and the text/film” (128). Besides emphasizing the reader’s, or the viewer’s, role in the relationship, Bowers also points—in a somewhat defensive manner—to a larger applicability of magical realist theory than the exclusive domain of literature: “Far from being simply a fashionable narrative device, magic(al) realism has proved itself through the criticism it has generated to stimulate consideration of the relationship of fiction and representation to reality” (128). Indeed, as a postmodernist phenomenon, magical realism operates as a versatile and self-reflective mode of reality representation.
Early- and mid-twentieth-century theorists, including Walter Benjamin and Situationists such as Guy Debord, have tried to explain a world made of representations, whose multilayered reproductions of reality seem to be constantly eluding us. According to Debord, for instance, “spectacle” is not merely “representation,” something related to “show,”