The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Real ...

(Unlike representation, which involves some degree of interpretation, re-presentation captures the feel of a limit experience, not the facts. Because of its shocking impact on the psyche, a limit experience cannot usually be assimilated and stored as a narrative memory by consciousness, remaining confined to its limits as a latent traumatic memory.) Viewed in the larger context of postmodernist fiction, magical realist writing foregrounds and at the same time transgresses the traditional borders between reality and imagination by rearranging apparently antithetical ontological levels within the literary text: the logically and perceptually verifiable everyday reality, on the one hand, and the sensorially ungraspable and unexplainable phenomena of the supernatural on the other. Over more than half a century now, magical realist language has demonstrated its versatility by affecting literary productions belonging to various cultural spaces and representing different histories of violence. The oxymoronic character of the term magical realism has often been pointed out by critics, who have also been careful to justify its meaning according to the perceived functionality of the writing mode. For example, Christopher Warnes defends the oxymoron by deeming it “an appropriate condition given that it designates a narrative strategy that stretches or ruptures altogether the boundaries of reality” (vi); Homi Bhabha describes the writing mode as “the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world,” a function that this work deals with more specifically and extensively in Chapter 5; and Fredric Jameson considers magical realism “a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism” (Warnes 1). Significantly, none of the quoted theorists refer to magical realism as a literary genre in its own right, but they all seem to situate the “literary language” or “narrative strategy” at the very core of postcolonial and postmodernist writing. At the other end of the spectrum, however, are the skeptics like Jean Franco, for whom magical realism is only “a little more than a brand name for exoticism” (Warnes 1). Alfred J. López also questions the legitimacy of the term, which he considers a “European term applied to a non-European literature” and “a futile European attempt to categorize and thus ‘understand’ it by this process of naming […] to ‘master’ the other’s difficult text?” (quoted in Wen-chin 15).