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confront, available to the reader. He discusses the way in which magical realism enables writers to exercise what he calls the “traumatic imagination,” through which they express aspects of historical trauma that have been suppressed. As he explains, the traumatic imagination transforms traumatic memories into narrative memories and integrates them into what he calls an artistic shock chronotope. This is another term he has coined (using Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope) to suggest the way in which magical realist writing brings forth events that, because they exceeded a subject’s capacities for assimilation and narrative, have been repressed through shock.
In the course of articulating his own theory, Arva contextualizes magical realism critically, availing himself of a number of other psychological and cultural theories. The perspective of trauma studies integrates not only postcolonial and metropolitan sites but also negotiates the intersection of public and private, synthesizing fruitfully both social and psychological nuances. He links Freud’s idea of the uncanny as something that appears in connection with an event that was too difficult for a person to assimilate with magical realism’s inclusion of nonrealistic events and images, and uses that idea, together with the notion of trauma, which causes an event to be suppressed, to begin to describe how magical realism reconstructs history via nonmimetic imagery, and thereby makes historical atrocity present for readers to experience.
In his second chapter, which locates magical realism within postmodern writing, Arva deals with Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra, among other ideas, and distinguishes magical realist texts from Baudrillard’s hyperreality, which he sees as oversaturated with facts and information. Starting from those and other theoretical bases, he selects novels from three historical situations in order to demonstrate in more detail how magical realism reconstructs history in order to deal with trauma. His treatment of Caribbean slavery in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, and Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem illustrates how the characters and narrators of these texts use their traumatic imaginations to confront impossible situations.