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Next comes an insightful discussion of images of colonial and postcolonial trauma in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In order to explain how García Márquez is able to use his traumatic imagination fruitfully to create magical realist texts, even though he himself had not experienced major trauma, for example, Arva locates García Márquez’s writing within both the frames of the violencia in Colombia and Spanish colonialism. The penultimate example of the magical realist traumatic imagination at work is taken from two novels depicting the Nazi holocaust, Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer. While Arva recognizes the significant differences between the historical events involved, he makes a convincing argument that magical realism indeed provides a widespread and fruitful textual strategy for reliving and dealing with historical trauma.
The last chapter takes up two narratives whose authors were closer to the traumatic wartime events represented in their novels, Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, and Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato.Arva studies the way in which the fractured narrative voice of Grass’s narrator, alternating between first- and third-person viewpoints, embodies a traumatized self, one that is suspended between innocence and guilt, and how Grass infuses the text with magical images to depict Oskar’s unusual wartime experiences. He then compares this magical narrative of trauma with O’Brien’s, analyzing the similar position of Cacciato’s narrator, and the way he deals with the discomfort resulting from such a position by creating a magical alternative reality.
In short, through such analyses of texts from widely differing historical contexts, this approach to magical realism through ideas associated with trauma studies enlarges our understanding of the cultural work magical realism continues to do in contemporary world literature.
–Wendy B. Faris,
University of Texas at Arlington