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Magic Realism • The genre of magic realism moves between the cultural and political positions of "inherited" codes and "imagined" codes, creating an interplay which undermines the fixity of borders between them. Each term invades the other, eroding its absolute nature and addressing the gaps that fixed systems inevitably create.
The eroding of fixed systems in the narrative of Eva Luna Typical binaries in postcolonial texts: • Centre / periphery • Masculine / feminine • Dominant / subservient • Authoritative / transgressive become areas of shifting signs in the novel • the space between such poles is negotiated in the narrative rather than organizing it
Not a singular and linear narrative, but a web of stories within stories • Born into poverty of a servant mother and an Indian father, Eva is a child of the shadows; yet this is not so much disabling for her as it is the source of creative possibility. Eva's position, rather than reinscribing the centre / margin binary with its attendant attributes, instead provides camouflage from which, as storyteller, she can occupy any space.
Not a singular and linear narrative, but a web of stories within stories • Although Eva’s world is "bounded by the iron railings of the garden," she finds that "[w]ithin them, time [is] ruled by caprice . . . Light and shadow create fundamental changes in the nature of objects . . . Space expand[s] and contract[s] according to my will" (pp.23-24). • As "a prolongation of [the] shadow[s]," she is "transformed into a multifaceted being, reproduced to infinity, seeing my own reflection in multiple mirrors . . . speaking with many voices" (p.263).
What do authoritarian regimes want? • Control over "the truth" • So any totalitarian system only survives, after all, on a suspension of disbelief. Information and disinformation dissolve into one another; a story of stability sustains a society in which dissidents who are existent one day are non-existent the next. In order to keep the "official truth" intact, in effect, a lot of narrative invention has to be done.
What can the magic realist do? • Not so much go beyond the reality of the social world as challenge the regime's restricted version of that world by drawing upon its own narrative strategies • Eva's reinventions of the "official truth" implies, therefore, an unsettling of the polarized relationship between authority and transgression
Room for Manoeuvre • Eva’s oppositional practice is to ‘manoeuvre’ within the 'room' that opens up between the two poles of authority and transgression • When General Rodríguez asks her “how does one write”, she tells him: • Reality is a jumble we can’t always measure or decipher, because everything is happening at the same time. While you and I are speaking here, behind your back Christopher Columbus is inventing America, and the same Indians that welcome him in the stained-glass window are still naked in a jungle a few hours from this office, and will be there a hundred years from now. I try to open a path through that maze, to put a little order in that chaos, to make life more bearable. When I write, I describe life as I would like it to be. (p.266)
Eva's peculiar status as … • a woman living in the shadows of an authoritarian patriarchy • a (maternal) child of the oppressive colonizing culture • a (paternal) child of the oppressed native culture
Female sexuality’s manoeuvring power • The women in the novel are the keepers, by matrilineal inheritance, of a life-giving and ongoing energy which can be pitched against the various violences of a masculinist and militant culture. • This women-shared energy is rooted in the image of a radicalised mother love
The reinvented "mother" • Mother figures are prevalent in the novel as the holders of a capacity to heal and to create, manifested in ways which disrupt and reinvent the traditionally valorised (and thereby depoliticized) signification of “mother”
Eva's life is guided and protected by characters like… • The ghostly presence of her dead mother Consuelo, who in parenthood compounded illegitimacy with miscegenation and was herself the most unconventional orphan; • Elvira: the shrivelled “grandmother” who never was a mother; • The madrina: the tough and sassy alcoholic whose only child was born with two heads, presumably as punishment for her various sins; • La Señora: the painted brothel owner who knows how to care for her “girls”
Recuperating female identity… • Yet although the most familiar meanings of “mother” are refused in the novel, Allende’s focus on female solidarity looks a lot like the western feminist tradition of a separate and unproblematic women's identity. • However, presenting female power as nurturing and cyclical and male energy as culturally based and destructive must be understood within a powerful socio-political context, both past and present, of colonial, capitalist and patriarchal violences.
… or dismantling gender? • The “ambiguous” figure of Melisio / Mimi, a transvestite who becomes biologically female, is both a “fictional woman” and “the absolute female” (p.227). • When Melisio / Mimi attends the Carnival Ball dressed as a man (p.198) the result, says Eva, “is unsettling, to say the least” (p.189). • Melisio / Mimi works both on the stage, in the art of role playing, and at the language institute, in the translation (and transformation) of meanings. Her life becomes a “suspended” (p.189) exercise of transformation, in which identity is only, and always, provisional. • In the house which Eva shares with Melisio / Mimi and La Señora, life is lived “in a forest of ambiguities”: • In that house day and night were reversed, you lived at night and slept during the day; the girls became entirely different creatures once they put on their makeup; [La Se–ora] was a tangle of contradictions; Melisio was without sex or age . . . [all was] profusion and total disorder. (p.113)
Dismantling space (through setting) • The urban domestic space of La Señora is “a forest of ambiguities” (p.113) • The nation’s assumed centre of power is not defined by an exterior space characterised as general and undifferentiated, but by its own “interior” (p.68) • Thus the “centre” is undermined by a variable hinterland of “exuberant” and “immoderate geography” (p.67 & p.158) • Running through this “most hallucinatory land on earth” is a river of “opalescent waters whose banks evaporated in the reverberating light,” whose current carries an incongruous diversity of “garbage, carcasses of dogs and rats, and inexplicable white blossoms [along with] images, smells, colours, and myths” (p.5). • By contrast, the now centreless “centre” of authority is described in ways which render it flat, caricatured, inanimate against the multiple worlds of the interior.
Dismantling place (through migration) • The immigrant space of La Colonia, “a foreign colony with its own laws and customs”, is a satire of cultural authenticity, evolving into an exotic tourist Mecca that is both organic and contrived (p.80-1) • The aphrodisiac environment of Rupert and Burgel parodies in its fecundity the sterile morality of Latin American Catholicism and simultaneously ‘cures’ Rolf Carlé’s Freudian holocaust trauma • Riad Halabí’s Pearl of the Orient in the rural backwater of Agua Santa [Holy Water] is an inverted parody of the nation’s dreams of modernising the interior; where Halabí instead imports his ancient Arabic “sense of hospitality and passion for water” (p.126). • Alluding to the other conquistador myth of Ponce de Léon’s Fountain of Youth, Agua Santa becomes the place where Eva becomes a woman and learns the mysteries of sex & story telling, like Scheherazade.
