Dreaming of home: Magic realism in William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and John Nichols

This dissertation defines magic realism as a product of the colonized imagination that constructs alternative "spaces" in the local landscape as a means of cultural survival. These spaces become the site of transcendent mythical experiences, linking the local population to a strong cultural ancestry predating the colonial event. While the term "magic realism" is often confined to certain modernist and postmodern Latin American writers, reading it as a product of colonial experience broadens its definition, making feasible its application to other marginalized populations, such as Faulkner's postbellum South, Morrison's Midwestern African American communities, and the Chicano Southwest described by John Nichols. These works transcribe an impulse toward the creation of a sense of indigenousness, source of the marvelousness at the core of culture that I term "vernacular magic." These writers, in the act of describing their homesite as marvelous, participate in constructing home for the marginalized groups for whom they write. Using Deleuze and Guattari's term "becoming-minor," I show how Faulkner articulates not the position of minority groups, i.e. the African Americans that lurk in the shadows of many of his novels (though, conspicuously, not The Hamlet), but the position of the marginalized southerner victimized by the encroaching Northern industrialized economic system. We see in Faulkner the beginnings of a magical landscape, one that speaks to the strength of the community and its ancestral culture. Gabriel Garcia Maquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude amplifies Faulkner's efforts through a similar use of marvelous landscape. The focus of Morrison's Sula is the community of the Bottom, itself a marginalized location on the outskirts of Medallion, Ohio. Toni Morrison's Sula follows what has developed into magic realist pattern: articulations of a borderland where community "difference" signifies solidarity in the face of situational colonization. John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War depicts a battle for natural resources between Chicano peasants in New Mexico and Yankee land developers. The myths of the "native" community, including the particular cosmology and sense of indigenousness, inspire the marvelous victory.