| This dissertation studies eight Hispanic-American writers (Isabel Allende, Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, João Guimarães Rosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Juan Rulfo) and two French Caribbean writers (Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz-Bart), and explores the use in their works of ‘magic realism’ as an allegory of the colonial experience. Beginning in Chapter One with the work of Alejo Carpentier, who was the first to use the concept of the ‘marvelous real’ and whose influence on the writers of the subsequent generation is undeniable, I have attempted to illustrate that the novel conveys more vividly than is possible in psychological or sociological studies the trauma of colonialism and its enduring effects. This study uses critical works on allegory and on magic realism to point out that the two modes are in fact one and the same. Both privilege contradiction, ambiguity and deliberate confusions, which force the reader to embrace openness, multiplicity, and excess, and to participate in the construction of meaning; both make use of a certain degree of stylization and patterning, often found in primitive thought, thus subtly undermining the hegemonic mentality of the ‘imperial center’; both hark back to the past, through historical referentiality and/or intertextuality, thus underscoring their place in the continuum of history and of artistic production and emphasizing the play of reality and illusion that is basic to modes that refuse facile definition. Chapter Two examines the history and describes the elements that make up magic realism, illustrating its varied aspects with examples from the works of the authors cited above. Chapter Three deals with the history and description of allegory and shows how its characteristics mirror those of magic realism. Chapter Four studies the work of the two French Caribbean authors and explores the limits of allegory as seen in the work of Simone Schwarz-Bart. The conclusion makes use of a novel by a New Zealand author, Janet Frame, to illustrate the fact that magic realism is found, not only in so-called ‘post-colonial’ countries, but in the work of First World authors, where the effects of oppression are evident in the lives of the ‘colonizers’ as well. |
