Olga Tokarczuk’s Magical Realism In The Post-Anthropocentric Era

Of all the Nobel Prize winners in literature,there exists a distinctive genealogy of magical realism,including Marquez,William Faulkner,and Mo Yan.Olga Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature for her narratives full of boundary-crossing and imagination.Her fictions are also enveloped in a strong sense of magical realism,so she deserves to be compared with other writers.Simultaneously,post-anthropocentrism provides her magical narrative with a background that distinguishes her from this genealogy,enriching magical realism both in narrative technique and thematic meaning.Based on narratology-related theories,this thesis applies the methods of literature analysis and comparative analysis to compare Tokarczuk with Marquez and Mo Yan,and explores her unique narrative strategies in the post-anthropocentric era from story to discourse.The comparison is mainly conducted from the following four dimensions,namely non-linear spacetime,supernatural things,historical and mythological intertext,and fantasy narrative.First,while distorted linear spacetime is a common feature in the novels of the three writers,Tokarczuk’s time and space are apparently more fragmented.Instead of destroying the integrity of the story,the fragmented spacetime forms uniquely structured “constellation” novels.Put otherwise,chaotic narrative spacetime subverts the traditional linear authority and creates a unity in which multiple spacetime coexist.Beneath chaos and disorder lies the true meaning and universal experience of human existence that transcend respectively the barriers between individuals,nations,and states.Second,all three literary masters have greatly described supernatural things,and Tokarczuk inclines to embody their subjectivity in comparison with supernatural things without subjectivity in the novels of Marquez and Mo Yan.Then subjectivity is transferred from human to supernatural things with the capability not only to think and feel,but also to act.Therefore,the boundary between people and things(including organic and inorganic things)is no longer plain,revealing the animism in the postanthropocentric era.Third,history and myths drawn from local cultures are a major feature of magical realism.Different from the mainstream traumatic history expressed by Marquez and Mo Yan,Tokarczuk attenuates the sense of boundary by focalizing on marginal history and unfamiliar mythologies.She bases on boundaries and meanwhile transcends them to create centers on them,challenging the mainstream narrative and achieving the effect of removing the center-periphery schema typical in anthropocentrism.Finally,magical realism literature is generally inseparable from fantasy,yet the fictions of Marquez and Mo Yan belong to “the uncanny” and “the marvelous”respectively,while Tokarczuk’s novels belong to the category of “the fantasy”.Her novels not only make readers and characters hesitate over the authenticity of the literary world,but also cannot be interpreted poetically or allegorically.The paradoxical literary space contains the mysterious interconnection of things in the fantasy world,echoing the blurred or fluid boundaries in the post-anthropocentric era.