Theoretical Interregnum: Chronotopes, Indexicality, and Iconicity in Magical Realism

This episode is a theoretical interregnum that will focus on showing how the principle of equivalence between the fantastic and the real in magical realism also turns specifically on the constitution of space and time, both in terms of the conflation or juxtaposition of different chronotopes and ontologies of space-time and of the transposition or leakage of different spatio-temporal categories into one another. What to a reader of realist literature might appear an odd event, such as the melting of the ‘taciturn Armenian’ into a ‘pestilential puddle’ right before Jose Arcadio Buendia’s eyes as he desperately searches for Melquíades the gypsy in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Salim Sinai’s uncanny capacity for turning his mind into a meeting place for the gathering of the midnight’s children in Salman Rushdie’s novel are only one aspect of what makes them magical realist texts. We shall see how the different chronotopes of space and time also entail different principles of indexicality and iconicity, such that the mixture of these principles can also help us discern the different emphases adopted in individual magical realist texts.
Suggested Reading
Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004)
Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, (London: Palgrave, 2009)
Ato Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative and History” The Novel Vol 1: History, Geography, and Culture ed. Franco Moretti, (Princeton University Press, 2006), 726-758
Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press), pp. 243; 250.

[@annanarthur1990]

Thank you prof.