It All Depends On What You Mean By Reality: US Plain Magical Realism

My objective is to analyze some recent North American literary production which, while partially rejecting metafiction, has widened the classical western notion of realism, hybridizing it with oxymoronic, non-mimetic elements. The western concept of mimesis has in the last years been tried by forces both endogenous (the increasing transmediality, the postmodernization of society) and exogenous (the effects of globalization, the rise of postcolonialism). The idea of a non-mimetic realism also encompasses the notion of Freud’s Unheimlich, a peculiar state combining the comfort of the already known with the uncanny novelty of the unseen. Tracing its history means re-constructing a geographical path - from Europe to Center America, to South American reinventions, to the globalized contemporaneity – while trying to explain how languages drawn by different media (graphic novels, film, television series, the übermedium of the Internet) penetrated into literature. Several studies have dealt with this subject, sometimes with unfortunate lexical overlaps due to a partial incapability to communicate with liminal fields. My view is that the authors of both magical realism and neofantastic (Marquez, Rushdie, Borges, Cortazar, Calvino, Saramago, Grass, Murakami) should be seen as the founding fathers of a hybrid sensibility which is turning into a self-sustained, highly productive literary mode. I will therefore analyze a corpus of contemporary North-American works of “new magical realism” (a label then replaced by fabulism or slipstream) by Aimee Bender, Julia Slavin, Judy Budnitz, and those (slightly different) by Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders and Donald Antrim. I will investigate whether their hybrid nature reflects the principles of accepting otherness as a constitutive counterpart of the self or is a way to mitigate the subversive charge of the original fantastic (Jackson 1981). Finally, I will try to understand if the reason of their appeal responds to the mere allure of exoticism or if it proceeds from a real epistemological shift, trying to give account of the contemporary unreal reality (Brooke-Rose 1981).