Climate and Crises

Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse

Ben Holgate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351372930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Sammlungen

Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse makes a dual intervention in both world literature and ecocriticism by examining magical realism as an international style of writing that has long-standing links with environmental literature. The book argues that, in the era of climate change when humans are facing the prospect of species extinction, new ideas and new forms of expression are required to address what the novelist Amitav Gosh calls a "crisis of imagination." Magical realism enables writers to portray alternative intellectual paradigms, ontologies and epistemologies that typically contest the scientific rationalism derived from the European Enlightenment, and the exploitation of natural resources associated with both capitalism and imperialism. Climate and Crises explores the overlaps between magical realism and environmental literature, including their respective transgressive natures that dismantle binaries (such as human and non-human), a shared biocentric perspective that focuses on the inter-connectedness of all things in the universe, and, frequently, a critique of postcolonial legacies in formerly colonised territories. The book also challenges conventional conceptions of magical realism, arguing they are often influenced by a geographic bias in the construction of the orthodox global canon, and instead examines contemporary fiction from Asia (including China) and Australasia, two regions that have been largely neglected by scholarship of the narrative mode. As a result, the monograph modifies and expands our ideas of what magical realist fiction is.

1 ‘Expanded reality’

Alexis Wright’s Revitalisation of Dreamtime Narratives

Indigenous Australian Alexis Wright’s fiction demonstrates how Lawrence Buell’s concept of the “environmental unconscious” is a relative term.¹ The collective ideologies and social experiences that shape an individual’s perception of the environment vary between people of different societies and cultures. The environmental unconscious, therefore, is a heterogeneous phenomenon rather than a singular, homogeneous one. And, of course, the environment itself – with the definite article – is a relative term, dependent upon the actual geographical locality. Wright’s fiction is largely set in Northern Australia, where populations are sparse, and where arid or semi-arid landscapes meet tropical seas. In particular, the backdrop within much of her three novels to date is the Gulf of Carpentaria, from where her family originates, and which is the home of the Waanyi nation.² Moreover, Wright imbues her fiction with the Indigenous Australian Dreamtime, a philosophy and spiritual framework that is inextricably connected to the Australian landscape, but which is substantially different from Western philosophies, even ecological ones. In other words, Wright’s books are notable for being unlike European or North American fiction in both the geographical environment of their settings and the world view that underpins the narratives.

Wright did not begin publishing fiction until 1997, when she was in her late 40s, after she had spent time working as an activist for Indigenous affairs, including helping to coordinate two Indigenous constitutional conventions in the 1990s in an unsuccessful attempt to develop political autonomy separate from Australia’s national and regional governments. This background is important because it shows that the political imperatives evident in her fiction are goals and values that she has long held and championed. Wright benefitted from an established market for Indigenous Australian literature that emerged in the 1960s as part of a resurgent Indigenous voice which developed during the civil rights movement of that decade. After two centuries of political, economic, social and cultural marginalisation, Indigenous Australians belatedly won the right to vote in national elections and were finally counted in the national census. Pioneering writers such as playwright Jack Davis, poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and novelist Monica Clare paved the way for a renaissance in Indigenous Australian literature that was supported by government funding from the 1970s and the establishment of dedicated Indigenous publishers like Magabala Books from the 1980s. Collectively, Indigenous writing may be seen as a reappropriation of European communication, an intervention by Australia’s first inhabitants to wrest back control of their own narratives and reinsert themselves into social and political discourse. Yet, despite a substantial number of published Indigenous Australian authors, a general reading audience of Indigenous literature “is yet to be fostered,” as Indigenous author and critic Anita Heiss says.³ This may be partly due to Indigenous Australians making up a relatively low 3 per cent of Australia’s population.

Wright follows other Indigenous Australian authors, such as Sam Watson and Kim Scott, who employ magical realist techniques as a postcolonial strategy by conveying the Indigenous Australian Dreamtime in a written literary form, building on traditional oral storytelling. The Dreamtime, however, is not easily transferable to non-Indigenous languages, cultures or philosophies, in particular Western ones. This is a key factor that makes Wright’s fiction so interesting in terms of both magical realism and environmental literature for there are limits to how much the rubric of either concept can be applied to non-Western philosophies. The Dreamtime is a “fraught epistemology” for Western intellectual consumption as European philosophies, derived from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, tend to categorise and prioritise rationalist ideals. Dreamtime narratives, on the other hand, “integrate fields that are separate discursive domains in [W]estern knowledge – philosophy, religion, economics, ecology, epistemology, kinship, gender behaviour, kinship systems, interpersonal relations, geography and mapping.”⁴ The Dreamtime is tied to the land as well as to Indigenous Law. Historian Bill Gammage describes the Law as “an ecological philosophy enforced by religious sanction” that “compel[s] people to care for all their country.”⁵ The environmental aspect of the Law is paramount. Wright describes the Law as “Indigenous memory [by which] men and women can name and tell the story of thousands of individual sites in their country, continuing a long tradition of watching over this country and maintaining the ecologically sustainable life.” In other words, these traditional stories are passed down orally from generation to generation in order to identify and describe individual parts of the physical environment so that they are conserved and protected. Moreover, these “ancient” stories originate from “the ancestral creation beings,” thereby linking the stories, Law and environment with Indigenious spirituality.⁶ Indigenous playwright and poet Kevin Gilbert says that ancestral spirits watch over people in the present day as custodians of “a predictable and unchanging system of Law” that governs “the social and spiritual system as set down at the Beginning, the start of time.” The Dreamtime, he adds, “is the first formation, the beginning of the creative process of mobile / life upon and within the land.”⁷ The Law, then, is a constant that exists outside of chronological time.

The Indigenous protagonists in Wright’s two major novels, Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), are guardians of the Law, hence protectors of the environment, and both have ‘magical’ or ‘supernatural’ attributes.⁸ Yet Wright does not view the ‘supernatural’ elements in her fiction to be extraordinary; instead she views them as quotidian occurrences that ought to be considered as ordinary. “Such stories could be called supernatural and fantastic, but I do not think of them in this way,” she says. “These are stories of spiritual beliefs as much as the beliefs of the everyday.”⁹ Her comment emphasises the point that the aspects of her fiction which may seem non-realist to Western readers should be read not as metaphors or figurative but rather as phenomena in the actual world. In Carpentaria, Norm Phantom is an “old tribal man” (4) whose stories are referred to as “decorum – the good information, intelligence, etiquette of the what to do, how to behave for knowing how to live like a proper human being” (original emphasis) (246). Tellingly, Norm, as a fisherman, shares a greater affinity with the sea than the land, preferring to be in a boat on the ocean as “the sea man of Carpentaria” (95). He “inherited his father’s memory of the sea” (17), indicating the vital importance of intercultural transference of traditional knowledge and culture for survival. Through the character of Norm, textual references to the environment expand beyond the terrestrial.

Interestingly, Wright repeatedly appropriates the use of the word ‘magic’ to describe Norm, which suggests that this is a deliberate technique to normalise the term and invoke a normative status for ‘magical’ events in the narrative. Norm is described as the kind of person who has “swapped their blood for magic” and who has “only got magic running through their veins” (486). His practice of preserving dead fish is depicted as being “like magic” (197). And his son, Will Phantom, seeks out “the latest piece of magic his father was working on” (194). Norm is also referred to as a “supernatural master artist who created miracles” (206). Indeed, Wright uses the word ‘magic’ liberally throughout the novel, including in relation to ancestral sprits, like the “land woman devil Gardajala” (276). Some critics worry that the application of the word ‘magic’ to Indigenous Australian literature somehow “trivialises the sacred dimension” of the ancestral spirits.¹⁰ Alison Ravenscroft even warns against relating Carpentaria to magical realism because it might imply a binary reading that “associates Indigeneity with magic, irrationality, delusion and dream, and whiteness with realism, reality and rationality.”¹¹ However, I propose that Wright is deliberately co-opting the word ‘magic’ from an Indigenous viewpoint, using it in a positive rather than a pejorative sense.

Wright’s approach is consistent with an anthropological perspective that treats magic as a legitimate form of knowledge. Claude Lévi-Strauss considers magical thought in premodern societies to form “a well-articulated system” that is just as valid as modern scientific thought. Rather than pitting magic and science against each other as adversaries, Lévi-Strauss suggests that it is better to “compare them as two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge.” Both magic and science are similar insofar as they “require the same sort of mental operations,” yet they are dissimilar in regard to “the different types of phenomena to which they are applied.”¹² Magic, as Marcel Mauss notes, is a knowledge base that has to be believed. It is “a social phenomenon” rather than a private one, and it is sanctioned by public opinion through “shared ideas and voluntary rites” that are passed down through generations. Magic is learned through “revelation,” which occurs through contact “with one or more spirits.”¹³ In short, an anthropological interpretation of magic is as a well-articulated system of thought equal in status to scientific thought and as a social phenomenon consecrated by tradition.

Magic as a legitimate form of knowledge links an Indigenous Australian environmental unconscious with traditional spirituality in Wright’s fiction. Ancestral spirits reside within the environment and pass on knowledge of the Law to ongoing generations of Indigenous people like Norm. Carpentaria opens with a creationist myth: the “ancestral serpent,” at an indeterminate time “billions of years ago,” descends from the stars and crawls “all around the wet clay soils in the Gulf of Carpentaria.” For the remainder of the narrative the rainbow serpent “continues to live deep down under the ground” and “permeates everything” (1–2). The “silent spirit men” watch over the country and people (150), and, in an echo of the historical massacres of Indigenous tribes, the “fairy-like people,” the yinbirras, who once lived beside real people, “disappeared into the wilderness of life” in order to not be found (299). This interconnection between the Law, ancestral spirits and the environment reaches its apotheosis towards the end of the narrative, when Norm invokes the spirits to create a cyclone as “payback” against the corrupt white people who run the town of Desperance (485, 487). The storm destroys the white settlement, razing the land back to a precolonial state, recalling a similar fate for Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

This interconnection between the spiritual and environmental worlds is even more overt in The Swan Book. The native Australian black swan, which has supernatural properties in the text, is an inversion of the northern hemisphere’s white swan. The black swans are said to be “banished” and “gypsies” (15–16), representing the plight of Indigenous Australians. Black swans have their own ancestral spirits and Law stories (16), but nobody can remember what the swans’ stories are (67), signifying a loss of cultural memory. The protagonist, the teenager Oblivia Ethyl(ene), becomes a custodian of Indigenous knowledge after living underground for a decade in the “bowels” of an ancient eucalypt, a “sacred tree where all the stories … were stored like doctrines of Law left by the spiritual ancestors” (78). Oblivia’s education, however, is not initially voluntary. After being “gang-raped” as a girl by a group of petrol-sniffing Indigenous boys (82), signifying dysfunction within her own society, she is pushed underground by an ancestral spirit responsible “for looking after the memories” (79). She learns by touching the native eucalypt’s “huge woven roots” and “writing stanzas in ancient symbols” (7), meaning she literally inscribes knowledge on to the earth. Her underground dwelling also acts as a kind of womb for Oblivia’s resurfacing as a young woman signifies parturition. Her muteness – she does not speak – symbolises both the denial of an Indigenous voice and the prospect that only Oblivia can communicate traditional knowledge among her people.

Two other characteristics of the Law make this Indigenous philosophy starkly different from Western perceptions of the environment: the land as text and localised knowledge. Indigenous Australian literature has a “unique conception of textuality” because the land is viewed as a text of the Dreamtime, a text that is bound up with the experiences of each and every individual.¹⁴ In The Swan Book this is evoked through Oblivia writing ancestral knowledge on the earth while underground and the drought-riven country, described as having been “rolled like an ancient scroll from its top and bottom ends” (18). Knowledge stored in the environment is conveyed from one person t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: A Crisis of Imagination
• 1 ‘Expanded reality’: Alexis Wright’s Revitalisation of Dreamtime Narratives
• 2 Sublime Wilderness: Embracing the Non-Human in Richard Flanagan’s Tasmania
• 3 ‘The oneness is still with us’: Oceanic Mythology in Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider
• 4 ‘Heart, spirit, and inclination’: Reconciliation in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People
• 5 Mosquitoes and Malaria: Counter-Science and Colonial Archives in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome
• 6 Purity and Parody: Mo Yan’s Resistance to Western Magical Realism in Pursuit of His Own Chinese Style
• 7 Planetary Perspective: Addressing Climate Change in Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes
• 8 Conclusion
• Index