Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures

Kenneth A. Loparo, R. Perez, Kenneth A. Loparo, R. Perez

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137329240
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

A collection of essays that explores magical realism as a momentary interruption of realism in US ethnic literature, showing how these moments of magic realism serve to memorialize, address, and redress traumatic ethnic histories.

PART I

Traumatic Inheritances

The Psychic Life of Magic

Chapter 1

Trauma, Magic, and Genealogy

Moments of Magical Realism in Daughters of the Stone by Dhalma Llanos-Figueroa and The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

Lyn Di Iorio Sandín

Two modes of literature—and more particularly, of reading literature—have rarely been compared: trauma theory and magical realism. Particularities of postcoloniality and neocolonialism visited on peoples of Afro-Caribbean heritage in the islands and in New York can be examined by looking at magical realism from a new angle: traumatic realism, thereby underscoring that characteristics of trauma narratives are also features of magical realist texts, as is the case in Daughters of the Stone by Dhalma Llanos-Figueroa and Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid.

In Daughters of the Stone, the traumatic effects of slavery are passed on from mother to daughter among a group of black Puerto Rican women and are mended by the New York descendant of the line and her recuperation of stories from the past through a family heirloom, a stone, which produces magical realist effects that include allowing women in the line to dream about their ancestresses, and other aspects of the past in Africa that intrude momentarily into the present.

From Autobiography of My Mother, I examine the fleeting but important magical realism manifesting itself in a figure who might or might not be an African goddess and the ambiguous results of her mysterious appearance.

I am interested in the effects and emotional charge of the object—the stone—and the mysterious figure—the lady in the water—that bring magical realism into these otherwise realist texts as momentary irruptions and ruptures. In both texts, magical realism manifests momentarily to indicate that certain infrequently encountered objects or events have a catalytic effect on those who’ve suffered a history of trauma, and the forgetfulness, dissociative, or fractured memory patterns that often accompany the traumatized. The magical moment is a symptom of something larger—possibly a whole history—that subjects no longer remember—and which is now the social unconscious of the subject and, in these texts, the community. When the moments of magical realism irrupt, the subject—immersed in a present in which modernity has suppressed belief in what is now coded as the magical, may not recognize its catalytic importance. The importance instead is encoded strangely in brief, infrequent, and uncommon instances, figures, and objects—illuminating and mystifying, occluding and revealing alternate readings of history and community.

Trauma Theory and Literary Analysis

Trauma theory responds to the uncovering and naming of the experiences of continued psychic distress undergone by Holocaust survivors; colonial and postcolonial subjects; female survivors of physical abuse, rape, and incest; and survivors of war, in particular wars characterized by atrocities on a grand scale. Trauma theory also addresses psychic trauma on individual and collective levels. After the publication in 1996 of Cathy Caruth’s now classic text Unclaimed Experience,¹ trauma theory became an accepted lens with which to examine literature. It is a particularly instructive way of thinking about literature because it stresses the therapeutic nature of the narrative—that is, the telling of the story of what happened as a way of better understanding the trauma and, also, as a way of possibly overcoming the most devastating effects of the trauma. Clinicians and researchers in the field of trauma distinctively contrast the mindset of the individual after he or she has experienced a traumatic event and the mindset of the individual after he or she has been able to work through the trauma and can tell a story about it.

In their essay “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” Bessel Van Der Kolk and Onno Van Der Hart note that from a clinician’s perspective, for the posttraumatic subject “under extreme conditions existing meaning schemes may be entirely unable to accommodate frightening experiences which cause the memory of these experiences to be stored differently and not be available for retrieval under ordinary conditions: it (the memory) becomes dissociated from conscious awareness and voluntary control.”²

Van Der Kolk and Van Der Hart use the term dissociation, borrowed from the work of Pierre Janet, one of the nineteenth-century predecessors of Freud and psychoanalysis, to describe the way in which traumatic memories are not available to regular memory functioning. Janet stressed narrative in his discussion of the effects of trauma on memory: “The subject is often incapable of making the necessary narrative which we call memory regarding the event: and yet he remains confronted by a difficult situation in which he has not been able to play a satisfactory part, one to which his adaptation had been imperfect, so that he continues to make efforts at adaptation.”³

Van Der Kolk and Van Der Hart, and other theorists, building on the extraordinary work of Janet and, of course, Freud’s monumental legacy, emphasize that the overwhelming experience that is trauma often cannot be integrated well enough into cognitive meaning schemes so that individuals can put it in narrative relation to their other memories. He or she either cannot recall the experience or remembers fragments that are frightening and confusing.

Conversely, a traumatic memory is so overwhelming that it takes over completely and an individual comes back to it repeatedly in flashbacks and nightmares. In fact, as Caruth, working through Freud’s insights, reiterates in the haunting introduction to Unclaimed Experience, an individual may find him or herself unwittingly in situations that recall the original trauma.⁴ That is, the individual may find him or herself in the process of what trauma theorists call reenactment. This compulsion to reenact the original trauma puts the traumatized individual at risk for continued psychic trauma. Traumatic memory, then, tends to be fragmentary and repetitive, and tends to hold the full experience of the trauma at bay so that it ultimately is not well integrated into the rest of the individual’s memory and experience. This happens because the traumatic experience is so difficult, painful, and often horrific, that it cannot be assimilated at once. In fact, as Freud and Caruth have pointed out, the reenactments of the original trauma may often serve to allow the individual to better understand the nature of the trauma. Dissociation, then, is a productive psychic strategy for those suffering from severe trauma, as it protects them from some of the damage of the original event, until they are able to work out a narrative about the trauma. Traumatic memory, according to Van Der Holk and Van Der Hart, is also inflexible and invariable, has no social component, and is addressed to no one. It is a solitary activity. As well, traumatic memory can create a state in traumatized individuals wherein they experience life in a kind of split reality. They live in the present but they also live in constant connection to the past traumatic event.

In individuals who are not victims of trauma, the ability to integrate present experiences with past memories essentially is the ability to create narrative memory. In therapeutic contexts, patients are geared toward integration of the dissociated traumatic event and the ability to finally create narrative out of the traumatic event. Inasmuch as the traumatic event can be recounted as a story from the teller to a responsive receiver, narrative memory, then, according to Van Der Holk and Van Der Hart, is a social act.

The presence of a receiver, a listener who can bear witness to the story of the trauma, is crucial, as Shoshana Felman has shown both in her commentaries on trauma narratives ranging from Holocaust survivor accounts to literature that represents traumatic events.⁵ What becomes particularly clear in Felman’s and Caruth’s writing is that the story of trauma in some way depends on the presence of the listener or witness. Felman’s provocative account of how her graduate seminar on trauma at Yale was thrown into a crisis simply through bearing witness to videotapes of Holocaust survivors also suggests that bearing witness to trauma allows the stories of trauma to be told through the listeners’ willingness to experience a momentary wounding as they bear witness to stories of heartrending traumatic events that befell other people.

Janet and others have pointed out that the healthy response to stress is mobilization of adaptive action. Janet went so far as to view memory itself as active. “Memory is an action: essentially, it is the action of telling a story.”⁶ It is narrative memory that is therapeutic. Once the traumatized individual turns fragments into a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, and can tell the story in a social context to other people, the trauma starts “losing its power” over current experience.⁷ For Van Der Kolk and Van Der Hart, the flexibility of memory is all-important. They note that it is crucial for victims of rape and other forms of overwhelmingly violent events to imagine having agency and being able to respond to the perpetrator.⁸

Here I’d like to note the distinction between the notions of individual and collective trauma. Individual trauma, according to Kai Erikson’s essay “Notes on Trauma,” is a wound to the psyche that breaks through the subject’s defenses so suddenly and with such brutal force that the subject cannot react effectively to it. Erikson notes that, on the other hand, collective trauma is a blow to the fundamental structure of social life that damages the bonds uniting people and impairs their sense of collectivity. Because of its wide-ranging and diffuse nature, collective trauma may not have the sudden impact often associated with individual trauma. Its impact is more gradual and tends to affect a group of people who were once a community with the realization that their social body no longer exists as a means of support.⁹ It must be recognized, however, that in certain communities, the notion of community itself may depend on an original trauma as one of the factors that created the community. So for example, for members of the African diaspora, the Middle Passage functions as an originary trauma by uprooting prior communities, and also as a locus of identity for a new imagined community. Likewise, for Puerto Ricans on the island and in New York, the four hundred year period of Spanish colonialism (which included genocide of the native populations in the Caribbean as well as enslavement of Africans) and the shorter period of colonialism under the United States become starting points for discussions about colonialism as a communal trauma for Puerto Ricans as well as locus points for a relatively new definition of community (a community marked by trauma).

If earlier social bodies no longer exist as a means of support, then the effort to create a narrative out of traumatic memory generates certain moments coded as “magical” that may serve to connect alienated and traumatized subjects to the rest of the sundered community and to a past history, even if many details about the past community have been forgotten.

Magical Realism and Trauma

The phrasing of the term “magical realism” posits that the literary mode it describes yokes contrary, even paradoxical, perspectives on the world.¹⁰ In this equation, empiricism, with its emphasis on the independent existence of objects that can be perceived through observation, meets another vantage point whose conditions of belief frequently contradict realism and empiricism. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Kingdom of this World (1949, tr. 1957) established the Latin American, and arguably the best known, variant of magical realism. Carpentier himself termed it “lo real maravilloso americano”¹¹—not magical realism but, in my extrapolation, “the marvelous real of the Americas.” Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, and many critics interested in magical realism, have pointed out that the nonrealist perspective is frequently that of those who have experienced subjugation and colonialism, and that the realist, empiricist perspective is frequently that of those who are the colonizers and oppressors. Hence magical realist narratives are frequently stories that resist the philosophical conditions of master narratives. These classical magical realist narratives very often create a split between the perspectives of empiricism and the nonrealist perspective, but they also blur the boundaries between those split perspectives to show how contrary worldviews mix and affect each other.

In order to highlight what he perceived to be a mode that arose out of the unique collisions of the perspectives of conquistadors and native peoples, as well as black slaves and their descendants, and to differentiate the marvelous real from other nonrealist modes such as surrealism, Carpentier also emphasized that those who partake of the marvelous perspective really do believe in it: “To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints”¹² Carpentier’s magical realism proposes that the denizens of the Americas, who believe in places, practices, and visions that outsiders view as “magic,” see these things as the product of their specific perspectives and their faith in not just the magical manifestations but in their histories and contexts.

The Kingdom of This World features Macandal, the historical leader of an early slave rebellion in colonial San Domingue or Haiti.¹³ Macandal initially escapes his captors but is then recaptured and burned at the stake. The masters see that the man indeed burns at the stake, but the slaves, by contrast, “see” their leader escape (“The bonds fell off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into the black waves of the sea of slaves.”).¹⁴ They do not acknowledge that he is recaptured and executed at the stake.¹⁵ Instead, inspired by their belief in the Afro-Caribbean religion of Voudoun, the slaves understand that Macandal metamorphoses into different animals. Instead of going to heaven, he stays with them as a spirit, capable of carnal incarnations—hence the title of Carpentier’s book, which forcefully underlines the difference between Christianity, which tells believers to look forward to happiness after death in heaven and a different sense, stemming from Afro-Caribbean religious practice, that spiritual metamorphosis happens closer to home and closer to the human body in the earth where people have lived their lives.

One can read this moment through the lens of trauma theory as well. Macandal’s escape causes pandemonium and confusion. This sense of confusion, and the fear in which the slaves live on a daily basis under French colonial slavery, adds to their psychic trauma. Additionally, once Macandal is caught and finally burned at the stake, many of the already psychically wounded slaves do not see their leader burn because they dissociate from the traumatic event. Ultimately, one can argue that they make a narrative about the event that enables them to live with some of its horrific effects, such as the folk story that Macandal transformed into a bird or a butterfly and flew away and the powerful Voudoun belief that Macandal remained among his people as a helpful spirit inhabiting animals and human beings. It was this type of story that helped the Haitian slaves to start a later rebellion that led to the Haitian revolution. Additionally, the Afro-Caribbean religio-magical system of Voudoun highlights “possession,” or the “mounting” of human believers by the “old” Gods from Dahomey as well as newer ones that date to the time of the Haitian revolution. In this sense, as Joan Dayan has brilliantly observed in Haiti, History, and the Gods, believers in Voudoun are frequently possessed not just by the gods but by historical characters and, in a sense, by history itself.^1...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Tracing Magical Irruptions in US Ethnic Literatures
• Part I: Traumatic Inheritances: The Psychic Life of Magic
• Part II: Sensory Irruptions, Magical Sensibilities
• Part III: Prophetic Practices, Mythic Knowledges
• Part IV: Antinomies: Magic, Memory, and Space
• Notes on Contributors