Magical Realism in this Week's Texts

In this week's readings, Carlos Fuentes's Aura and Haruki Marakami's After the Quake, I received the biggest some of the shocks of all the literature I've encountered in this course. Aura, emphasizes the meta-fiction and authorial resistance characteristics of magical realism to string the audience along to discover the truth beneath Consuelo's and Felipe's lives. The way Fuentes wrote the novel, we become Felipe within the first couple of lines of the work. We see the way he thinks and moves because the audience and Felipe are one and the same. However, this is not the case as Felipe discovers more about Consuelo, Aura, and the General. Whereas Felipe has an oblivious reaction to the strange occurrences around the house, the reader tries to understand what in the world is actually happening and rationalize the situation (as it's our human nature). Yet, because we are only allowed to see what oblivious Felipe sees, we don't get very much detail about anything that occurs. Thus, in the end, we are shocked about what we read. It very much reminds me of the way the Fall of the House of Usher gave small hints about what was happening and end in a nearly surreal fashion, except this way we are the protagonist as he simultaneously discovers. It is precisely the 2nd person narration (or rather that meta-fiction aspect) of the novel that hits home because it makes everything much more personally. As Professor Potts put it, it one thing to read about a ghost encounter and being the one to encounter the ghost (which I can't quote her on because I can't remember the exact way she phrased it).

The Marakami readings were, in my opinion, very surreal. Of course, part of magical realism is a surrealistic contortion of a realistic feature. I believe thing that was distorted in this piece was one's sense of analysis. Each plot follows the effects of the lives of certain characters after an earthquake in Kobe, Japan. The big question is how exactly does an earthquake in Kobe affect people who are a great distance away from the site and have no relevance to Kobe. It seems that it have some kind of mental effect on everyone. Komura's wife suddenly was inseparable from the TV's earthquake coverage and left him, just as Sasaki (his friend) gives a strange package to deliver. The never-appreciated-enough Katagiri keeps getting visits from a huge frog. Junpei comforts Sala's nightly visions of the earthquake man just as Junpei finally makes the decision to pursue Sayoko. There is, however, unusual about how it all proceeds. Why did Komura's wife keep watching the news coverage if she had no family in Kobe? How did it influence her to separate with Komura, if it did at all influence her? What was in Sasaki's package? Was anything Katagiri saw real? If Frog was real, what happened that night? Who was the earthquake man Sala kept seeing? It is interesting how every character, like Felipe, did little questioning on these inconsistencies. Perhaps, that is one of the factors of categorizing these types of stories as magical realism. Maybe the protagonist isn't supposed to question the happenings around him or her and just accept everything at face value.