c o l u m n2 INTERPRETATION
SUBJECT
Note: This column offers insights into other
literary forms that often resemble or
share attributes with magical realism. The goal of this column is to
highlight shifting notions and biases about
cutting edge literature.
Q What is
supernatural writing?
Here are a few points to ponder culled from the Internet:
Alain Silver, author, More Things Than Are Dreamt
Of: "In primitive societies, the
unknown was a fertile ground for a process of mythic transformation. As
the aspects of material reality which
could not be scientifically understood were explained through folk tale
and fable, the basis for all of supernatural
literature was laid down. "
Tsvetan Todorov, author/theorist/intellectual: "The
fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as
a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who
must decide whether or not what they
perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. At the
story's end, the reader makes a decision
even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and
thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he
decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of
the phenomena described, we say that
the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he
decides that new laws of nature must be
entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the
marvellous. ... The fantastic therefore leads a
life full of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment. It seems to be
located on the frontier of two genres, the
marvellous and the uncanny, rather than to be an autonomous genre. One
of the great periods of supernatural
literature, that of the Gothic novel, seems to confirm this observation.
Indeed, we generally distinguish, within the
literary Gothic, two tendencies: that of the supernatural explained (the
"uncanny"), as it appears in the novels of
Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe; and that of the supernatural accepted
(the "marvellous"), which is characteristic
of the works of Horace Walpole, M. G. Lewis, and Maturin."
Elbert Hubbard, author: "The supernatural is the natural
not yet understood."
Dictionary.com: su -
per - nat - u - ral adj.
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B U T . . . I S I
T M A G I C A
L R E A L I S M ?1. Of or relating to existence outside the
natural world.
2. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural
forces.
3. Of or relating to a deity.
4. Of or relating to the immediate exercise of divine power; miraculous.
5. Of or relating to the miraculous.
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Rev'd 2004/05/31
