{"id":917,"date":"2009-12-06T22:24:32","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T03:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/?p=917"},"modified":"2009-12-06T22:25:26","modified_gmt":"2009-12-07T03:25:26","slug":"917","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/archives\/917","title":{"rendered":"Magical Realism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can’t help but feel that in its own way The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<\/em> is a magical realist novel. I hadn’t heard the term used before we talked about it in reference to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close<\/em>, but having read several of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, I think I understand well enough what the term means.<\/p>\n

The fuku curse is the most striking example of this because it isn’t something one finds in everyday life. Most Americans don’t believe in this sort of thing, and curses need belief in order to have any power at all. The power of this curse does stem from a supernatural source, it is something too big to be avoided: “no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always — and I mean always — gets its man” (5). One of the questions that stands out in my mind about this is what about Beli? She managed to escape from the canefield, despite being terribly injured: “Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of the canefields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a “mother” with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything…it is that our Beli was blessed” (152). It’s true, people who are cursed don’t usually have such good luck. But if she were blessed, how would she have landed herself in such a situation anyway? I mean, really? An affair with Trujillo’s brother-in-law? That has to be fuku right?<\/p>\n

The creature that eventually leads Beli out of the canefield is what stands out to me as magical realism, though. “But before Beli lost hope she heard the creature’s voice. She (for it had a woman’s lilt) was singing! (149-50). Beli is able to follow this voice out of the canefield, which would normally not happen. Beli got help from a supernatural force, which to me signifies an element of magical realism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can’t help but feel that in its own way The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a magical realist novel. I hadn’t heard the term used before we talked about it in reference to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but having read several of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, I think I understand well… Continue reading Magical Realism?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=917"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":919,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917\/revisions\/919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2009\/459\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}