McMurray, George R.

English

University of New Brunswick: Centre for Digital Scholarship Journals

Twenty-five  years ago Robertson-Lorant wrote an impressive doctoral dissertation on the subject of  Melville and race. It was a critical milestone in the liberal rehabilitation of  Melville, and Robertson-Lorant maintains her earlier perspective without, however, screening out or blocking evidence to the contrary. That perspective may be labeled feminine,  even feminist,  but it is clearly not committed to exposing or magnifying  "dysfunctional"  attributes of her subject. She can be very persuasive in arguing that Melville in his full maturity embodied a breadth of  humanity that embraced both the masculine and feminine  values of  an individual or an institution. Perhaps a refinement  of Hawthorne's dialectic of  head and heart, she demonstrates how Billy  Budd  hinges on the systemic incompatibility of  legal necessity on the one hand and morality and mercy on the other. In a man-of-war  world the maintenance of  discipline represents rationality and reliance on the head; whereas the heart, basically sentimental and irrational, represents "the feminine  in man," and in the world as Melville knew it, the heart "must be ruled out." A generation ago, scholarly fashion  encouraged biographical studies entitled "The Art and Mind of  ..."; Robertson-Lorant has given us "The Heart and Mind of  Herman Melville." Valuable for  its genealogical information  and description of  family relationships, for  its summary accounts of  the significance  of  Melville's apprentice works, for  sounding the depths of  Moby  Dick (1851) or admirably explicating the ambiguities of  Pierre,  Robertson-Lorant's Melville:  A Biography excels in conveying an understanding of  Ciar  el's  spiritual wasteland and of  the lesser known poems that were the avocational by-product of  Melville's day job as a customs inspector. This book should find  a place on the shelf  of  the scholar as well as that of  the general reader. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical  Realism:  Theory,  History,  Community Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 581. $59.95 $22.95 Reviewed by George R. McMurray The term "magical realism" has been tossed about rather freely  in recent decades, especially since the publication of  One Hundred  Years  of  Solitude  (1967). During much of  this time some scholars refused  to use the term because it had not been properly defined.  In more recent years, however, more serious studies have been published on magical realism, one of  several examples being Maria-Elena Angulo's Magic  Realism:  Social  Context  and Discourse (1995). The present volume, containing essays by scholars with different  points of  view, is far  more extensive than any of  the others I have seen on the subject. In their introduction, the editors explain one of  their basic tenets: that magical realism is by no means limited to Latin American literature, but rather 104 The  International  Fiction  Review 24 (1997) can be considered universal in its scope. This tenet is illustrated by the essays on writers from  other parts of  the world, including Europe, Africa,  Asia, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The editors also emphasize magical realism as a mode that transgresses ontological, political, geographical, and generic boundaries. In the editors' words: "Magical realism often  facilitates  the fusion,  or coexistence, of  possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of  fiction"  (5-6). This volume is divided into four  sections: Foundations, Theory, History, and Community. Although some of  the essays included under Foundations are well known to many scholars, this section will nevertheless provide the novice with a broader understanding of  the subject. These essays include ones by German art critic Franz Roh, which deals with postexpressionist paintings in the 1920s in Europe; Alejo Carpentier's theory of  lo real  maravilloso  in Latin America; Angel Flores and Luis Leal, who endeavor to define  magical realism in the early stages of  the "movement." In this same section are Amaryll Chanady's comments on magical realism and European surrealism, and Scott Simpkins's analyses of works by Borges and García Márquez. In one of  the best pieces on Theory, Wendy Faris elaborates on what she and Zamora write in their introduction, that is, the view of  magical realism as an international movement and, in addition, as a revitalizing force  from  the peripheral regions of  Western culture. She also sees it as "a strong current in the stream of  postmodernism" (165) The subject of  another fine  essay in this section is the "textualization of  the reader," a process, according to Jon Thiem, whereby the boundaries between the readers' and the characters' worlds are magically erased. Thiem bases his comments on works by Michael Ende, Italo Calvino, Woody Allen, and Julio Cortázar, the latter's "Continuity of  Parks" representing perhaps the best example of  this erasure of  boundaries. In addition, Thiem explores the psychological, cultural, and philosophical implications of "textualization," considering this technique an "expression of  the postmodern fascination  with ontology" (244). The essays in the section on history focus  more on individual works that make use of  magical realism to shed new light on episodes of  the past. Examples include P. Gabrielle Foreman's comparison of  The  House  of  the Spirits  by Isabel Allende and The  Song of  Solomon  by Toni Morrison; both authors utilize magic to recreate realities of  the past that have been obscured by injustice. (One Hundred Years  of  Solitude,  it seems to me, would also fit  perfectly  into this category.) In a similar vein, an essay by Patricia Merivale on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children  and Günter Grass's The  Tin  Drum presents characters linked to European colonialism and World War II. And symbolic meaning as a bridging concept linking psychology and literature is discovered by Steven Walker, who studies magical realism and Jungian psychology in Rushdie's The  Satanic  Verses. Book Reviews The final  section, dealing with magical realism and communities, demonstrates how this literary mode often  registers the rise and fall  of  societies instead of  the struggles of  individuals. The emphasis here is on the deconstruction of  colonialism in postcolonial communities, as seen in essays by Stephen Slemon, who focuses  on four  Canadian writers; John Erickson, who analyzes two North African  works of  fiction;  Melissa Stewart, who examines depictions of  city life  in works by well-known American writers; and Lois Parkinson Zamora, who compares elements of  magical realism—the appearance of  ghosts, for  example—in American and Latin American literatures. (Again, One Hundred  Years  of  Solitude  would seem to represent an excellent example of  the category.) With a total of  twenty-three well-written scholarly essays, Magical  Realism: Theory,  History,  Community  stands out as a valuable contribution to the definition and discussion of  a subject which, until recently, cried out for  further  exegesis. Now, after  the publication of  this weighty tome, scholars can no longer complain about a lack of  critical understanding of  the literary mode so widely known as magical realism. Faris and Zamora are to be highly commended for  compiling and contributing their own scholarship to this valuable text. Raylene L. Ramsey The  French  New  Autobiographies Gainesville: University Press of  Florida, 1996. Pp. 263. $49.95 Reviewed by Doris Y. Kadish How, from  the vantage point of  the 1990s, do we assess the significance  of the French New Novel and the evolution that the principal new novelists have undergone since writing their most well-known works in the 1960s? Readers seeking answers to these questions will find  Raylene L. Ramsey's The  French  New Autobiographies  a useful,  thorough, and insightful  work. Well written and clearly developed, it provides a sophisticated and theoretically informed  treatment of  its subject: the semi-autobiographical works written in the 1980s and 1990s by Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras. Although Ramsey focuses  primarily on six texts—Enfance  and Tu  ne t'aimes  pas by Sarraute, Le Miroir  qui revient  and Angélique  ou l'enchantement  by Robbe-Grillet, Emily  L. and L'Amant  de  la Chine  du nord  by Duras—her analyses also touch on works by Claude Simon, Èoland Barthes, and other writers who similarly interweave their personal histories with French history of  the Second World War and the postwar period. Accordingly, Ramsey's work transcends her limited topic of  the three writers and six works she has chosen to discuss and assumes broad relevance for the study of  the modern French novel and contemporary French literature in general. 106 The  International  Fiction  Review 24 (1997) 

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community

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Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community

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