Conflicting Juxtapositions

The episode of the burning at the stake of Makandal encapsulates perfectly what I consider to be the principal and distinguishing feature of Latin American magical realism: the juxtaposition of European and native American or Afro- American perceptions of events. It also serves as a key example of ‘bisociative shock’, a neologism invented by Arthur Koestler to describe what he considers an important trigger of humour. In this pivotal chapter of El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of this World), the scene is set for the auto da fe of the runaway slave, an event which will be understood very differently by the two factions watching it. The narrative focuses on the completely different expectations and perceptions of this occurrence and it is this clash rather than the horror of what is happening which is imprinted on the page, and on the reader's mind. I shall return to this later.

The comic always participates in the category of contradiction. To argue the relationship between the underlying principles of humour and of magical realism I shall first focus on oppositional duality as the mainspring for both: humour as resulting from the clash or collision when two contrasting or habitually incompatible associative contexts meet, and magical realism as deriving from ‘the cultural sparks which fly from the juxaposition and clash of different cultures at different levels of development’. This definition can equally be applied to Koestler's notion of ‘bisociative shock’, which denotes the collision between two contradictory levels of association. Koestler focuses on the oppositional nature of humour resulting from ‘universes of discourses colliding, frames getting entangled, or contexts getting confused’ arguing that the pattern underlying all varieties of humour is essentially ‘bisociative’. Koestler's idea can be traced back to Freud's identification of humour as ensuing from the coupling of two dissimilar things bringing to light an ‘appropriate incongruity’ which in this case exists between two aesthetic systems or modes of thought. There is, and can be, no comprehensive definition of humour, a category that constantly overlaps with other disjunctive systems such as irony, parody, satire and sarcasm. One important distinction is that humour depends on brevity and momentary surprise for its effect. It is a particular way of looking at the world with various degrees of derision or aggression, yet lacking the corrective faith of satire and sarcasm.