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4 - Günter Grass and magical realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2010

Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

Magical realism is a genre in which magical elements appear seamlessly within a realistic setting. The term was first coined by the German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe paintings that demonstrated an altered reality. Then in the 1960s magical realism was used by the Venezuelan essayist Arturo Uslar-Pietri specifically in the context of Latin American writers, most notably Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Gabriel García Márquez. The term can be extended to authors outside of the Latin American tradition, however, to Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote under Stalin, the French novelist Michel Tournier, or the contemporary British-Indian author Salman Rushdie. Their novels of magical realism perceive history as so grotesque that they resist operating within realistic paradigms of representation and resort to other genres steeped in myth, legends and fairy tales. While these genres help Bulgakov to comment on the terrors of Stalinism in The Master and Margarita (written in the 1920s and not published until 1967), in Tournier's The Ogre (1970) the Erlking myth and the fairy-tale world of man-eating ogres conjoin as a means to represent the surreality of life under National Socialism, and in Salman Rushdie's prose Hindu myth and The Arabian Nights: Tales of One Thousand and One Nights (between AD 800 and 900) are important subtexts in the context of colonialism and postcolonialism. Myth and the fairy-tale world also deeply pervade the structures of Günter Grass's work, primarily his novels The Tin Drum (1959), The Flounder (1977) and The Rat (1986).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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