Post on 11-May-2023
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Rebel Yells and Restless Spirits: Literary Resistance via the
Grotesque, Magic Realism, and Carnival in Pan-America
The Grotesque, Magical Realism, and the Carnivalesque: Key Terms
and Concepts
In literature of the Pan-American region, which includes
certain parts of North America, Central America, South America,
and the Caribbean, common literary elements are frequently used
by cultures where contact with European and American colonial
powers permanently altered indigenous culture and agrarian
landscapes across the region. Forced industrialization, the
introduction of capitalism, and diasporic migration (by the slave
trade) that led to the assimilation—and destruction—of countless
indigenous cultures are represented by literary modes like the
grotesque and magical realism which are driven by the impulse to
question, mock, criticize, and reject institutional control once
observed in early carnival celebration. Comparative analysis of
texts from the American South (William Faulkner’s The Sound and the
Fury, Flannery O’Conner’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,”
and Larry Brown’s Dirty Work), the Caribbean (Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s
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Love, Anger, Madness and Edwidge Danticat’s “Nineteen Thirty-Seven”),
and Latin America (Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World) indicate a
new regional identity where the grotesque and magical real
literary modes—anti-institutional responses to the clash of new-
industrial culture with indigenous tribes—utilize carnivalesque
origins to narrate a series of similar realities altered by
interaction with natural surroundings. Critiques are made using
subversive romantic conventions and various forms of carnivalized
free expression, fragmented formats like short stories, and
unique regional experiences that express the potential for
change, growth, and freedom in literature of the Caribbean, Latin
America, and the American South.
In order to discuss the grotesque and magical realist
literary modes as distinct representations deriving from a shared
anti-institutional impulse, one must discuss their evolution from
a common source: the carnivalesque, a literary mode whose origins
are found in the social institution and traditional folk
celebration of carnival. Used by governing state and religious
powers as an institutionally-approved outlet for antisocial
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impulses considered threatening to the larger order, carnival was
a festival period during which societal norms and practices,
socioeconomic boundaries, and hierarchal power structures were
temporarily reversed in order to allow controlled, manageable
forms of chaos. The carnival—observed until the early seventeenth
century by various European cultures—is described by Mikhail
Bakhtin as an event “with no performers or spectators,” in which
all citizens participate, that functions not as an extension of
“the real world” but as “the world standing on its head,” and
which creates an inverted reality whose most liberating potential
stems from the lack of restriction of public discourse (250).
Governing powers used carnivals to control dispossessed
populations through the allowance of regulated transgressive
behavior; however the unrestricted interaction allowed during
carnival also created a space for the ridicule and analysis of
accepted beliefs and power structures. In order to accommodate
these privileged exchanges created by the suspension of cultural
norms during carnival, a “special type of communication” evolved,
and a carnivalized, “marketplace style of expression was formed”
by the combination of sacred and profane language with use of
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free expression (Holquist 10). Though the tradition of carnival
dwindled in Europe as feudalism gave way to capitalism, the
impulse towards free communication survives in many regions,
practiced as a festival of freedom and revolution in parts of the
world where the custom was spread by European slave traders; and
as a result of work in the field of cultural studies, there is an
increasing awareness of the degree to which the carnival has
evolved into a form of subversive literary expression.
The carnivalesque is a literary extension of carnival;
translated from a term used in Bakhtin’s discussion of the
evolution of carnival from celebration to literary mode, a mode
that works as a mirror through which the carnivalesque is
“reflected and refracted through the multi-perspectival prism of
verbal art” formed by carnival forms of thinking and writing
(Danow 4). Driven by the same impulse to question, mock,
criticize, and reject institutional control that inspires
carnival celebrations and the carnivalesque, a literary mode
evolved to provide the space in which a similar form of free
expression could still occur. In “The Spirit of Carnival; Magical
Realism and the Grotesque,” David K. Danow describes the
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carnivalesque as “a permeation of a similar spirit of reversal
and revolt,” and a “reflection in literature, a mode and
perspective that at once produce transformations, reversals, and
inversions of fate and fortune that reveal in turn a resultant,
necessarily dualistic view of the world” (3, 5). In the
carnivalesque literary mode, truths and realities become confused
as they are involved in processes with dualistic notions of old
and young, comedy and horror, good and evil, or the magical and
grotesque intermix to create new, altered realities that are in
direct contact with each other despite their binary opposition.
Combining within a text the mundane realism of life’s more
practical concerns with a spectrum of unrealities both magical
and dark, narratives that contain elements of the carnivalesque
rely on fantastic and horrific visions of everyday life to most
accurately achieve mimesis of life as it is lived by actual
people—in particular, by people living in places where colonial
contact brought about sudden and sweeping changes to routines and
belief systems that had existed for generations. Generalized
carnivalesque language would later be filtered through the
particular oral and regional literary traditions of the
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Caribbean, Latin America, and the American South, thus resulting
in the divergent but related literary modes that have come to be
known as “magical realism” and “the grotesque.”
Put another way, the carnivalesque narrates diverse stories
of communal experiences with strong cultural ties to the
collective memory of a region and its peoples, necessarily
evolving into related literary modes like magical realism and the
grotesque. Forming a common literary bond between regions
historically conquered by Europe and the northern region of the
United States, respectively, the magical real mode of Latin
American literature and the grotesque literary mode of the
American South allow the formation of a Pan-American literary
culture that illustrates the common experience of regions
affected by forced modernization brought on by the industrial
expansion of conquering nations. The same anti-institutional
impulse is expressed from distinct perspectives and
representative of a dualistic separation within carnival between
magical and grotesque ways of experiencing and representing
reality. The two modes advance the original spirit of free
expression of social and political struggle inherent to carnival
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celebration, creating a space for similar cultural narratives to
occur while embodying what Danow refers to as “the wide range of
man’s potential combined with a corresponding, even greater
potentiality that exists in the world of nature,” and “the
darkest side of human capacity, what would have been unimaginable
if it had not actually happened” (7). The carnivalesque (now
evolved into the magical real and grotesque literary modes)
allows for comparative critiques of imposed social conditions
like industrialism, capitalism, and colonialism constructed upon
the foundations of dualistic notions like light and dark, mundane
and exceptional, humorous and horrific. These interpretations
reflect individual regional experience while simultaneously
expressing the potential for change, growth, and freedom in
literature of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the American
South.
In order to understand the specific significance of the
grotesque as a literary mode, one might benefit from a historical
overview of the term. The original use of the grotesque as an
artistic concept, evolved from the mid-sixteenth century Italian
word, grotto, or grottesco, meaning “of a cave,” referred to an
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ancient Roman art-deco style rediscovered in the ruins around
Nero’s unfinished palace, Domus Aurea, built in 64 AD (Landow). The
ruined corridors, named Le Grotte due to their underground location
and overgrown appearance, contained various decorative patterns
that utilized elements of curving, winding flora and fauna that
Wolfgang Kayser, a German scholar and literary critic renowned
for his studies of grotesque art and literature, referred to as
“something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic, but also
something ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally
different from the familiar world . . . in which the realm of
inanimate things is no longer separate from those of plants,
animals, and human beings” (24). As the popularity of the
artistic style spread across Europe, the term retained a similar
meaning and usage in French, German, and English until the late
seventeenth century, when the term was replaced by its modern
pronunciation and an evolving meaning that would eventually
become less exclusive to the aesthetics of art and evolve into a
common descriptive term.
The term “grotesque,” used to refer to anything strange,
fantastical, horrific, or incongruous with the world around it,
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referenced not only an artistic mode but literary, architectural,
theatrical, and typographical mode as well. In his study of the
grotesque, George P. Landow states that as early as the sixteenth
century “confusions—of moral, political, social, and spiritual
order” began to bring about a new literary and artistic emphasis
on the monstrous and a “definitive lack of proportion and
organization” that adapted into a more threatening, anti-
institutional, modern form of the grotesque (Landow). The
grotesque functioned as a fundamental, potentially universal
literary mode, incorporating doubled, hybrid, and metamorphosing
figures and motifs used to conceptualize alterity and change in
diverse cultures. The term’s strong associations with conflicted
emotional audience and reader-responses of simultaneous
discomfort and sympathy (and other dualistic notions) emerged
around the same time as the literary grotesque mode continued its
transition toward its modern form, linked by forms like satire
and the tragicomedy in European literature and stage performance.
In his discussion of the grotesque and the writings of
literary critic and grotesque scholar Philip Thomson, David
Lavery states that, from roughly the seventeenth century until
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the late 1950’s, only isolated attempts were made to define the
evolving nature of the grotesque (20). Individual critics
throughout the eighteenth century had little influence on its
perception, definition, and usage until the work of the literary
critics G. K. Chesterton of England in 1903 and of German
Wolfgang Kayser in 1957. Chesterton states in his text, Robert
Browning (1903) that “the grotesque may be employed as a means of
presenting the world in a new light without falsifying it”
focusing on the grotesque and inherently carnival element of
seeing all things from a new perspective, “though strange and
disturbing” (Lavery 2). Through this evolution of the modern
grotesque literary form, the narrative mode of carnival and the
carnivalesque are re-identified and prioritized by the
grotesque’s focus on horrific and terrifying events and
situations. Kayser, while objecting to the notion that the
grotesque contained some element of “exaggerated buffoonery or
the ludicrously fantastic,” brought focus to the “co-presence of
the ludicrous with the monstrous, the disgusting and horrifying”
that would later incorporate a sense of horror, anger, and awe at
the negative potential of the human condition (Lavery 2). Kayser
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and Chesterton together began to apply the most inherent elements
of its contemporary usage to literature of the Caribbean, Latin
American, and American South, describing a combination of the
regenerative nature of the grotesque literary mode and a growing
sense of dissatisfaction with institutional power structures.
As the Industrial Revolution took hold in Europe and the
Americas, ideologies like capitalism and industrialism influenced
much in literature and art, including the grotesque literary mode
as it had evolved from its medieval origins through the romantic
period. The grotesque literary mode, which was already more
specifically focused on the horrific and terrifying aspects of
the human experience than the carnivalesque or magical realism,
shifted from what Lavery describes as a mode of classical
allusions, departures from classic order and reason, and gothic
themes to melancholy, horrific reflections on the human condition
in the face of colonialism, industrialism, and devastating war
(2). The grotesque literary mode began its transition to its
modern form with characteristic elements like dark, twisted, or
distorted bodies, timelines focused on the theme of outsiders and
victims of a rapidly-changing society, and alienation that
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expressed the carnival notion of free expression while giving
narrative voice to the distresses of rapid, forced modernization
throughout the world. Critics commonly agree that the romantic
grotesque became fully involved in the literary mode with the
beginning of World War I though this transition is seen in some
parts of industrial Europe as early as the late eighteenth
century and in the American South, after the loss of the Civil
War. A focus on the fantastical grotesque creature emerged—
symptomatic of the human cost of war and its horrors in the
brutal clash of opposing world forces—highlighting the themes of
congenital deformity and medical anomaly in its reflections of
modern society. The visual image of maimed soldiers deformed and
disabled by war injuries merged and half man-half machine forms
created through prosthesis frequently appeared, as well as
various other forms of the physical grotesque that reflected
anti-institutional impulses created by forced industrialism and
the ravages of warring capitalist societies on folk cultures
throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the American South.
Magical realism is another concept, evolved from the
carnivalesque like the grotesque literary mode, which requires
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introduction. The magical real literary mode (similar to the
grotesque literary mode because of anti-institutional elements
used to criticize colonialism and industrialism in the evolving
language of the carnivalesque) appears frequently in literature
of the Pan-American region and is often used in combination with
the grotesque literary mode, helping to bring mundane reality
into conflict with daily experiences of the magical real. First
used by the German historian, photographer, and art critic Franz
Roh in 1925, the term “magic realism” originally described a new,
distinct style of painting recently emerged in the wake of
Expressionism’s decline. Magical realism’s evolution from the
carnivalesque into a separate literary mode began with everyday
realities in which the fantastical, a sense of regenerative
nature, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction with institutional
power structures was expressed in relation to painting and other
forms of art. Louis Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris write in
the editorial note of their text, Magical Realism: Theory, History,
Community, that “the word ‘magic’ in this sense indicates “that
the mystery does not descend to the represented works, but rather
hides and palpitates behind it” (15). Roh’s studies, returning to
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hyperreal representation of ordinary objects, focused on the
separation between magic realism and surrealism and cited a focus
on the actual existence of things in the world as opposed to
psychic realities and subconscious, dreamlike forms. The magical
realist artistic mode of the early twentieth century, categorized
by its frequent inability to be resolutely defined, was built
upon a shifting, interweaving series of characteristics used to
depict the familiar not only in “aesthetic and stylistic terms,”
but also in political, cultural, and regional terms as well. The
magical realist literary mode, frequently connected to colonial
regions where forced industrialization and the capital interests
of international powers consumed lands, resources, and indigenous
cultures, embodied similar characteristics in its emergence from
regions of Europe and Latin America after the translation of
Roh’s text, Revista de Occidente, into Spanish in 1927. In its modern
form magical realism links strongly to its roots in carnival and
the carnivalesque, seeking to depict the inherently mysterious
and fantastic qualities of reality while recalling the
interruption of the mundane by chaotic, unreal events in order to
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give narrative voice to regional and cultural realities less
horrific than those described by the grotesque literary mode.
In its modern form, magical real literature frequently
depicts the continuing negative resonance of the effects of
industrialism, capitalism, and colonial expansion upon native
peoples, focusing on border restrictions between territories and
the struggles of powerful nations to gain and maintain control of
conquered peoples, lands, and resources. Modern magical realism
also incorporates any number of characteristics used to identify
the mode, thereby adapting itself to the culture and events that
it describes, relying on regional individualities of flora,
fauna, and indigenous cultures to dictate its form. M. Ruth
Noriega Sanchez names common criteria for identifying magical
realism in her book, Challenging Realities: Magic Realism in Contemporary
American Women’s Fiction, describing the “dialogic encounter of two
cultures” in colonial and postcolonial interactions that are
“reflected in the language of [magical real] narration,” in which
there occurs “the juxtaposition of national views of reality
based on Western cosmology and the magical view coming from
ancient non-western systems of belief and folklore” (25).
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Elements of the fantastic that include local fables, myths, and
folk tales are built upon the foundation of a real-world setting
and are often intertwined with contemporary events. Revealingly,
such elements are given the highest social relevance in times of
cultural crisis. Narration is often removed or indifferent,
describing fantastical events as if they were commonplace,
focusing on the vastness of unconsumed space and resources and
mixing of ethnicities into hybrid characters and concepts,
including the concepts of Western, indigenous, urban, and rural.
Hybridity is further used to access multiple planes of reality in
order to portray a more mimetically-accurate representation of
the human condition. Danow states that the literary mode presents
a “hallucinatory impression . . . of a land where time is bent,”
and that “time is frequently presented as cyclical,” since “what
occurs on one occasion (which is not likely to be the first) is
destined to take place again [in] eternal recurrence” (74). The
magical realist literary mode superimposes one reality upon
another, crossing paths with local religious beliefs, myth, and
historical occurrences in order to highlight the events of the
past being repeated or relived in the present as a traumatic
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cultural event.
Rebel Yells: The Grotesque in Literature of the American South
Although the Caribbean and Latin America are often
considered to be culturally distinct, both share with the
American South various geo-cultural affinities that explain
similarities in how literature is used to represent the
experiences of people living in these places. Various sub-genres
were used to propagate the Southern tradition of chivalrous white
heroes returning from service during and after the Civil War to
protect regional honor often set in what was portrayed as the
quiet backdrop of plantation life. White authors like William
Gilmore Simms, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Mary Henderson Eastman
wrote regional—and often rural—stories that favored slavery and
the preservation of Southern mores. In his essay “Romance and
Riot: Charles Chesnutt, the Romantic South, and the Conventions
of Extralegal Violence” Andrew Hebard states that authors during
and after the Civil War “rewrote the history of Reconstruction
through forms of chivalric romance” and portrayed a “beleaguered
white aristocracy resorting to extralegal violence to restore
honor and good governance to a corrupt state” (476). These and
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other similar genres portrayed coexistence between whites and
African Americans that mimicked the master and slave relationship
in patriarchal settings constructed to prioritize and protect the
successful upper-class white lifestyle. Characters of both races
were confined to their allotted social place having been drawn,
in these texts, within safe borders that intended to prevent
racial mixing. Southern authors romanticized ideals of white
superiority and their traditional society, rewriting their own
mythic past and making it a part of the historical narrative and
memory of the region.
Southern authors like Mark Twain and Kate Chopin, then later
William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell, utilized
the grotesque literary mode, writing detailed descriptions of
agrarian landscapes, folkways, and post-antebellum concerns
specific to the region: the loss of autonomy and traditional
Southern culture caused by urban growth and industrial pursuits
by the North (MacKethan). Southern literature became focused,
through from a variety of perspectives, on the loss of
centralized authority and folkways throughout the region from its
beginnings in the Colonial era forward, reflecting the perception
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by the South of “the victory of nationalism over regional
interests,” and an “increasing move towards urbanization and
industrialism following the war” (Rowe). Writers responded to the
assimilation of their regional culture by focusing on what they
perceived to be the few unique aspects of their traditional
lifestyle that remained in the newly modernized South.
Concurrently, the grotesque literary mode re-emerged in the post-
antebellum era, overlapping with other subgenres including
Southern Romanticism, Southern Modernism, and counter-pastoral
fiction, subverting their conventions in order to recreate the
privileged exchanges created by the suspension of cultural norms
during carnival. In order to reflect the new Southern reality,
privileged and unrestricted carnivalesque language that
facilitated interaction between the culturally-sacred and profane
appeared in Southern literature, allowing ridicule or analysis of
the Southern way of life in the wake of industrial expansion and
reformation laws enacted by the North.
In the last years of the colonial era the grotesque literary
mode emerged in various genres of Southern literature including
memoirs, diaries, essays, and novels focused on the
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individualities of America’s Southern states as a unique region
rather than the broader interests of the United States. Manual
Broncano, in his analysis of the transition from a national to
more regional narrative, describes the first appearances of the
“magical grotesque,” a trope or “peculiar kind of realism often
produced in the Americas;” it is, Broncano suggests, a distinct
style of the grotesque literary mode with a clear tendency to the
magical and mysterious (662). Broncano states that the magical
grotesque, beginning with the first portrayals by the Europeans
of the New World as the land of exaggerated plenty, was “created
by the unique circumstances surrounding the contact and conflict
between Native, European, and African populations in the New
World,” where newly-merged populations interacted with unfamiliar
landscapes, flora, and fauna (662). The grotesque literary mode
evolved from the unique, unrestricted social interactions of the
carnivalesque and magical realism—drawing upon its conflicted
environment to critique its position as a conquered region
similar to other transcontinental American conquests despite
being a landlocked part of the rest of the nation—in order to
recreate the unique grotesque realities of the American South.
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In the late nineteenth century the focus of Southern writers
turned to more intellectual, realistic depictions of the South as
the region’s interests became more personal and symptomatic of
the feeling of displacement experienced by Southern culture in
relation to the rest of the nation. The emergence of the
grotesque literary mode in Southern literature brought new focus
to the individualities of America’s Southern states as a unique
region rather than the broader interests of the colonial era in
the United States, simultaneously becoming more reliant on the
grotesque literary mode than in the past. With their focus on
agrarian traditions and romantic values, these writers often
cited a dehumanizing movement, arguing that the South served as a
national model for society in which man, rather than machine,
remained the dominant force. Southern authors criticized the
nation, observing that life in the South remained one where man
was still able to have a relationship with his surrounding lands.
Freaks, soldiers crippled by war, social pariahs, outsiders,
foreigners, the ugly, weak, obese, and other grotesque deviants
of all sorts appeared throughout Southern literature; these
figures were symptomatic of the feeling of displacement
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experienced by Southern culture in relation to the rest of the
nation. The grotesque literary mode revolted against national
interests and social norms in order to depict the unique
realities of life in the American South as disconnected from an
idealized historical progression of Southern tradition and the
North American myth of freedom and prosperity for all citizens.
The grotesque utilizes shocking images and themes that create
dualistic relations between pity and horror or understanding and
loathing in the same way that magical realism relies on the
fantastical to create interaction between the mundane and the
magical, having evolved from the same carnival origins.
Generations-old Southern traditions are often characterized by
highly-integrated narrators speaking from a “community”
perspective that contrasts with the removed, indifferent
narration of magical realism, creating a voice and privileged
space in which to comment on the contemporary state and future of
the American South.
In many of his novels, William Faulkner’s commentary on the
progression of Southern culture utilizes longstanding Southern
traditions and various narrative tools that speak for an
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idealized Southern past while providing a commentary on the
regional inability to adapt to new national realities. Folk
storytelling traditions like multi-generational family
narrations, a popular sub-genre of Southern literature that
utilized the romantic literary mode, sought historical and
cultural continuity by building meaningful connections between
the mythic past and contemporary Southern identity, repeating
names and traits from one generation to the next. Faulkner’s
version of the family narrative, rather than serving as the
vehicle of Southern tradition, narrates a single family’s
perspective of the last, gasping breaths of the unique culture of
the American South, subverting its characteristics in order to
criticize outdated social mores and commercial expansion by the
North. In the aftermath of what many likely perceived as a form
of colonial contact with the culturally-different and highly-
industrialized North, critics commonly agree that the ideologies
that came with Reconstruction (industrialization and capitalism)
took their toll on traditional Southern culture and imprinted
themselves upon the region’s literature as the rapid expansion of
industry and urban growth consumed the agrarian culture. Texts
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like The Sound and the Fury (1929) written by Faulkner during the
Southern Renaissance employ elements of the grotesque literary
mode in their depiction of the decline of the traditional
patrilineal Southern white aristocracy in the new-industrial era
of the South. Shifting, nonlinear narratives, moral, spiritual,
and social chaos, as well as doubled, monstrous, and pitiful
characters are present in the story of Jason Compson III, a
disillusioned Southern patriarch, and his family; the remaining
members of a vanishing line dating back to the founding of the
nation.
In The Sound and the Fury the Compsons’ archetypal role as
respected members of the white, Southern aristocracy deteriorates
as each Compson sustains some grotesque defiance of traditional
Southern mores. Benjamin, youngest son and the first narrator of
The Sound and the Fury, is the most evident grotesque symbol for the
decline of regional culture after industrialism and a reminder to
the elder generation of their fall from aristocratic grace.
Benjy’s adult body and childlike mind are irresolvably,
grotesquely conflicted by a cognitive condition, discovered in
early childhood, which makes him monstrous to some and pathetic
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to others. Jason (IV) identifies Benjy as a grotesque social
pariah when he argues with his mother over finances, saying,
“Rent him out to a sideshow; there must be folks somewhere that
would pay a dime to see him” (196). Later, Jason focuses on the
financial burden of caring for Benjy while symbolically tying his
grotesque status to regional taxation (likely collected under
Northern authority), saying,
if we’ve got to feed another mouth and [mother] won’t
take that money, why not send [Benjy] down to Jackson.
He’ll be happier there, with people like him. I says
God knows there’s little enough room for pride in this
family . . . you’ve done your duty by him; you’ve done
all anybody can expect of you and more than most folks
would do, so why not send him there and get that much
benefit out of the taxes we pay. (221-22)
The archetype of the treasured youngest child of a romanticized
Southern family is subverted by Benjy’s grotesquely-distorted
form and Jason’s focus on the economic strain of Benjy’s in-home
care. Continuation of patrilineal tradition and the Compson
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family line, already interrupted by Quentin’s suicide and Jason’s
obsession with money, are shut down completely by Benjy’s
condition and inability to contribute to the family or to
flourish either mentally or physically, creating a grotesque
conflict between the reality of his condition and the
romanticized, mythic notion of heroic soldier-sons who stood for
the prosperity of Southern culture in the pre-industrial era. The
historical decline of traditional values, symbolized by the lapse
in continuity between the South’s idealized patriarchal tradition
and Jason’s failure as head of the family, intertwines with the
Compsons’ deterioration in the new-Industrial era and Benjy’s
grotesque form in order to highlight the death of agrarian
prosperity in the American South.
Commentary on the decline of Southern culture and the
regional inability to adapt to new national realities including
industrialization and commercial growth moved across the region
while continuing to appear in the Southern literary tradition.
Many writers of the Southern Renaissance utilized various forms
and narrative tools to reference the idealized past while using
carnival free expression to create historical and cultural
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continuity between it and contemporary Southern identity. In the
short story—a literary form believed to have evolved from oral
storytelling traditions like fables and anecdotes in the
seventeenth century—cultural and social identities as well as
diverse Southern realities are depicted in clever, sometimes
shockingly twisted plots and climaxes, often unexpected because
of the brevity of the text. Despite the challenges of the short
story form, Faulkner and contemporaries like Flannery O’Conner
write carnivalized fragmented realities from the decline of
Southern culture, expressing feelings of loss and confusion with
the grotesque literary mode.
Several grotesque symbols for the continuing decay of
Southern culture are evident in O’Conner’s short story, “The Life
You Save May Be Your Own;” a tale of a mother and daughter, both
named Lucynell (a distortion of the traditional passing of a male
name from one generation to the next), isolated on the rural
landscape with no man to tend to the needs of the farm. The elder
Lucynell, head of her household and a subversion of the
patriarchal hierarchy of the traditional Southern home,
symbolizes the decay of Southern morality as industrialism
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continued to inhibit the Southern agrarian lifestyle when she
calculates the value of a man walking up her drive, noticing that
he is thin, has only one arm, and is carrying a tool chest. The
tramp, Mr. Shiftlet, eyes both the car in the garage and young
Lucynell as he describes his years of odd jobs and military
service, suggesting another subversion of Southern moral
character and the romantic ideals of Southern chivalry. Mr.
Shiftlet and the old woman speak of capital interests as if they
were shallow and base, bringing chivalry and other key tenets of
Southern culture into grotesque conflict by using irony to
suggest the symbolic meaning of the conversation—decaying
Southern morality in the new industrial era. The narrator
describes Shiftlet’s description of himself:
Mr. Shiftlet’s eye in the darkness was focused on a
part of the automobile bumper that glittered in the
distance. . . “I’m a man,” he said with a sullen
dignity, “even if I ain’t a whole one. I got,” he said,
tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the
immensity of what he was going to say, “a moral
intelligence!” and his face pierced out of the darkness
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into a shaft of doorlight and he stared at her as if he
were astonished himself at this impossible truth. (58-
59)
Both the old woman and the tramp continue to use irony to convey
their meaning. Lucynell is described as innocent throughout the
course of a week-long negotiation, indicating that her cognitive
condition makes her a more agreeable, suitable wife than modern
women do by traditional Southern standards. The old woman barters
the marriage of her daughter in order to convince the one-armed
tramp to stay on the land and care for them, forming a grotesque
union symbolic of the decay of traditional Southern culture and
the desperation of some of its poorest citizens in the wake of
industrialization. Subsequently, the romantic ideal of chivalrous
Southern gentleman with flawless moral character is distorted
when Mr. Shiftlet abandons Lucynell in a diner a hundred miles
from home, continuing on in the car from the women’s garage. The
quality of white, Southern manhood—the keystone argument for
white superiority and domination of the region—is symbolically
corrupted by base, selfish desire and disregard for morality,
subverting the institution of patrilineal, hierarchal, white
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power at the heart of Southern culture using the grotesque
literary mode.
Many twenty-first century Southern authors, inspired by
their reading of Faulkner and his contemporaries, utilize the
grotesque literary mode to express similar regional concerns
despite the years and social progress between the nineteenth
century and today. Contemporary Southern authors, like their
predecessors, subvert romantic Southern conventions with the
grotesque in various forms of carnivalized free expression.
Despite the continued expansion and incorporation of
industrialization and capitalism into every aspect of American
life, the grotesque literary mode continues to appear
symptomatically in Southern literature, often focused on modern
weapons of war and their devastating effects. Southern archetypal
grotesque figures that include veterans of war missing limbs, or
maimed, characters with physical and mental birth defects, and
the elderly and wasted; these figures continue to be combined
with characteristics of Southern romantic tradition, cultural
mores, and regional pride to emphasize, in Southern literature of
the present day, emphasizing the continued uniqueness and
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separation of the region from the rest of the United States. The
use of the grotesque literary mode in contemporary Southern
literature subverts limited characterizations of the South in
America’s ongoing media discourse as the lesser-developed,
economically-depressed portion of the country, creating
continuity in literature where the continuity of romanticized
Southern culture has failed.
Decades after the works of Faulkner and O’Conner, similar
themes concerned with the threat of forced industrial expansion
continue to appear in Southern literature, growing exponentially
in scope with the capability of modern technology to affect
remaining agrarian cultures on a world-wide level. For example,
Larry Brown’s Dirty Work (2007) employs elements of the grotesque
literary mode seen in the work of his predecessors in nineteenth
century Southern literature: elements of Southern romanticism,
distorted archetypes, and frequent references to the South’s past
glories and defeats. In Dirty Work, like various works of Southern
literature of the nineteenth century which focused on the
frightening capabilities of combat weaponry as industrialization
progressed across the nation, the grotesque literary mode is used
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to subvert the romantic ideals of brave, young men fighting for
the freedom of (the South) the nation during American conflicts—
in this case Vietnam (a war with its own North/South dynamic).
The addition of twenty-first century postmodern elements like pop
culture reference to film and television and the depiction of the
post-Vietnam experience of (Southern) veterans neglected by the
country they defended allude to American conflicts dating from
the Civil War era to the Middle East crisis of the seventies,
engaging with the present in order to criticize industrialization
and continued Northern consumption of the South’s most valuable
asset—its young men. Set in the late seventies in a VA hospital
in Mississippi, Braiden (who is African American) and Walter (who
is white) share many characteristics: in particular, they have
both suffered traumatic injuries in battle which left them
grotesquely disfigured. The freakish appearance of the two men
(symbolic of Civil War-era soldiers who returned as amputees;
monstrous reminders of Southern loss) subverts the romanticized
Civil War-era image of young Southern men fighting for the
region’s noble cause by bringing it into conflict with the
reality of injured veterans whose lives and productivity are cut
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short in the same way that traditional Southern culture was by
interactions with the North.
Braiden and Walter, having returned from Vietnam to lives of
physical and emotional alienation from their families and the
outside world experience a conflicted, grotesque response to each
other’s injuries when they meet despite having lived for decades
as freakish social outcasts. Braiden, awake when Walter is
wheeled (unconscious) into their shared room, gives the first
description of Walter’s disfigured face. He says that
Most of it had been blowed off and they’d tried to put
him another one together. RPG probably. Rocket-
propelled grenade . . . Just scar tissue. Places he had
hair and places wasn’t no hair. Skin grafts. Aw he had
a piece of face but it wasn’t a real face. . . . Anyway
when they rolled him up next to me I saw what the load
of shit he was toting was. (6, 84)
In his description of Walter’s injuries Braiden identifies
himself as a grotesque double or twin to Walter’s character
through his recognition of various tools of industrialized
warfare that have the capability to leave a man’s face in that
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state. Later, when Walter opens his eyes and sees Braiden’s
condition he says that “I had to suck in a big breath when I saw
the rest of him. He didn’t have any arms or legs, just nubs. Just
like Johnny Got His Gun. . . He was kind of like a large baby laid up
there on a sheet. But he wasn’t a baby. He was forty-something
years old” (13-15). Walter, like Braiden, wonders “what could
have eaten him up like that, but I knew. A machine gun, or a
mine. Or hell, maybe a claymore. Maybe even one of our own
claymores” (16). Walter’s reference to Johnny Got His Gun, in which a
World War I veteran hit by an artillery shell is left a quadruple
amputee with no sight, hearing, or speech, intensifies the
description of Braiden’s injuries, simultaneously associating the
horrific capabilities of industrialized warfare from one American
conflict to the next with the extreme isolation of life in that
physical state.
Walter and Braiden’s injuries are continually associated
through subversion of romantic Southern conventions and the
archetype of young men headed off to war to defend the Southern
cause, building upon the symbolism of lasting injuries to
Southern culture by industrialization and war with the North.
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Braiden describes his last night at home before deployment to
Vietnam spent watching TV with his mother. He says that,
Me and her had watched some old movie on TV . . . It
was old Jimmy Stewart in something. He was in the Civil
War. And he got shot, and he had this beautiful horse,
and his arm was almost blowed off, and this doctor said
he couldn’t save his arm but saw that horse he was
riding and remarked over what a fine animal it was.
This guy was like a lowdown motherfucker on the
battlefield of life. Couldn’t save his arm, see . . .
Then he seen old Silver over there. And old Jimmy
Stewart told him, Doc, if you’ll save my leg, arm,
whatever it was, you can have that horse. Well the old
Doc decided he might could save it then. (24)
Braiden’s description of the plot of the film symbolizes several
aspects of the effects of industrialization and war with the
North on the South. The injuries to Jimmy Stewart’s character,
similar to Braiden’s, continue to subvert the romantic Southern
archetype of heroic sons of the region going off to fight for the
South’s noble cause in the Civil War by referencing severe,
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grotesque injuries sustained by veterans of all American
conflicts. Northern industrial growth in the South brought with
it ideologies like capitalism which motivated the consumption of
all Southern resources available, represented here by the greed
of the doctor who chooses not to act to save Jimmy Stewart
character (not just anyone in need of medical care, but a
soldier) until he secures possession of the horse. The grotesque
literary mode further criticizes capitalism and its effects on
the South through depictions of desperate individuals forced to
compromise their morals or their own security to survive while
others (representative of the carpetbaggers of the North waiting
to take advantage of regional weakness after the Civil War) put
self-interest and capital gain before moral obligation and the
guidelines of Southern mores.
Restless Spirits: Part One—Magical Realism in Caribbean
Literature
The analysis above focuses primarily on the deterioration of
Southern culture in the new-industrial era and its demonstration
through the use of the grotesque as a predominant literary mode.
In other Pan-American regions with populations affected by
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diasporic movement, colonization, and industrialization—regions
that include, in particular, the Caribbean, and, more precisely,
a country like Haiti—elements of the carnivalesque evolved into a
literary mode with magical elements related to the grotesque but
altered by collective cultural experiences and interaction with
the unique geographical features of the region. Haiti proves to
be an especially good case study for this topic because it’s
diverse literature, which reflects the varied experience of its
peoples’ complex and problematic contact with several colonial
regimes, represents for readers the carnival and/or magical real
literary mode as they are used throughout much of the Caribbean
as a whole. In other words, a study of the Haitian version of
magic realism will offer an adequate (though, of course, not
exhaustive) overview of how the carnivalesque is used throughout
the Pan-American world.
In order to discuss the origin of the magical realist
literary mode, we must understand the binary connection between
the grotesque in the literature of the American South and magical
realism in literature of the Caribbean (and Latin America). One
begins with the juxtaposition between the Caribbean’s indigenous
Spears 38
tribes, their oral traditions, religious beliefs, and their
comprehension of nature. In his examination of aboriginal
Caribbean religions, History of Religions in the Caribbean (1989), Dale
Bismauth states that prior to its occupations, Haiti’s indigenous
tribes shared similar religious beliefs that encompassed aspects
of animism, both believing that mysterious, magical forces of
nature and mischievous spirits had the power and desire to
inhabit humans, animals, objects, natural landscape like rivers
and mountains, and the elements (1). One tribe (Arwaks) practiced
a more advanced system of animism than the other (Caribs),
“[combining it] with polydaemonistic elements” that consisted of
similar infinite numbers of spirits (1). Both feared the magical
abilities of their gods and spirits, calling upon shaman or
bohitos to exorcise them when necessary. In his study of the
carnivalesque and its various evolutions, Danow analyzes links
between the religious beliefs of Haiti’s indigenous peoples and
their explanations of the natural phenomena around them. In
Danow’s description of the origins of magical realism as a
literary mode, he states that in an environment like the
Caribbean (and Latin America as well), animals were living close
Spears 39
to men, the vegetation became colossal, and that “the nature of
the place naturally [propagated] strange tales” (67). The various
forms of magical realism “derived from a host of [realities]:”
imposing geography, composed of daunting natural
barriers—impenetrable forests, dangerous waters,
and portentous heights—and a frequently unbearable
humid Caribbean atmosphere . . .The geographical
proximity of the jungle to the city elicits a
related omnipresent sense of the closeness of the
prehistoric past to modern life, of myth, or
primordial thinking, to scientific thought. (71)
Jean Delbaere-Garant similarly states that the tribes lived among
so much “unconsumed space” that the magical images so present in
their religion and daily life were “borrowed from the physical
environment itself” (252). Though deforestation left contemporary
Haiti with little of its original flora, the island before
colonization was covered with a variety of different types of
forests allowing for a variety of plant and animal life.
Seemingly magical and controlled by the will of the spirits,
various natural phenomena and regional elements became entangled
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in the religion and myths of Haiti’s indigenous peoples, then
later into contemporary culture and literature as well.
Interaction between elements like environment, traditional
beliefs, oral tradition, and the human imagination of the
indigenous peoples coalesced in literature of the Caribbean,
creating the necessary conditions for the region’s particular
strain of the magical realist literary mode. Passing collective
cultural memories and myths orally from one generation to the
next, magical real mechanisms were accepted and incorporated into
Haiti’s cultural narrative. Referring to “oral storytelling” as
the “cultural transfer of memory,” Jana Evans Braziel describes a
powerful cultural tool, drawing on a long griot tradition that
people of African descent have used to give alternative accounts
of the world” (88). Dating back to 600 CE, the oral traditions
of Haiti (Ayiti, ‘land of high mountains’ in the pre-Columbian era)
connected mythical ancestors with a cultural narrative consisting
of a tri-world cosmology and animistic explanations for all
things. The magical real literary mode, evolved from its origins
in oral storytelling modes to recall and retell the past in the
carnivalized space of free expression created by Caribbean
Spears 41
literature, which Braziel describes as, “lieux de mémoire (‘places
of the memory’),” with no “referent in reality” (78). Braziel
refers to moments torn away from the movement of history, then
returned, resulting in the “[juxtaposition of] legendary Haitian
myths against more contemporary historical references,” stating
that “that they are without content, physical presence, or
history . . . they escape from history [and are] the ultimate
embodiment of a memorial consciousness” (78-80). The magical real
literary mode and its inherently carnivalesque tendency to
express anti-institutional impulses, symptomatic of Haiti’s
political turmoil, mix familiar magical elements with everyday
events in order to depict the realities of Haitian life, serving
as the voice of lost generations and a criticism of the horrors
of colonialism and industrialization from the fifteenth century
until the present day.
Occurrences of violence, subjugation, revolution, and
rebirth are all frequent themes in the Caribbean’s unique
incarnation of the magical real literary mode, emerging from the
interaction of European and American sociocultural groups with
the indigenous peoples of Haiti and their culture. The history of
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colonization, industrialization, and revolution in Haiti,
recorded in the region’s literature, depicts a cyclical pattern
ongoing since the fifteenth century that merges the past and
present in close literary quarters from one generation to the
next. In Caribbean literature of the late-colonial and
postcolonial era, a revolutionary voice emerges within that
pattern from diasporic cultural roots to protest violent
occupation, exploitation, and enslavement of human beings from
around the globe as expendable resources. Authors like Fernand
Hibbert, Oswald Durand, Frankétienne, and later Marie Vieux-
Chauvet, Jean-Claude Charles, and Edwidge Danticat write historic
traumas and revolutionary rhetoric with a carnivalesque spirit,
using subversive literary modes like magical realism to describe
the repeated occupation and enslavement of Caribbean nations.
Literature of the Caribbean is frequently written in short story
or novella form, and fragmented time, events, families, and
nations coalesce, interacting with Haiti’s unique flora and
fauna. The wide range of man’s potential and a corresponding,
even greater potentiality that exists in the world of nature
create a magical space for subversive cultural narratives to
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occur in the magical realist literary mode, allowing free
expression of social and political struggles related closely to
its origins in carnival celebration.
In order to create the necessary conditions for Caribbean
literature’s particular strain of magical realism in the modern
era, folk culture and generations of regional history are
embodied by revolutionary language and actions that subvert
violent, mechanical images of colonial occupation and
industrialization. In Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s award-winning Haitian
trilogy, Love, Anger, Madness (2005), three loosely-related novellas
depict life in Haiti in the late nineteen-sixties from varying
narrative perspectives. First published in a limited release in
France, Love, Anger, Madness was suppressed by two longstanding
militaristic Haitian regimes for its subversive content, causing
Vieux-Chauvet to go into permanent exile until her death. Each
novella describes a fragment of life in post-occupation Haiti
from a unique economic and social perspective, romanticizing the
revolutionary spirit of Haiti while demonstrating various levels
of subjugation imposed by militaristic colonial regimes. In the
novella Anger, a mother (Madame Louis) is sickened by her
Spears 44
inability to prevent the suffering of her family—which has been
ravaged by military police—so she begins to climb towards “the
gigantic outline of a fortress protected by cannons, their
charred muzzles like forbidding tunnels,” to satisfy her deep,
physical need for rebellious action (225-26). Suddenly, “a
deafening drone [swells] around her, which she [mistakes] for
engine noise,” then “hundreds of thousands of men . . . every
one of them in boots and a helmet,” begin to emerge from the
mountain (226). Madame Louis realizes then that “it [is] no
engine noise but the blurred voices of hundreds of thousands of
mouths, all of them yelling in unison: Hail to the chief of the
Blackshirts!” (226). Soldiers—industrialized and suggestively
mechanical, stripped of their humanity by their engine-like sound
—are symbolically transformed into a consumable resource (or
expendable weapon) of the militaristic regime. The startling
visual representation of colonial-industrial strength reinforces
Madame Louis’s feeling of helplessness and despair while
signifying the desperation felt by generations of Haitians under
similar military control. The significant depletion of natural
resources is suggested as the colonial forces march out of the
Spears 45
mountain by the thousands, defiling the connection between the
Haitian people and the natural landscape with the intrusion of
industrialization.
A stark contrast is drawn between thousands of soldiers
yelling in unison and participants in the subversive cultural
traditions of carnival, bringing to mind Danow’s earlier
description—paraphrased here—of the carnivalesque as a literary
mode that produces inversions of fortune in the spirit of revolt
revealing dualistic realities in constant interaction. As quickly
as Madam Louis can retreat from the traumatic display of
industrial power the colonial imagery is challenged and brought
into conflict when, defeated and weary,
[Madame Louis was] snagged by a delirious crowd
shouting and singing a Carnival merengue . . . A group
of half-naked devils with scarlet horns threatened the
spectators with their gilt pitchforks. Two rows of
giant laughing heads ran ahead of a queen of great
beauty dressed in pink tulle blowing kisses to the
crowd atop a float depicting the fortress in
Spears 46
miniature . . . Hundreds of beggars in rags followed in
[the queen’s] wake, arms in the air, swarming to the
sound of a huge, colorful ribbon-draped drum pounded by
crew members lurching to the rhythm . . . Nothing
existed anymore: not anger, nor fear, nor despair. The
throng granted itself a reprieve through the ancestral
rituals that, for the moment, offered a deceptive sense
of freedom. (227)
The inhuman sound of the soldiers’ chanting and militaristic,
industrialized imagery of the fortress on the hill are challenged
by the carnival parade marching almost within sight of the
mountain. A festival period of managed chaos and free expression,
taking place only streets away from a living symbol of industrial
strength, subverts militarized cultural norms, protesting the
(industrial) colonial regime with indigenous cultural tradition,
mocking European imperialism with colorful costumes and spiritual
abandon. The appearance of carnival celebration as if in response
to the dramatic show of military force creates a privileged space
for a deliberately subversive voice-of-the-people that opposes
Spears 47
intrusions of the industrial or colonial into everyday life with
mockery and jubilant defiance.
The revolutionary voice in Anger is fully realized when
elements of the magical real appear in subversive response to the
imposition of a militarized (colonial) border that circles the
family’s property with stakes and armed soldiers, restricting
surrounding lands and crops while intimidating the family into
selling land to members of the colonial regime. Claude, Madame
Louis’s youngest son, summons an ancestral ghost with the help of
his grandfather—also named Claude—who legend says will be
compelled to seek revenge against the soldiers. When their
ancestor arrives, Claude describes the specter’s appearance,
saying that the ghost is “dressed in a high-collared jacket and a
big straw hat . . .His feet [are] bleeding as if he [has]
travelled a great distance, and he [is] looking at us with sad,
heavy eyes” (258). The ancestor (a symbol of voiceless
generations of natives and slaves consumed as expendable human
resources in the pursuit of colonial industrial progress)
disappears in a moment, leaving Claude in despair but with the
expectation of violent vengeance. The narrator describes elder
Spears 48
Claude’s response to the ghost, saying that “In the depths of his
soul, legends he thought he had forgotten had been reawakened”
(258). Indigenous animistic beliefs, Christianity, and the
magical real literary mode (in the form of the ancestral ghost)
merge when the grandfather—a living symbol of Haiti’s
revolutionary spirit—suggests that the ancestor is compelled to
carry out the wishes of Claude and his grandson, but then
speculates that “If even the dead refused to hear God’s voice and
come to our aid . . . then what would become of us” (258). The
(magical) mundane reality of an otherwise powerless colonial
situation is demonstrated when Christian doctrine—one which only
God can summon a spirit from the dead—is brought into conflict
with the traditional Haitian belief that an ancestral spirit
could be compelled to intervene in human affairs by the actions
of a boy and his elderly grandfather. Shortly thereafter, several
of the guards shoot each other during an argument, creating the
sense that a minor revolution had occurred. The combination of
magical real literary elements like the ghost of Claude’s
ancestor with revolutionary ideas and the carnivalized space for
free expression—created by the same (colonial) borders that
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separate the family from their land—allow the progression of
social commentary from colonialism to the carnivalesque to the
magical real present.
In literature of the Pan-Americas, a common romantic element
exists that, while focused on themes individually prioritized by
the cultures of the region, demonstrates consistent connections
between seemingly-unique colonial-era experiences of the
Caribbean, Latin America, and the American South. As
industrialization, commercial growth, and the reign of powerful
military regimes moved across the Caribbean, authors of the
region utilized various literary forms of carnival free
expression to create historical and cultural continuity between
contemporary Haiti and its lost, voiceless past, including
romanticism and the short story format. Haiti’s romanticism,
while similar to its appearance in Latin American and Southern
literature, focuses on cyclical periods of revolution in Haiti’s
history, making archetypal folk heroes and villains of historical
figures, rather than Latin American literature’s romanticized
attempt to build cultural continuity across the region and the
obsession in Southern literature with the connectivity of its
Spears 50
romanticized, Eurocentric past. In Haitian literature, the short
story is used to highlight cultural identities largely based on
social status and diverse realities with violent, often shocking
plots and climaxes emphasized by the brevity of the text.
Carnivalized, fragmented realities depict the restriction of free
Haitian culture, utilizing the magical real literary mode to give
voice to the feelings of loss, confusion, and rage created by
constant military control.
In order to criticize colonialism, industrialization, and
the dictatorial control of military regime leaders, Haitian
author Edwidge Danticat presents a series of modern-day folk
tales about survival, nationalism, and the magical reality of the
Haitian people in her award-winning collection of short stories,
Krik? Krak! (1996). In “Nineteen Thirty-seven,” Danticat creates
what Dean Franco refers to as “a dialectical engagement with
history,” that utilizes the short story format, non-linear
storytelling, and the magical real literary mode to depict
traumatic historical events rooted in the region’s collective
memory while subverting the event to reflect Haiti’s romanticized
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revolutionary spirit. The narrator (Josephine) describes the
night of her birth after her mother (Manman) escapes from
Massacre River, saying that, “On that day not so long ago, in the
year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my
mother did fly. Weighed down by my body inside hers . . .she
glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which
at that moment looked as though it were in flames” (49). Here,
imaginative, magical storytelling is overlapped with the
historical events of the Parsley Massacre of 1937 (during which
the Dominican president Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of
thousands of Haitians living near the Dominican border) as well
as grotesque language and imagery in order to describe the
reality of cultural clashes between Haitian citizens and
militaristic leaders enforcing colonial borders. Josephine’s tone
as she describes her mother’s escape is indifferent, as if
describing a commonplace event as three realities merge into one:
a magical reality in which a flaming pregnant woman covered in
blood flies to avoid her pursuers is juxtaposed with a violent, a
traumatic, grotesque reality where human beings are slaughtered
in the streets for crossing an imposed political border, and
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mundane reality as similar violent attacks became commonplace.
When Manman—whose character is romanticized by her revolutionary
actions—flies to escape her attackers then gives birth to
Josephine in the same night she becomes a magical real subversion
of everyday militaristic oppression and the consumption of
Haitian (human) resources used to fuel the industrial growth
necessary for European and American colonial success.
Restless Spirits: Part Two—Magical Realism in Latin American
Literature
As the above analyses indicate, there is a strong,
intentional link between the grotesque and magical real literary
modes and the colonial contact between European/American and
various Pan-Caribbean cultures. This fact is given particular
emphasis by Latin American writers, whose evolution of
subversive, anti-institutional carnival expression began in Latin
American literature in response to colonial contact between
indigenous cultures and various European nations—then later with
the American North—during the late fifteenth century
(concurrently with literature of the Caribbean and American
South). The magical real literary mode of the Latin Americas—like
Spears 53
literature of the Caribbean—evolved initially from the unique
contact between indigenous tribes, their religious understanding
of the world around them, and unconsumed natural resources in the
pre-Columbian era. For centuries throughout the region,
polytheistic belief systems containing elements of mysticism,
traditional folkloric entities, and Afro-Latin hybrid culture
coexisted with several thriving oral literary tradition and
pictorial writing systems (codices) used by cultures like the
Aztecs or Mayans before colonization. Elements similar to Haitian
literature’s “lieux de mémoire (‘places of the memory’) and
Braizel’s description of oral narrative traditions as the
“cultural transfer of memory” emerged in Latin America,
establishing forms of what Ruth Hill calls “artistic verbal
expression,” or: “prayers, hymns, myths, [and] theatre of various
kinds,” used to retain the collective past (1). Complex
indigenous populations—like indigenous Haitians and Native
American populations in the American South—which had previously
flourished across Latin America were absorbed into Spain’s empire
and assimilated, enslaved, or devastated by European disease.
Concurrently, a popular literary effort was made by Europeans to
Spears 54
record and preserve native oral tradition, and in the late
fifteen hundreds as native populations interacted with early
Spanish colonizers, particularly in highly-advanced native
regions of Mexico, Chile and Columbia, “the creation of a native
elite, able to write and imbued with Western culture, [became]
crucial to the empire’s functioning, so colleges and universities
were founded” (Hill 1). A new, subversive voice of native culture
began to form, evolving from common elements of indigenous
culture that combined artistic verbal expression, carnivalized
language, magical realism, and European alphabetic tradition to
form a new literary response to colonial and industrial
domination in Latin America.
Beginning early in the sixteenth century the number of
slaves imported from Africa increased rapidly to meet the growing
industrial need for manual labor in Latin America as the
indigenous cultures were all but wiped out. As a result, African,
Native American, and Spanish cultures merged, forming hybridized
races, languages, and modes of understanding the world that
included elements of various religious practices (Santeria,
voodoo, and Catholicism), folk practices (oral or written
Spears 55
traditions and culturally-specific mythology or rituals), and
regional influences (unique natural elements and landscape and
interactions between bordering and non-native cultures). As the
written word made its way across Latin America, published
accounts of colonialism from the perspective of native authors
appeared concurrently with European epic-style conquest and
exploration literature as well as travel journals; all gained
popularity as debates regarding the status of the indigenous
peoples, conquered lands, and the ethics of colonial contact
raged in the Latin American literary world. Frequent descriptions
of the astonishment of Europeans at the cultural development of
Latin America “likens to the marvels found in the romances of
chivalry,” echoing Broncano’s statements about the magical
grotesque in areas of the New World where newly-merged
populations interacted in unfamiliar regions and were portrayed
by Europeans as the land of exaggerated plenty. Like literature
of the American South, the Latin American romantic literary
tradition, in combination with the magical real literary mode,
helped to build a sense of national and regional identity—largely
based on heritage and religion—as once-separate cultures from
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around the world merged through common experience. Spanish-
American poetry and drama thrived throughout Latin America as
distinctly Baroque stylistic movements like culteranismo—ornate
vocabulary, hyperbaton, metaphoric language, and mythological
illusions—and conceptismo—rapid, simple language that relies on
wordplay and metaphors to convey multiple meanings and concepts—
slowly gave way to the writing of Latin American drama and
fiction in the late eighteenth century.
Theatrical retellings of Spanish history and the early
colonial period ranging from tales of European bravado to
indictments of colonial culture and Spanish tradition presented
“sanitized accounts of the Spanish conquest of [indigenous]
empires” as well as different regions of America and “the
reconquest of Spain from Muslim invaders” (Hill 1). Concurrently,
lyric poems with magical, spiritual themes suggestive of early
Latin American artistic verbal expression like hymns and prayers
evolved into the first attempts at epic poetry in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century that included satirical
themes and heavy focus on the natural elements of New Spain.
Early Latin American novels evolved from various genres (often
Spears 57
sharing the themes of conquest and exploration literature),
possessed with a “Neoclassical conviction that society would be
reformed by a combination of informed individual choice and state
regulation” (Hill 9). Hierarchal systems of race classification
based on “the purity of one’s blood” where challenged in
narratives with both Romantic and Naturalist literary elements
(the beauty of nature, the effect of environment on its people)
focused on the building of a national identity, local agrarian
landscapes, and regionally-unique characters (various mixed-race
characters, gaúchos, slaves, the urban poor) as the movement
towards cultural independence gained momentum (Hill 9). A period
of “foundational fictions” occurred during which a “clash between
barbarism (rural, native culture) and civilization (urban,
European-influenced culture)” occurred in regional fiction that
contributed to discourse on the status of indigenous and mixed-
race peoples across the region (Hill 9.) It was from this period
that many of the most widely-recognized works of fiction in Latin
American tradition emerged, utilizing carnivalized language, free
expression, and the magical real literary mode to reflect
industrialized colonial realities throughout Latin America.
Spears 58
The evolution of the modern Latin American novel continued,
defined by nineteenth-century Realism (where “The mighty struggle
against nature . . . [approaches] allegory and myth: man against
nature, civilization against barbarism, good against evil”) and
an emerging twentieth-century focus on “rebelliousness,
skepticism, and contentiousness of the avant-garde,” which
incorporated elements of indigenous and African American culture
and fragmented, multi-voiced narratives into mainstream Latin
American literature (Hill 11). The incorporation of hybridized
folk, religious, and supernatural beliefs formed a literary
movement that incorporated the magical into traditional
definitions of everyday reality, resulting in a unique
presentation of the Latin American magical real literary mode. In
the wake of this shift the Latin American Boom occurred in the
late twentieth-century and Modernism emerged as authors
throughout the region began to incorporate “the style and
techniques of the modern European and American novel:” “stream of
consciousness, multiple and unreliable narrators, fragmented
plots, interwoven stories, a strong influence of the cinema,” and
humor (Hill 11). One of the most widely-recognized authors in the
Spears 59
Latin American literary tradition, Gabriel García Márquez,
combines carnivalized language, the magical real literary mode,
modernism, and in-depth descriptions of unique regional flora and
fauna to present a subversive criticism of colonial power,
simultaneously depicting Columbia as a complicated political and
social entity. Folk storytelling traditions like multi-
generational family narrations are combined with elements of
Naturalism and Romanticism, building cultural continuity through
meaningful connections between the mythic past and contemporary
Latin American identity, repeating names and traits from one
generation to the next. In Márquez’s seminal text, One Hundred
Years of Solitude (1967), the mutli-generational story of the
Buendias (a large Columbian family) is told from the time of José
Arcadio Buendias, the family patriarch, just before he founds the
city Macondo—a metaphoric representation of Columbia—until its
destruction by a hurricane decades later. Appearances of the
magical real literary mode, combined with mundane reality and a
romanticized notion of the potential of the future depict the
realities of colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization on
the Latin American world.
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In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez combines magical realism
with Cuban myths and ageless, archetypal figures in order to
subvert the ideals of colonialism and industrialization in a
symbolic representation of Cuban history. Zamora describes the
Buendias family, saying that they “unsettle discrete, stable
identity with familial repetitions, self-reflections, and
integrations of the living and the dead” in a jungle setting
where industrial, political, and colonial influence alter life in
Macondo (502). After the founding of the village—in a vast swamp
surrounded by mountains—extravagant expansions are made to the
family home, incorporating man-made (industrial) items with
elements of nature. In spite of Macondo’s agrarian landscape,
“The primitive building of the founders became filled with tools
and materials, of workmen exhausted by sweat . . . in that
discomfort, breathing quicklime and tar, no one could see very
well how from the bowels of the earth there was rising . . . the
largest house in the town” (60). Before the house is finished the
local magistrate, who “had arrived in Macondo very quietly,”
orders the Buendias family to paint the front of their new home
blue, “in celebration of the anniversary of national
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independence,” despite the irony of a mandated celebration of
one’s freedom (61). When José Arcadio expels Don Apolinar from
the village the magistrate returns a week later “with six
barefoot and ragged soldiers, armed with shotguns” (62). Colonial
and industrial influences are brought into play by overlapping
situations: Úrsula corrupts the native, agrarian environment—
already distorted by the founding of Macondo—by expanding her
home, while the arrival of the magistrate (Don Apolinar Moscate)
symbolizes the impending intervention of a (militaristic)
government armed with (industrial) weapons. A recurring theme—the
progression from the indigenous to the industrial and then
ultimately to destruction—emerges, subverting the government’s
narrative of social progress and demands for obedient
nationalism.
The ongoing interference of colonialism and
industrialization in Macondan culture (introduced by various
outside forces that include the Buendias family) is subverted by
a series of supernatural presences surrounding José Arcadio and
his wife Úrsula—the incestuous root of the Buendias family tree—
and their ancestors. After the expansion of the Buendias family
Spears 62
home and reopening of José Arcadio’s alchemist laboratory where
he engages in a frenzy of scientific creativity, a familiar
spirit—Prudencio Aguilar—appears, leaving José Arcadio with
intense feelings of nostalgia for the long-dead enemy who speaks
with him until dawn. Aguilar’s appearance is treated as
commonplace though it marks the beginning of a period of madness
that comes over José Arcadio, which concludes when he
[grabs] a bar from a door and with the savage violence
of his uncommon strength he [smashes] to dust the
equipment in the alchemy laboratory, the daguerreotype
room, the silver workshop, shouting like a man
possessed in some high-sounding and fluent but
completely incomprehensible language. (85)
José Arcadio lashes out in the areas of the newly-renovated home
that have scientific or technological connections to
industrialism and the separation of (Latin American) man from
native agrarian lifestyle. José Arcadio’s violent outburst and
destructive frenzy following his spectral guest interrupts the
temporal flow of the Buendias narrative, subverting Úrsula’s
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attempt to modernize (industrialize) her (swampy) agrarian
surroundings, simultaneously disrupting already-fragmented
communications between Macondo and the (progressive) outside
world. In response to the advancement of colonialism and
industrialization appearances of the magical real reconnect the
living to their regional roots, signifying the rejection of
unwanted social and political progress in favor of folkways
dating back to the origins of indigenous peoples and their
understanding of the workings of the world.
Another Latin American (Cuban) author whose work in the
magical real literary tradition allows the expression of a
subversive, carnivalized language focused on criticism of (and
protest against) oppressive colonial power is Alejo Carpentier.
In his award-winning novel, The Kingdom of This World (1957),
Carpentier describes the violent colonial occupation and
enslavement of many thousands of Haitians and others brought to
the Caribbean by the forced diaspora of the slave trade,
utilizing his experience in a similar postcolonial setting to
establish narrative integrity. Magical real literary elements
overlap with the mundane, subverting the absolute control of the
Spears 64
French colonists over the indigenous culture while simultaneously
encouraging the revolutionary spirit of the enslaved peoples of
Haiti. Macandal is a one-armed slave who was a “king . . .
warrior, hunter, judge, and priest,” in Africa, and who is
“irresistible to Negro women [and] held the men spellbound,
especially when he recalled his trip, years earlier, as a
prisoner before he was sold to the slave-traders of Sierra Leone”
(8, 14). Macandal’s shaman-like characteristics foreshadow the
magical while his tales of travel symbolize vast distances
covered to supply colonial commercial industry with valuable
human resources. Though Macandal’s size and strength make him a
valuable resource to his slave master his memories of African
legends, history, and of his own travels—maintained through the
cultural tradition of oral narrative—indicate a symbolic role as
s traditional folk hero, an archetypal figure common to both
Haitian and Latin American literature during times of collective
cultural trauma.
A significant relationship forms between Macandal’s
inability to affect change—for himself and others—while working
in an industrial setting with the ability to avenge himself
Spears 65
against foreign colonizers after being moved to a more agrarian
landscape. When Macandal’s arm is crushed feeding cane into the
large, iron rollers of a mill, he is removed from manual
(industrial) labor and reassigned to the cow pastures where he
begins to realize his magical potential. Life in the pastures
transforms Macandal spiritually: he reconnects with unconsumed
resources around him, discovers regionally-specific flora and
fauna, and explores the geography around his plantation. The
narrator tells of Macandal’s wonder, saying that “To his surprise
he discovered the secret life of strange species given to
disguise, confusion, and camouflage,” describing the discovery of
a variety of species of fungi (17). In order to achieve magical,
physical transformation Macandal meets with a witch who gives him
the magical ability to transform into various animals. The
narrator states that, “At times the talk was of extraordinary
animals that had had human offspring. And of men whom certain
spells turned into animals” (19). Macandal’s magical abilities
overlap with the mundane, making each act of rebellion against
the plantation managers an act against the commercial
exploitation of Haiti’s resources. Macandal uses his magical
Spears 66
ability in conjunction with knowledge of poisonous fungi to
torment and murder slave-owners throughout the region, interrupt
commercial production, and destroy various resources,
symbolically subverting the absolute control that colonial forces
had over Haiti’s enslaved population and protests against forced
industrialization and its culturally-destructive qualities.
The Common Bonds of Pan-American Literature: Collective
Trauma and Non-Linear Narratives
Collective cultural damage to conquered and postcolonial
regions like the Latin Americas, the Caribbean, and the American
South represented in literature of the Pan-American region by the
grotesque and magical real literary modes is often used to build
a stronger historical link between traumatic past events and the
cultural experiences attached to them. Associated closely with
what Peter Coviello refers to as “a language of affect” and
universalist rhetoric, the sensations of national belonging and
devastation or “of the capacity for suffering and trauma at the
citizen’s core” are used to connect and create a sense of unity
across landmasses in the Pan-American region (439). Collective
Spears 67
traumatic experiences commonly found in literature of the Latin
Americas, Caribbean, and the American South are referenced in
Coviello’s statement, which describes the construction of a sense
of national unity at the regional level that has evolved into
feelings of Pan-American and transnational unity. Forced
industrialization, similarities in folk culture, traumatic
historical events, and a unique American literary identity are
formed across borders and bodies of water using modes like the
grotesque and magical realism to demonstrate the cultural
proximity of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the American
South. Elizabeth Bellamy states in her article, “‘Intimate
Enemies’: Psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Postcolonial Affect,”
that “the figure of the subaltern [in literature] is the point
where complex (and never fully “locatable”) intersection between
Marxism and psychoanalysis occurs within postcolonialism,”
describing a “countermovement to mainstream history in terms of
defining national identity in the context of decolonization”
(344). The grotesque and magical real literary modes illustrate
and repackage history to represent the collective cultural damage
to conquered and postcolonial regions represented in literature
Spears 68
of the Pan-American region subject to forced industrial growth
and the introduction of capitalist ideology.
Some of the common bonds between literature of the Pan-
Americas are demonstrated in Deborah Cohn’s description the
influence of William Faulkner’s depiction of “his South” upon
Latin American literature in her essay, “He Was One of Us: The
Reception of William Faulkner and the U. S. South by Latin
American Authors.” Cohn states that Latin American authors relate
to Faulkner’s writing because of similar experiences of colonial
dependency, economic difficulty, and the culture crisis that
resulted from forced industrialization as the Northeastern United
States modernized farming methods and increased its capital gains
(150). Both the American South and Latin America—populated
previously by agrarian communities under regional and often much
more local autonomous political control—were forced into a state
of economic dependency as their way of life was assimilated,
contributing to the industrial growth of the nation while
standards of living dropped locally (164). Cohn writes that
“reconstruction policies resulted in the South’s perception of
itself not just as defeated but as conquered, and of the North as
Spears 69
the conquering nation,” (164) noting that Latin American writers
are conquered historically not only by America but also Spain,
bringing about “a shared comprehension of America and a shared
mode of narrating its history” (Cohn 152). Tensions created by
environments rife with social upheaval are made visible by
literary devices like the grotesque and magical realism, whose
non-temporal depictions of conflicting cultural perspectives,
figurative language, and fantastical and often horrific
occurrences subvert accepted cultural and political structures of
conquering nations, undoing or working against mundane reality in
all of its forms.
Put another way, literary modes like the grotesque and
magical realism in Southern, Caribbean, and Latin American
literature demonstrate a common cultural lens used to understand
and respond to colonial—and industrial—contact with the Northern
United States. In his critical analysis of the connection between
Southern and Latin American literature, Manual Broncano refers to
literary modes like the grotesque and magical realism as ways of
understanding literature and viewing the world. Specifically, he
identifies a “unique texture” of reality “found in the Caribbean,
Spears 70
especially Haiti and Cuba, but also in the Americas at large,
where history is filled with atrocities and wonders,” stemming
naturally from “[realities] recreated in fiction” that are
expressed by these modes (663). Márquez claims that “the
Caribbean stage as well as the writings of Latin America”
consistently use “similar techniques which find their roots in
the same postcolonial atmosphere and are deeply indebted to
Faulkner’s heritage” (661). Events portrayed in Pan-American
literature—like the loss of a war to and occupation by the
Northern United States (particularly in the South, where the
experience of military defeat, occupation, and reconstruction
were not shared with any other part of America) and
industrialization—are demonstrated to bring with them ideologies
like industrialism, which annihilated the regional economy and
culture previously built on local agrarian labors and autonomous
political control. Capitalism, related to the industrial growth
in both regions, further alienated independent farming and
production, working in direct opposition to the cultural norms
and folkways already in place in the region, causing the eventual
loss or corruption of those as well.
Spears 71
While many critics agree that a Pan-American connection
exists between Caribbean, Latin American, and Southern literature
based on alienating experiences with capitalist industrial
societies, some critics focus more specifically on the traumatic
experiences of the subaltern. Julia Grandison proposes that the
link between grotesque and magical realist texts utilizing non-
linear narratives and trauma exists in the interaction of memory
and affect. Grandison describes narrative memory as “capable of
shortening, modifying, and narrating a past event,” and
“traumatic memory” as “an anachronistic and dissociative
intrusion whereby a traumatic event is repeatedly re-experienced
in the present as if it were recurring,” combined with affective
language deeply connected to feelings of national identity used
to revisit and bring to life events and voices often forgotten in
the narrative of history (Grandison). Narrators and characters
question structural institutions like temporality, nationality,
and even reality at the most basic level through literary modes
like the grotesque and magical realism which are often associated
closely with human emotion and collective cultural experiences.
Layered and disjointed narratives weave carnivalesque and mundane
Spears 72
elements of daily life into one as narrative and emotion
intertwine with memory, leaving the events of the present less
real than the traumas and successes of the past in literature of
the Caribbean, Latin Americas, and the American South.
Put another way, in Pan-American literature diverse stories
of communal experience—tied to the collective memory of a region
and its people—suggest similar impulses to question, mock,
criticize, and reject institutional control while subjective,
non-linear narratives illustrate similar histories of
underdevelopment, dispossession, loss of centralized authority,
and unwanted political intervention. As a result the magical real
and grotesque literary modes are used as a common voice to
express distrust of colonialism and industrialization in order to
connect with a time when “the [world was] preindustrial, or, at
least, resisting industrialization,” before centuries-old
cultural traditions and religious beliefs where lost to slavery
or absorbed by violent assimilative practices (Cohn 165).
Folkways are portrayed as a high (or even the highest) cultural
value and have numerous complicated ties to traumatic historical
events referred to, alluded to, and assumed in multifaceted
Spears 73
literary inversions of reality and convention. The common
experiences and unique realities of the Pan-American region are
recreated using magical realism and the grotesque, forming a
continuous bond to the carnivalesque foundations of subversive
rhetoric that subverts and ignores colonial borders, building
(through literature) a renewed sense of national unity in the
Pan-American region.
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