Shahrzad and Naguib Mahfouz : two storytellers confabulate across time
- Citation:
- 2000
- Issue Date:
- 2000-05-01
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| Bhuva_Honours_Full.pdf | Published version | 1.04 MB |
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Even a cursory survey of the fiction of the latter part of the twentieth century brings to our attention a few very distinctive features of this body of work. One shared trait in the fiction of this period is something that has come to be known as "magic realism,'' as found in the works of Hermann Hesse, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, GIinther Grass, John Fowles, Isabel Allende, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, and others, wherein the writers intenveave, in ever shifting patterns, a sharply etched realism representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with elements derived from myth and fables, though this kind of literature has a much older tradition. Robert Scholes coined "metafiction"' as an overall term for the large and growing class of fiction that departs drastically from the traditional categories either of realism or of romance, and also the term "fabulation" for the current mode of free-wheeling narrative invention that encompasses elements of both "metafiction" and "magic realism." These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic-and sometimes highly effectivwxperiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusion of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish. in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic. In the hands of Marquez and other Central-and-South-American writers, magic realism and fabulation have functioned as a way to represent the problems of political oppression and corruption, the tragedies of families and their entangled histories, and, often, hopeless, passionate love. ...
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