Magic realism in the postcolonial novel : a study of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One hundred years of solitude and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to engage with a discussion on the importance of magic realism in a postcolonial context, which particular reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The introduction is an overview of the problems of defining the term magic realism, in terms of delineating its boundaries and the literature it should or should not include. The contradictions between the various definitions are discussed and understood to be a result of the different cultural perspective from which the genre is approached. The relationship between magic realism and postcolonialism is argued as being extremely important because of the very fact that the magic realist genre came into being in a formerly colonised country. Chapter 2 is a discussion on the relationship between magic realism and western colonial writings, and the way in which Marquez and Rushdie first endorse and then debunk western colonial stereotypes of the Other, in order to subsequently subvert them. It is outlined how the conquistadors in Latin America and the Orientalist scholars in India have created the exotic Other with which the continent and the subcontinent had come to be identified. Subsequently, examples are given ·of instances in both novels where stereotypical exotic representations of the natives are mimicked and ridiculed and thus subverted. This subversion of western stereotypes paves the way for a use of magic realism within the two novels which has a far more important role of rewriting the history of the colonised.