A taste of what's to come

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You draw connections between magical realism and shamanistic practices.  When shamans journey, their goal is to heal, either by doing battle with evil forces while in the trance state or by bringing back information from the other world.  Is it the author, the narrator, or the reader who is doing this kind of journeying with magical realist texts?


Since the authors are not shamans and are creating a text not performing a rite, I'd say it is not him or her.  That the author creates texts that I maintain are similar to shamanic journeys--analogous in the realm of writing, that is, as I try to demonstrate with my idea of "'defocalized narrative"--then I guess I'd say that the narrative voice (which is not necessarily coexistent with the realistic notion of a real person narrator) metaphorically journeys between different worlds, and the reader follows that narrative voice.  So the narrative itself, the narrative voice within the narrative, and the reader can be seen as journeying in this way.  Thus the author has created an environment in which his or her text and the reader's experience of it can take that reader into a narrative world that resembles a shamanic journey.  And that journey can accomplish various kinds of healing, especially in the realm of cultural conversations between different traditions or more personal ones between the actual world and some kind of different world, of the spirits, so it heals the gap usually experienced in modern secular life between those worlds.  This is, then, as I've said, clearly a Western form of fiction, or at least as far as I personally know if it.  I suspect, as I say somewhere in the narrative, that coming from the other direction, from the East, where spiritual traditions and the fictions that reflect them are much stronger, there are other types of magical realisms that combine the material and the spirit worlds in different ways.  And a student of mine wrote a paper on the Bible as magical realism, and I thought it was pretty convincing.  So...  the possibilities are quite intriguing.

Wendy Faris