Rudy Wiebe Magical Realism Analysis

The term Magischer Realism, translated as magic realism, was first used by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to refer to an alternative style known as New Objectivity. Around 1920s, artists looked around them, at the ordinary objects of life and painted to portray the strange and the uncanny in the aspects of everyday life. Their aim was to shake the established perception of reality, and their surroundings by announcing fantastic elements. Roh recognized magic realism’s accuracy in detail as well as its portrayal of magic in the rational world. He also claimed that magical realism in art finds a way to portray mystery found in everyday reality whereas in literature, it works ‘both within and against the aesthetic of realism.’ Lori Chamberlain, "Magicking the Real: Paradoxes of Postmodern Writing," in Postmodern Fiction: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide, ed. L. McCaffery (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood

This binary understanding is more effective in language that its roots are either in the way of transporting new words to a new home or imposing a fresh terminology on a native population. As Coral Ann Howells puts it, ‘Our way of seeing is structured by the forms in which our language enables us.’ (Re-visions of Praire Indian History in Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear and My Lovely Enemy in revisions of Canadian Literature, ed. Shirley Chew. (Leeds: University of Leeds, Institute of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, 1984: 6)

When read as post-colonial discourse, magical realism is seen to provide a response to dictating history and language of fragmentation. By transfering the binary oppositions of real through pushing elements, magical realism implicitly puts forward strategies revisioning the future. This action can metamorphose the fragments of colonial into new recognition in which marginalized, unvoiced and silenced can again find