Abstract
I have theorized that in textualizing the two radically different perspectives of realistic description that reflects a solid grounding in empirically verifiable reality and of “irreducible elements” of magic that cannot be so verified, magical realist narrative resembles the activities of a shaman who bridges the world of everyday community life and that of the spirits to whose realm s/he is imagined to journey in search of special power.1 Therefore, magical realism as a genre is “shamanistic,” performing shamanism from its inside, as it were, irrespective of its thematic content, and hence the genre itself makes room for the presence of spirit within the discourses of realism and empirical reality.2 Less importantly, I think, but not inconsequentially, in a number of cases, the shamanistic quality of the narrative is thematized and hence underscored by the presence of figures who can be seen to resemble actual shamans in some way.3 But their actions and the often magical or near-magical events associated with them do not cohere into a recognizable program. Rather, they endow the narrative with a generalized mystical aura that can be absorbed by readers from a variety of traditions.4 Many of these figures show traces of the traditional shamanic trajectory of separation from the ordinary social world, confrontation with a world of spirits, and return with special knowledge or power, but the pattern is often interrupted or incomplete. That incompleteness reflects the presence of different cultural traditions and belief systems (including shamanism) that characterizes contemporary magical realism, as well as the generally empirical outlook of modern and contemporary society and the dominant fictional mode of realism combined with other also current genres such as fantasy and science fiction.
For SW, White Shaman
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The phrase in the epigraph comes from a Guajiro shaman’s chant collected by Michel Perrin, “Formas de comunicación chamánica: El ejemplo guajiro (Venezuela y Colombia),” Abya-Yala, Colección 500 Años (Quito, Ecuador) 1 (1988): 64–65 (my translation),
cited in Mario Califano, “Los Rostros del Chamán: Nombres y Estados,” in Chamanismo en latinoamérica: Una revisión conceptual, ed. Jacques Galinier, Isabel Lagarriega, and Michel Perrin (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdéz, Editores, 1995), 124. Califano does not give the name of the shaman he cites. I have taken the term “irreducible element,” which I like so much, from the (relatively) early treatment of magical realism by
Robert Young and Keith Hollaman in the introduction to their anthology, Magical Realist Fiction (New York: Longman, 1984). Michael Taussig and others have deconstructed Eliade’s formulations as too desirous of an impossible cultural purity. However, such qualifications do not seem to me to invalidate the connections I am making here between shamanic and magical realist practices. See Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 187; his The Nervous System (New York: Routledge), 1992; as well as my discussion of Eliade and Taussig’s critique of him in connection with magical realism in my Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 147–67.
My discussion of a particular thematic strain in magical realist characters resembles Anne Hegerfeldt’s analysis (in her chapter on “Magic Realist Focalizers”) of the way that the figures and perspectives of circus performers, madmen, fools, and children, inasmuch as they are frequently portrayed in such a way that they represent an at least partially validated alternative to normality, serve to advance the general magical realist tendency to overturn established ideas. See Anne C. Hegerfeldt, Lies That Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen through Contemporary Fiction from Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 130–56. Furthermore, because shamanism presupposes a faith in nonempirical reality, the thematic I discuss here belongs to the “faith-based” side of magical realism that Christopher Warnes distinguishes from the “irreverent” strain that highlights the play of the signifier. That they are powerful suggests “a desire to enlarge realism’s purview to make space for alternative world views,” which characterizes that strain;
Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 82.
It may be this quality that has been responsible for the worldwide popularity of magical realism and its consequent problematic “takeover” of Latin American identity in world literature, critiqued by a number of individuals and groups of writers, such as the McOndo and Crack movements in Latin America. For a discussion of magical and subsequent realisms and the politics of literary marketing, see the recent article by Sarah Pollack, “Latin American Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States,” Comparative Literature 61, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 346–65, 350–53.
James Dow, The Shamanic Touch: Otomi Indian Symbolic Healing (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), 7.
See the article by Daniel C. Noel, who calls himself someone “who was already doubtful about Western science’s understanding of matters spiritual,” discussing Carlos Castañeda’s legacy. Daniel C. Noel, “Adios, Don Carlos, We are the Dumbos: Castañeda’s Spiritual Legacy as a Literary Trickster,” Quest 87, no. 1 (1999): 6–7. The revelation that Castañeda’s shamanism was actually a neosha-manism, a fiction, means he belongs in some sense to this group of fictional figures of shamanic power; however, he is one who greatly influenced the development of a fascination with such figures in the United States. Noel also notes the inter-American nature of this neoshamanism, the “strange twist of cultural history that had someone born in Cajamarca, Peru, where Pizarro first defeated the Incas, now saying the superstitious natives know more than the rational Europeans concerning such [spiritual] matters.” While the texts I discuss here do not produce a “successful simulation of ethnography,” as Castañeda’s texts do, they, like his, contribute to the cultural fascination with such figures, bringing the “fantasy of shamanism” to Western readers “whose family histories had long since lost contact with any actual indigenous shamanistic practices.”
Discussions of shamanic characteristics of literary texts appear from time to time, though they were (predictably) more common in the 1960s through the 1980s than they are now. Within European tradition, magical realism can be seen to continue the longstanding “orphic” tradition of poetry that spans the different worlds of the ineffable and the material since Orpheus sang of the former in terms of the latter. Such a duality embodies the “shamanist contradiction” (as described by Robert McGahey): the shaman feels himself to be an independent person yet is also the channel for forces outside himself; in other terms, he is involved in both material and immaterial realities. Furthermore, like magical realist narrative, Orpheus is also seen as bridging the gap between older and recent cultures: following Karl Jaspers, in his study of Mallarmé’s orphic moment, McGahey considers Orpheus a “key operator,” “carrying forward the older, shamanic mode of thought and being into the youthful logocentric age”; see McGahey , The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarmé (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), intro. and 8. The connection of literature with shamanism is somewhat less clear in the Americas, but native shamanic traditions are even more currently present, as evidenced by such studies as (among many others)
Jacques Galinier, Isabel Lagarriga, and Michel Perrin, ed., Chamanismo en latinoamérica: Una revisión conceptual (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdéz, Editores, 1995);
Joan Halifax, Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979);
Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman: A Guide to Power and Healing (San Francisco: Harper, 1990); and Mircea Eliade’s chapter on “Shamanism in North and South America” in his seminal Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972 [1951]), in which Eliade speculates in the epilogue about the potential for studying shamanism as a source of epic and lyric poetry. Sometimes, they connect shamanism with a literary tradition, as does
Daniel C. Noel in his The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imagined Realities (New York: Continuum, 1997). 9.
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1959 [1955]), 17.
Jacques Galinier, The World Below: Body and Cosmos in Otomí Indian Ritual, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004), 68.
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1970 [1967]).
Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 48.
Ana Castillo, So Far from God (New York: Norton, 1993), 24.
Gabriel García Márquez, “Light Is Like Water,” trans. Edith Grossman, in Strange Pilgrims (New York: Knopf, 1993), 158.
Among many examples, see the reference to “shamanic auxiliaries that can be animals, plants, objects, or intermediary beings. Everyone yearns to connect with these entities, which are conceived of as part of one’s personal psychic makeup” (“la composicion animica personal”; Pablo G. Wright, “Cronicas de un encuentro shamanico: Alejandro, el ‘Silbador’ y el antropologo,” in Chamanismo en latino-america, eds. Jacques Galinier, Isabel Lagarriega, and Michel Perrin (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdez, Editores, 1995), 167–86. Regarding the temporal dimension of human-animal connections, according to Fernando Urrea Giraldo and Diego Zapata Ortega, they refer back to “a raw time [un tiempo crudo], a paradise of unity between culture and nature, when “primitives, our ancestors, or, rather, the others [the “lower ones,” los aucos] or the unbaptized were in charge and still possessed their full ability to change into animals; see their “Vegetalismo y sistema de rep-resentaciones en el curandismo inga-camentsa,” in Chamanismo en latinoamérica, ed. Jacques Galinier, Isabel Lagarriega, and Michel Perrin (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdez, Editores, 1995), 218.
Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Collier, 1970 [1949]), 41–42. Further references are given in the text.
Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: Henry Holt, 1988); “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” trans. Gregory Rabassa, Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, ed. Robert Young and Keith Hollaman (New York, Longman, 1984), 55–59; Carlos Fuentes, Aura, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975);
Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina (New York: Bantam, 1988 [1987]), 200.
Julio Cortázar, “Axolotl,” in The End of the Game and Other Stories, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1956]), 9. Though she does not associate it explicitly with magical realism, Sharon Spencer analyzes the transformation of the narrator in “Axolotl” as a shamanic process and allies such processes with Cortázar’s artistic process, “a perfected image of the deep psychic transference that is demanded by the act of making art”;
Sharon Spencer, “The Art of the Shaman: Julio Cortázar Viewed as a Native American Writer,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 3, no. 3 (1984), 82.
See Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 220–28.
On magical realism and historical trauma, see Eugene Arva, “Writing the Vanishing Real: Hyperreality and Magical Realism,” Journal of Narrative Theory 38, no. 1 (Winter 2008), 60–85. This is another controversial point, because some critics take that expression of historical trauma or silenced minority voices as a defining characteristic, which makes magical realism a postcolonial genre. Others maintain that it also belongs to mainstream writing, and early examples of the genre in Europe especially—such as texts by Ernst Jünger, Johan Daisne, Massimo Bontempelli, and others— do not necessarily represent the voices of silenced minorities, although others, like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, often seen as a precursor of magical realism, do.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 29–34.
The phrase “remember the ancestor” appears in a discussion of Morrison’s use of ancestors in La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 88. From an inter-American perspective, the antelope as evoked here might be compared with the sense of surviving mythic traditions referring to a “time— another time— in which animals spoke and things were acquiring the shapes they now have,” preserved in rituals or the memory thereof that Alfredo Lopez-Austin discerns in Mesoamerica;
Alfredo LopezAustin, Cuerpo humano e ideología: Las concepciones de los antiguos nahuas, vol. 1 (Mexico City: UNAM, 1990), 55.
Michel Perrin, “The Body of the Guajiro Shaman: Symptoms or Symbols,” in Portals of Power: Shamanism in South America, ed. E. Jean Matteson Langdon and Gerhard Baer (University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 105.
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, trans. Magda Bogin (New York: Knopf, 1985 [1982]), 6, 30.
See Frederick Luis Aldama, Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2013 Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Faris, W. (2013). We, the Shamans, Eat Tobacco and Sing. In: Di Iorio Sandín, L., Perez, R. (eds) Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329240_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329240_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45113-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-32924-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)