Mama Day

Abstract

In “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” Rawdon Wilson appropriates a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and revises the trope of the alien visit to reimagine a close encounter of a different kind. His purpose in doing this is to explain the handling of space in magical realist fiction. The particular kind of space that Wilson examines is what Roland Barthes refers to as “stereographic space,” the intertextual space “in which one text, or sliver of a text … pulls into its own textual space, some other text or shard.”¹ Wilson goes on to add that in literature “one space can contain other spaces.”² He asks his readers to imagine an alien world named QueAng-QueAng in which inhabitants use metal straws to drink the eyeballs of living creatures by piercing the center and sucking out the soft gel within. In this imaginary world, the people of QueAng-QueAng also “execute blasphemers in a similar manner.”³ Wilson then extends his example to London where he imagines that the aliens have landed to “practice their distinctive mode of punishment”:⁴ “Once they land, they will be like an alien world superimposed upon English space, their doctrines and practices folded into the world they have entered. That ordinary space will now contain them, encysted but highly active, and will inevitably make a little room for their cultural practices.”⁵