Fictional Space
The initial way that dreams help illuminate magical realism and its use in Solitude is by helping the reader understand the place that the magical realist narrative occupies in our mind while reading. This is what literary critic Rawdon Wilson in “Metamorphoses in Fictional Space” refers to as “fictional space”(210). He describes this concept as “the sense of direction and distance, the sheer up and downness and back and forthness, the scale” that is imagined “when reading or viewing a fictional world” (Wilson 210). We can think of it as the imagined stage upon which the various textual dreamlike aspects can play out and make sense for the reader.
Critics consider the conceptualizing of space problematic for magical realism because the reality that magical realism creates is not like our normal waking reality. It encompasses the “copresence of oddities, the interaction of the bizarre with the entirely ordinary, and the doubleness conceptual codes” (Wilson 210). This is in contrast with “the space in a ‘realistic’ novel.” In these novels we find the “the representation of space [we] take for granted, and in which [we] walk and move about in” (Wilson 210).
Because realistic novels involve a space that “[we] can easily see right that through” and magical realism does not, Wilson argues that “what reading magical realism requires [is] a faculty for boundary-skipping between worlds” (210). In this claim lies the implication that the reader is without or is not immediately aware of this certain faculty. For this reason he offers us magical realism’s parallels to the mathematical concept of geometry. Similarly, critic Shanin Schroeder offers the analogy of alchemy. Both are meant to serve the same purpose: to provide a structure for imagining the realm of the magical realist story. But are these particular structures all that necessary?
If you’re Wilson, the answer would probably be yes, that we are in need of some kind of “boundary skipping faculty.” But if we are to understand “faculty” as an inherent power or ability, or any of the powers or capacities possessed by the human mind, it becomes increasingly evident that we already posses it when thinking about the dream narrative. Tropes aren’t necessary when this understanding is a part of us already.
Read more:
Considering Dreams in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Fictional Space
Dreams and Narrative
Magical Realism: The World of Macondo
Meaningful Bizarreness
Marquez and Jung
Concluding Thoughts
Further Reading
About the Author