Re: Magical realism: The remythification, reconception, and regendering of narrative in Alejo Carpentier's 'El reino de este mundo', Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Cien anos de soledad', and Isabel Allende's 'La casa de los espiritus'

Throughout history, man has sought to understand and thereby control the world around him. Man's history is fraught with examples of his attempts to gain control and creative power through the employ of magic. The reality of his magic is made manifest not only by his desire to believe in it, but also by the desire felt by those around him. Similarly, the author/reader relationship relies on belief, on faith---or at the very least on a suspension of disbelief. In this thesis I investigate the use of magical realism by Spanish American authors, specifically Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende. In a continuation of human history, these three authors depict a very real magic in order to obtain a measure of control and creative power over the various facets of their identities (national, gender, and ancestral). Their use of magical realism---a literary aesthetic that within its own name bears the wry smile of oxymoron---blurs the lines between the self and the other; individual and community; past, present, and future; and literality and metaphor. These authors expertly bend and contract this elastic genre to erase and redraw the lines that the European set of hegemonic ideals had created for them. Yet, each of these authors recognizes in his or her prose that magic is a dangerous and fickle flame. In this thesis I detail the ways in which these three authors create a reality in which magic can aid you, exempt you from normative law, fail you, consume you, or elude you when you need it most. By studying the specific situations in which magic either aids or fails the characters within these pages the re-conceptive and re-creative powers of the authors through their magical realities will be made evident.