Similarities between gothic literature and magical realism

Capitalism inescapably conjures its own phantoms and so remains haunted by the spectral figures of вЂњdead laborвЂќ occulted under the sign of value.

This essay argues that ViramontesвЂ™s turn to spectrality in Under the Feet of Jesus aims to lay bare the fundamental fetishism and phantasmagoria surrounding the value form and the products of labor under capitalism-what Karl Marx suggestively calls вЂњall the magic and necromancyвЂќ shrouding capital accumulation.

Instances of spectrality abound in the novel, suggesting a fundamental connection between ViramontesвЂ™s figurative appeal to the вЂњghostlyвЂќ and her more openly political and economic concerns in telling a story about the poverty, exploitation, and violence suffered yearly by farmworkers at the hands of US agribusiness. There are ghosts in the barn, or at least Helena MarГa ViramontesвЂ™s Under the Feet of Jesus leads one to believe so. Here, the specter usually bears a message or embodies political significance, for, in the cultures most closely associated with magical realism, politics is more frequently associated with the extraordinary than the ordinary. Instead, by granting equal narrative presence to both, magical realism reveals that the extraordinary exists most absolutely within the quotidian real. Unlike the conventional ghost story, the result in literary terms is neither to eradicate the realism established beforehand in the text nor to dilute the unsettling effect of the ghost. At one moment a character is standing in a room in his or her own house at the next moment, a specter arrives and engages in dialogue.

Its relationship to realism is different from the gothicвЂ™s, in that the boundary markers between mimesis (Greek for 'realistic imitation') and antimimesis in magical realism are far more fluid and permeable. Magical realism comes to us first from Latin America, though it has also taken strong root elsewhere, and carries with it a particular ideological resonance that identifies it closely with postcolonial politics. In this essay I look at the gothic alongside its more overtly politicized sister form, magical realism - with which it is interacting increasingly - to consider to what extent the terrain that lies on the blurry boundary between these two modes of writing shifts in response to a larger political impetus that rejects the world of confidences and its political tricksters. But is this because, given its emphasis upon the interior (including the interiority of psychology and pathology), we seal our gothic reading away from our everyday political concerns? I think not. For it remains the case that the gothic, a form of literature and culture wedded to anachronism, the interior and its claustrophobic secrets, the pathological and its sick desires, continues to enthrall ever new generations of Western readers. Our literary appetites, however, seem to move in the opposite direction to those of our politics. One might also argue that, in literary terms, clarity is associated most clearly with the transparency of literary realism, for in setting up a mirror to life, the realist text purports to eschew the dark corners in which secrets lurk. Such transparency is, for the Western world, redolent with democratic ideals. We live today in a world of transparency and open-access information systems: global communication, transglobal travel, freedom of information requests, and twenty-four-hour digital communications.

Similarities between gothic literature and magical realism