Magical Realism in Ana Castillo\'s Novel so Far From God

Magical Realism in Ana Castillo's 'So Far From God'

When looking for the magical realism in Ana Castillo's So Far From God, and for those readers who know her work and her cultural background, one of the ways in which the author employs magical realism is as a skilled fiction writer. Castillo is writing about Latinos, a family of women. Her first step in employing magical realism is to set aside the Latino patriarchal cultural restrictions that would otherwise prevent the concept of "magical realism" from working in the story. Castillo had to find a way to overcome that allowed the reality to be used to advance the story past that obstacle. She also had the obstacle of Latino Catholicism, which is as equal a force with which to be confronted as is the patriarchal society. This essay is an examination of how Ana Castillo overcomes these obstacles in her book, and how she encounters and deals with other obstacles that might be placed in the way of Latino characters.

Freeing the Women in So Far From God

Right away Castillo helps the reader to understand how she will move past the restrictions of the patriarchal society placed on her female Latino characters. The key is the use of humor, and by taking those situations which are, in the life of Latino women, consistent as identifiers of their role in their society. The reality of the Latino culture suggests that the women, Sofi and her four daughters, around whom this story unfolds, should be in the background, while their male counterparts are in the foreground of the story. Castillo quickly dispels this cultural norm with humor, and also with the magical realism of one daughter, the second daughter, Caridad, whose dream in life it is to have a storybook wedding to her fiance, Tom. With this character, the second daughter, Castillo is conforming to the traditional Latino values, which she must do in exchange for the leeway she will take later in the story. The sacrifice of the second daughter to the traditions of her Latino culture come later, after Castillo has first taken what she needs as a fiction writer to move her story beyond the traditions.

In the first chapter, the opening lines of the book, Castillo breaks from the stranglehold of the Catholic Church by offering up Sofi's fourth daughter, three-year-old La Loca. La Loca's life is one of symbolism, which would no doubt cause the Pope in Rome to deny her magical realism as presented in Castillo's storyline (19). Castillo refers to this, the beginning of the first chapter, as "An account of the first astonishing occurrence in the lives of a woman named Sofia and her four fated daughters (9)." La Loca actually begins by dying, then has resurrected when, while lying in her coffin at her funeral, she sits up (22).

This began La Loca's long life phobia of people, because of the response to her resurrection; and the fact that she, like Christ, worked post resurrection miracles (23). While there are those who might interpret La Loca's magical abilities as "magical," that is not quite where Castillo wants us to go as the reader with the concept. It is easy to disagree with those who call La Loca's miracles magic, because Castillo has gone to great pains to associate the details of La Loca's very special life with the life of Christ. This is a concept that would help break the Latino women away from the traditional patriarchal society, which includes, for Latino women, the Church. Here, Castillo is putting Latino women on the same level of men, by using a symbolic female Christ figure. Animals have a symbolic role, one recreated in the story of La Loca to counter the role of the animals in the stable where the Christ child was birthed. The story about La Loca's death goes this way:

Her mother Sofi woke at twelve midnight to the howling and neighing of the five dogs, six cats, and four horses, whose custom it was to go freely in and out of the house (19)." The animals alarmed Sofi as to the death of La Loca, who suffered from epilepsy. When la Loca was resurrected, she claimed to have visited Heaven and Hell, and, as in the story of the Crucifixion of Christ, after He had risen, and he warned Mary not to touch Him; La Loca, too, warned the Father Jerome, "Don't touch me, don't touch me!"

It is important to the story, and important to the direction that Castillo takes us for her female characters to overcome these problems. When Father Jerome wants to put a different take on La Loca's rise from the dead, suggesting that the event is less Godly than evil, Sofi will not hear of it (23). Sofi eliminates that thinking from the reader's thoughts, because now La Loca will go about her mission of performing miracles on earth.

Elizabeth Mermann-Jozwiak (2000) refers to the story as "postmodernism," and it is easy to agree with that analysis, because we find that Castillo has put aside the traditional or classic treatment of the Latino in literature, for the postmodern version (101). Castillo has completely built a new tradition for her characters, and they shed the old classical concepts that keep Latino women within a framework of machismo and suppression. Castillo allows her characters to become the key figures in their own worlds, but with each one she is careful to show how that character steps outside of the realm of realism, and into the magical realism that becomes the character's own role and world.

Esperanza, Sofi's oldest daughter, is the first to go to college where she studies journalism, and graduates to become a television news anchor (26). Esperanza also begins her story by shedding her patriarchal chains. Esperanza has a boyfriend, a fiance, but he leaves her for a "white girl" with a corvette (26). Esperanza actually craves some of the stereotypical recognition that her sister, Caridad, receives because of Caridad's ethnic beauty.

Caridad is freed, but in a different kind of way than Esperanza or La Loca, or even Sofi. Caridad is the embodiment of the Latino stereotype, and she does not "overcome" this, because she is who she is. Rather, she is a victim to her own "stereotypical" nature, and has to overcome that. In other words, she must overcome her stereotype image, an image created in the minds of non-Hispanics about Hispanic women, and the patriarchal society which confines her in order to be free. Caridad is also set free, too, because Castillo uses her stereotypical Latino traits in an unconventional way, and a way that is not necessarily in keeping with the classical image of the Latino woman. Castillo uses Caridad's ethnic beauty against her, thereby freeing her from that restriction (26).

Sofi's third daughter, Fe, was not one who understood or appreciated her home, mother or siblings (28). She was the manifestation of the Latino stereotypical imagery, and she was happy with that. She worked in a bank and was engaged to be married to Tom (29). She had all of her arrangements made, her bridal dress, and the Saturday her bridesmaids were to meet for their fitting - which did not include among them her sisters - she received a note from her husband to be, advising her that he was not ready to marry her (30). Fe locked herself in the bathroom and created a commotion unlike any ever heard of in the house before (30). The people who came to her rescue were her family, those very individuals of whom she had been embarrassed of and did not understand. Fe was freed from her Latino accepting stereotype when Castillo reduced her to an emotional wreck.

This is how the author used magical realism to free her characters from the chains and servitude of their religious, stereotypical, patriarchal Latino images that are imposed upon Hispanic women. Once Free, and done so with a sense of humor and in a way that causes the reader to want to read further, Castillo can now move her story forward.

The Home

The notion of home is a central them in Castillo's story. Sofi has created a home for her daughters, even though she has been abandoned by the children's father, she still manages to survive. After La Loca's death experience and resurrection, La Loca becomes somewhat homebound, not wanting to be around people other than here mother. The animals are La Loca's immediate world, and the house itself is secondary to the pets. Sofi's other three daughters are ready to leave the nest - especially Fe, who sense of alienation form her family casts her in an almost alien situation. Carmela Delia Lanza (1998) describes the home setting this way:

Sofi is the head of her home, a home she has created for her daughters. For one daughter, Loca, the home is the only space she can call her own. She stays home, not playing the role of angel or devil, and is "without exception, healing her sisters from the traumas and injustices they were dealt by society -- a society she herself never experienced firsthand" (27). As for the other daughters, they "had gone out into the world and had all eventually returned to their mother's home" (25). They become trapped in the "quest-pattern that has dominated Western literature" (Romines 7). They are unwilling to accept what Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi describes in her book about spirituality and domesticity, The Sacred and the Feminine: Toward a Theology of Housework, as the "positive face of chaos, a letting go into possibilities that freedom from externally fixed routine allows" (153) and that external routine is the world of male domination and the world of racism. In the novel, the daughters can only face chaos when they reenter their mother's home and re-discover their identity, their spirituality, and their strength. Eventually all of the daughters, including La Loca, experience loss in the collision of their need to create a home space with the destructive forces outside (65)."

Loca's sister's problems are those that the reader can relate to, because relationships, jobs, success and failures happen when young women grow up and leave the home (Rodriguez, Ralph, 2000, 63). Loca is the only one never to leave the home, yet she contracts AIDS. Castillo does not explain how La Loca contracted the disease, but then she does not have to, because it is part of her literary character's personality, her dilemma, and, for La Loca, is the manifestation of the way in which she, a pure human, absorbs the disease of mankind around her. La Loca does not have to leave her home to experience the world, and this is why Castillo does not explain the disease. Castillo has done everything she can possibly literarily to help convey this character's relationship to her family, and especially to the world around her. It is Castillo's use of magical realism to demonstrate esoterically La Loca's relationship to the world. La Loca is vulnerable, she will die with the sins of the world upon her, even though she has never committed or experienced those sins.

Sofi's home is a contemporary one. She is a single mom, and she has had to work hard and deal with the emotional ups and downs of raising four girls on her own. She works outside the home, and even becomes politically involved, and is elected mayor. However, she continues to be matriarch of her home, and the home is a place where one does not air dirty laundry (Castillo, 143). She has had enough experience with her own husband, and with her daughter's relationships to understand men, and she is not easily swept off her feet, and this has to do with the fact that she has had four children. She has had their upbringing to contend with, and, when, except for La Loca, finally leave home, she is able to resume her focus more on herself. This makes her curious, but vulnerable. The curiosity over vulnerability is, again, Castillo creating her own brand magical realism.

In So Far from God Castillo reveals that outside the home mestizas are not safe. The three sisters who leave find "violence and ultimate destruction in the world outside the home." (18) When Esperanza leaves her home and family to pursue a high-powered career in the white media, she is kidnapped and killed in Saudi Arabia while covering a white man's war. Esperanza's family knows she is dead and, although "the official letter from the Army" came a week after her supposed death, "Esperanza had been disappeared for months" (SFFG 159). Deliberately evoking los desaparecidos of the civil wars in Argentina and El Salvador, Castillo contests the official versions about victims of political wars. The second sister, Fe, also leaves home in search of the American Dream, seeking to earn the money necessary to attain it. She takes a job at a chemical company, a job for which Fe "wasn't given no mask" (SFFG 183) to protect her from the chemicals, "and it was that job that killed her" (SFFG 171). Away from her home, Fe's acceptance of the hegemonic discourse -- manifest in her search for the American Dream -- isolates her from her family as well. As Delgadillo points out, this "isolation contributes to a silence and passivity that eventually kills her," the result of Fe's misplaced faith in institutions. (19) The third sister, Caridad, leaves home as well, but more significantly withdraws from society and does not participate politically in her community, spending a year as a hermit and later living a quiet, passive life. She is in love with a woman whom she fails to pursue, and she and that woman, recently raped by Francisco, jump into a canyon to their deaths. The world outside the home destroys all three of these women (Lyon, Kelli, 2004, 39)."

Magical Realism

Angel Flores (Zamora, Lois Parkinson and Faris, Wendy B., eds, 1995, 109) defines the magical realism employed by Castillo as:

Spanish American literature has been studied mostly through the thematic or biographical approach. The thematic approach has dwelt on geographical settings, classifying the works of fiction as "novels of the pampa," "novels of the sierra," and "novels of the selva" The biographical approach, on the other hand, has surveyed the literary production chronologically -- "novel of the Colonial period," "novel of the Period of Independence," "novel of the Mexican Revolution," etc. -- supplementing historical considerations with biographical notes on the writers of each of the periods. However interesting these approaches may be in relating literature to ecological patterns or to history, they have contributed but little to literary criticism. They have not been very helpful, for instance, in evaluating the intrinsically aesthetic merits of a work and have paid little or no attention to the complex problems of form, composition, and stylistic trends. Such classificatory terms as "Romantic," "Realistic," "Naturalistic, " "Existentialist" do circulate in their writings but in rather superficial, desultory, or indiscriminating ways (109)."

This is very easy to agree with, and it is clear that Castillo has overcome the problems Flores describe to successfully overcome the problems that would restrict the literary telling of her story. It is not agreeable, however, to say that Castillo does it in "superficial, desultory, or indiscriminating ways." Rather, Castillo has been very precise in the ways in which she has overcome the cultural and ethnic issues to bring forward her story. There is especially nothing superficial in Castillo's employment of magical realism. Her magical realism not only moves the story forward, but deals with issues that are prevalent and relevant in Latino society to women.

Castillo successfully deals with the old traditions and cultural restrictions imposed upon her, as an author, and her characters by virtue of their culturally inherited myths. Castillo has Sofi face up to one myth in particular, and in dealing with it, Castillo demonstrates the difficulty with which Latino women are faced in trying to live and work in their modern world - especially an American world. Castillo writes: "The land was old and the stories were older. Just like a country changed its name, so did the names of their legends change (161)." For Castillo, the society of the old country and the old ways do not permit her characters the freedom that their presence in America should bring to them. They have changed countries, not legends, and the old legends have been amended to cause the women to remain bound to patriarchal social dictates that Castillo is breaking away from. There is nothing disingenuous or mundane in the ways in which Castillo accomplishes this.

When Esperanza dies, an Angel who has been coming to La Loca since she was resurrected; comes to La Loca to tell her of Esperanza's death, and La Loca tells her mother how the news was brought to her (163). Castillo transitions Esperanza from life to death in a way consistent, even honoring Esperanza's life and meaning to the family. Esperanza transcends death to take the warmth and comfort of her family that she needs to comfort her in her death (164). Esperanza has been "seen" by Sofi coming to lie beside her, only to find that when Sofi looks to check the reality of what she has seen, Esperanza is gone (164).

Hence the frequency with which one meets in university theses such titles as "Romantic, Realistic and Naturalistic Elements in the Novels of R. mulo Gallegos and Jose Eustasio Rivera" and "El romanticismo esencial del realista Jose Rivera" ["The Essential Romanticism of the Realist Jose Rivera"]. Had the line of analysis followed a more rigorous examination into the emotional and stylistic peculiarities, it could have been ascertained that, at least in Latin American prose fiction, it is difficult if not impossible to categorize faithfully each movement (Zamora and Faris, 109-110)."

Therefore, as Castillo has done with Esperanza's death, and in so many other instances in the story, she has employed the magical realism in a poetic way, but in a way, too, which has resolved the problem of categorizing each movement as described by Zamora and Faris.

Sofi and her home, strange as it was, remains the touch stone for the family (132).

If Sofi's eldest 'jita nad her baby 'jita had been tragic victims of life - one who never left home and the other who strayed too far - there was still a little bit of hope for the two middle daughters (132)."

Home, is a central theme in this story, and it is the place to which everyone in the family returns - even if only to die. Oddly enough, it is La Loca, who at the end of the story leaves home to die (238).

The Men in So Far From God

The men in the story must be dealt with by Castillo in a way that releases the characters their cultural patriarchal supervision of Castillo's characters. In the beginning the first man is Sofi's absent husband, Domingo. Sofi's family and friends never believed Domingo to be good enough for Sofi, but she goes with her feelings and marries. As is often the case - and not just in Latino families - Domingo cannot shoulder the responsibility of marriage and fatherhood with the reality of his world (20-21). Here, Castillo distinguishes between the role of males and females in her fiction. The males are sans magical realism, and she leaves them in their cultural, traditional, and even stereotypical roles as the builders of the society within which women must live and move in Mexico, and in the social confines of the Latino community America. So Castillo takes Domingo out of the picture - even though in Mexico this probably would not have happened, but it is more prevalent in Latin-American society. Domingo has left Sofi, sending her a note and $50, saying he would do more for her and his kids when he could - but he never did (19-21).