Realism: philosophical perspectives and historical development

Realism

Some literary critics and scholars would recommend to start reading Kafka in order to be able to be introduced in the world of magic realism in literature. but, is the guide into this world whose father is actually Borges.

The concept of "invisible reality" or "magical realism" was born in Germany in the early 20th Century and it was defined in the world of image. "Magischer Realismus" was created to describe the works of those painters who after the impressionism era returned to the figural instead of the abstract. The term traveled through Spain, over the Atlantic into Latin America and was contradicted by his own creator, the art critic Franz Roh. Nevertheless, it transgressed in the literature world on the American Continent and it designates the capacity to discover in a certain common object extraordinary attributes, thus showing its magic. (Zamora) Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marques, two Latin American writers were among those who embraced what it became a literary genre (http://www.seattleschools.org/schools/hamilton/iac/magic/magic_primer.pdf).

These writers redefined reality and found magic aspects in its most ordinary aspects. They created what is presented as imaginary worlds inside their works of fiction. Beside reinventing the world, Borges reinvents a language that changes everything we now today through epistemology, for example. Some professor at an academy of theatre once said to his students that they were supposed to act as if they really inhabited the fictional world the author created, but they were supposed to keep their capacity to wonder a bit at any time, in order for their characters to be "real" to the public. The "magicrealism" makes the eyes of those who are in it to forget about not believing and start looking at the world around them with the eye of naivety, forgetting about the blaze attitude of common knowledge. Thus, continuously challenging the reality with its present order, the magical realism is aimed at making a point in politics or in culture in general. It represents the future in its anticipation of concepts that are going to change or be completely contradicted. It also represents the simple things that are so common that they have not awoken the wish to look at them from a different angle. It is an invitation to forget about prejudices, given facts, common knowledge.

Some literary critics and scholars recommend to start with Kafka in order to get a firm grasp of the idea the magic realism is about.

The major theme in Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is that of idealism characteristic to George Berkeley. Two writers, the narrator and his friend, Bioy Casares discover during a conversation that what the latter thought to be an existing country somewhere in Iraq or Asia Minor, it was a fictional world named Uqbar. The existence of Uqbar was testified in a Encycoledia, which one knows it is the gathering of real facts, worlds, people. It turns out that the Anglo-American Cyclopedia both writers had were slightly different. The one in Bioy's possession had four page more than the other one and those were the ages containing the article about Uqbar. The narrator proceeds to a thorough research about this unknown and unlikely to be real world. He uses a descriptive style that combines real scientific research methods and names of real scientists or philosophers with the descriptive methods proper to the fictional genre. The tone is also a combination between the objective tone of a professional who undertakes a research and that of a man who is describing his feelings related to an unusual discovery. Eventually, there is a whole Encyclopedia dedicated to this strange country named Tlon the narrator discovers and studies. The fictional world differs to a great degree from what we know as the real world, it has a particular language that lacks nouns and thus the common concepts of philosophy, religion etc. In fact the world the narrator discovered "is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers...directed by an obscure man of genius "(Borges, pg. 27). It resembles the world of a totalitarian regime, recreated to fit the vision of its government and directed at changing people's lives according to the desire of those who are involved in the creation act. The recreated world, present only in a fictional encyclopedia will eventually be copied in reality and adopted successively by countries. People will start to believe in what they once new it was not reality and Borges uses here a recurrent motif he handles very well, that of clandestine reproduction. The Encyclopedias are unauthorized reproduction of originals, the objects have their copies that are almost similar but slightly different than there originals. "Centuries and centuries if idealism have not failed to influence reality. In the most ancient regions of Tlon, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent" (Borges, pg. 34). The magic comes from the slight distortion and adaptation of a real object to fit into one's purposes. "Until recently the hronir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness" (Borges, pg. 34).

The Garden of the Forking Paths is a short story where the magic realism comes from the alternatives time offers. The main theme is that of different possibilities time gives to the outcomes of an event. The symbol for the relationship between present past and future and the position men have between them is a labyrinth that exists on one temporal scale, that of the present. Dr. Yu Tsun, of Asian origin, living in England, leaves his testimony about his successful actions as a spy for the Germans during the First World War. The mixture of national origins of the characters in this short story, the setting and the time the events described by Dr. Yu Tsun create an atmosphere where everything seems interrelated and possible. The events occur depending on one judgment at a certain time and they can also occur differently, based on a different judgment of the same person at the same moment. The worlds are numerous and seem to exist not on different points in space, but on different plans in the same time. The story seems the result of a philosophical speculation.

Another result of a speculation Borges makes is that of the short story the Lottery in Babylon. This time it is the turn of fate and God to be put under the scrutiny of the writer and speculated on. He uses the symbol of a game completely depending of odds, the lottery and places it in Babylon. There are questions that were on people's minds since ancient times related to the very existence of a higher authority that Borges wants to put here forward. Babylon is like a symbol for people's attempts to reach God, but the short story gives it a slightly different significance than the tower of Babel. People are not daring the higher authority by building a tower to reach higher, but they are simply questioning his authority and very existence.

The theme of idealism reappears in the short story the Circular Ruins, completed by other theme like the significance of the oniric world and immortality. The motif of assuming the powers of as superior being who is able to recreate human life in the lab of one's mind is also appearing in this short story. The wizard retreated from the world in some circular ruins having magical powers resembles to a writer who is struggling to create the perfect character. The wizard is eventually helped by a God to bring his creation to life and into the real world. He finds out in the end that he, too, is the result of someone else's imagination. The idealism of those who are trying to find the gem of perfection in the human being is very powerfully felt in the description of the wizard;s intentions: "The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality" (Borges, pg. 73). Borges' hero wants to created a perfect being, overcoming thus Adam, the creation of God who was imperfect because he could not stand alone.

The symbol of labyrinth reappears in the story the Library of Babel. It is accompanied by some other themes used by Borges in his short stories such as the conclusions reached by philosophers supported by mathematics regarding the nature of the universe. Ultimately, it is the quest for the supreme truth about the universe that Borges seems to describe in every short story in the volume. The endless possibilities and the undiscovered are anticipated in the magic realism of what may seem common.

The theme of immortality, again, is present in the story the Immortal. This time, one man does not dream of the perfect human being, but seeks to become immortal, that being his only desire. The hero comes from Rome, in the Antiquity. Once he is able to reach the river he was told will make him immortal he realizes that those who did the same were merely able to achieve immortality and nothing else. The other qualities of a superior being remained forbidden thus making the reality of their imperfect world even more difficult to bare.

Borges used the invisible reality in his short stories to speculate on some themes that were on people's minds since the beginning of human civilization. He used his writing skills to create a work of fiction that made the world of existential questions possessing men's minds became real to the contemporary reader.

If the invisible reality in Borges' stories represents the literary translations of the universal questions on people's minds since the beginning of the human civilization, the ghosts in Henry James' Turn of the Screw seem the representation of one's own fears, illusions, repressed feelings and imagination that is allowed to run wild. A potentially gothic story told in the evening of Christmas Eve is full of magic and scary at the same time. It is not suitable for the event, since Christmas is a moment of magic and beauty and although it has its secrets, there is nothing dark or spooky about it. The contrast is suitable for the human mind that has its dark corners even in the most bright places.

It is obvious that the field of psychology has its deep influence on James' writings. Kafka, Borges and James could not escape the temptations of exploring the human mind in its wonderful intricacies.

Humanity has appeared to need the world of fantasies in order to escape the ugliness of reality, or on the contrary, to enrich its experiences through dreadful stories instead of living the real things. Those very ghosts are the reflection of the human mind and of all those dark deep secrets that one does not dare to utter to another human being. The context in the Turn of the Screw allows the narrator to play with the reader and to suggest possible variations of the truth. The story teller will never indicate the reality in its entirety and the reader will always have the chance to find portions of his own reflections in one character or another or, in a certain situation. There is no right or wrong in the book, there is only a very complicated and deep connection between the characters. The governess who is hired by the handsome bachelor to take care of his nephew and niece could be the victim of a cruel person who sits above all the rest and enjoys playing with innocent people's minds or she could be as cruel as it gets and play with them herself. but, the issue of fantasy vs. reality becomes secondary to the issue of obsession. Obsession, no matter what form it may take, proves to be as destructive as any monster claiming for a life. The governess is obsessed with the children's relationship with the two ghosts she is seeing at Bly.

The theme of love is only the pretext for the story teller to tell her story through the mouth of a man who was, at his turn, in love wit her. The temptation to reduce everything to some prefabricated and easy to swallow contexts is cleared from the very beginning when the narrator answers the impatient audience's questions: " "Who was it she was in live with?" "The story will tell," I took upon myself to reply"..."The story won't tell" said Douglas; "not in any literal vulgar way." "(James, 9).

The narrator suggests that the twenty-year-old girl who came to London to answer an advertisement fell in love with her employer: "a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage."(James,11). But the very words describing him anticipate his lack of weight in the context of the whole story. He could be just the product of her vivid imagination and a pretext for her needs to fantasize. The description of the gentlemen goes further and it seems to never run out of appreciative words. The description creates the impression of a patch work made of pieces taken from different novels whose main characters were having some of the characteristics James' narrator exposes to the audience. The acute feeling of unrealism is enhanced by the impression that the author has taken the main characters from different novel of the universal literature and put together some of their most important features to create his own unrealistic and almost absent character.

Flora and Miles, the two children who need to be looked after and the reason for which the twenty-year-old governess goes to Bly are presented through their uncle's words as too small and thus ignorant of every harsh reality. but, as the rest of the novel will prove, physical beauty is not necessarily doubled by innocence and inner beauty. The children may not be evil, but they are most certainly not as innocent as they are presented by their uncle at the beginning.

The audience left to listen to the young governess' story is suggested to be a chosen one. The people who could understand the meanings of such a story share the awareness of their obsessions, fears, limitations and even of the dangers they expose themselves when allowing a dream or a fear to prologue more than the common sense should dictate it was appropriate. The governess in James' story will pay for her inability to stop from obsessing with the death of one of the children she was supposed to take care of and protect.

The delineation between fantasy, magic an horror is exposed as a very sensible line that can be easily crossed and thus transformed into a destruction mean for those who are not aware of their own faults.

The magic realism in Kafka's Metamorphosis becomes easier to decipher in the context of the human condition in the modern times. A man wakes up one day and finds out he became a bug. The ugly, disgusting creature everyone fears and runs away from has crept under one's skin and became one with the person. It looks like a punishment for someone who did not deserve it. A hardworking man who craved human interaction and feared the empty relationships established through short and meaningless human contact found himself in the form of a bug one day. The most striking feature at the beginning of the short story is that Gregor, the man who lives with his family and wakes up to be a bug one morning is fighting his limitations as a bug. The most simple movements from a human being's point-of-view become heroic acts from a bug's perspective. It takes the man inside the bug quite a long time to realize he could ask for help to his own family in order to get out of bed. Kafka's hero who is locked behind the door of his own room in his parents' house is similar to those young Japanese who lock themselves up in their rooms because they cannot cope with the society anymore. The alienation is the main theme in many Kafkian stories, just as it is in the stories of the authors who embraced the magic realism. The similarity between the situation some young Japanese are going through today with what Gregor is experiencing is striking. He looses control over his own body and he cannot speak the same language as those around him, when in fact, his interior thoughts are spoken in the language everybody else uses. The process of alienation grows and Gregor's family becomes more and more estranged to him. Not only the society rejects what he became, but his own family is incapable to understand anything. The grow worlds apart and seem unable to find a solution. "Since they could not understand him, no one, not even his sister, thought that he might be able to understand others, and thus, when his sister was in her room, he had to be content with listening now and then to her sighs and invocations to the saints" (Kafka). The society Gregor's family lives in gives him no chance to return to his former identity and he will eventually dry out and die. His own family will go on dreaming and living as if there was no Gregor before.