Magic realism challenges the traditional parameters of
pre-modernist perspectives in fiction. It suggests that lives are not ordered or
organised on either rational or god-given lines. In a sense, magic realism is a
fictional recognition of randomness; the principles, if you prefer, of chaos
mathematics. To the author it allows and promotes the willing suspension of disbelief in
his or her readers (diegesis).
Thus the tone of this novel
becomes post modernist (with all the connections that has with critical literacy and the
sense of reader postioning and resistant readings). Thematically the magic realism of
THotS - much of it centred on death and spirits and the afterlife - ties in with
Allende's visons of power and status and the denial of such to women in a patriarchal
society (which they subvert via mediums and spiritualism and so on). Life is not
ordered... and in this novel it is certainly not ordered along the lines that its key
male figures would like.
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