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 gothic’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.
#Gothic literature vs magical realism how to