Southern Spaces

Here just past the turn of the millennium, the term "magical realism" has long since exceeded original boundaries geographic, chronological and even generic. In its most conservative definition, however, magical realism is firmly rooted in Latin American traditions, dating back to Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier's first use of the term as a literary technique in his preface to the 1949 book The Kingdom of This World, in which he refers to the practice of melding everyday realism indistinguishably with elements of magic and myth, the latter often arising from the intersection of culturally and racially different peoples in the New World. Importantly, Carpentier stresses that "the extraordinary is not necessarily lovely or beautiful. It is neither beautiful or ugly; rather it is amazing because it is strange" ("Baroque" 101). But whether beautiful or not, the goal of magical realism was a new encounter with and understanding of a reality which steadfastly resisted expression in conventional terms; as critic Luis Leal has written, in magical realism "the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts" (121) and ultimately to discover "the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances" (122).

In the wake of the Latin American Boom, works incorporating magical realism can be found around the world, and the American South as well boasts works tinged with the element of magical realism. In the words of one critic, "the southern United States comes naturally upon magic realism, for the root of its writing is vision sprung from ruin, one as ornery and mytho-magical as its exemplars who follow in the great tradition of Faulkner, Welty and O'Connor" (Gingher 468).

Many of the regional themes explored in Nordan's book trace back to literary concerns rising in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction: a preoccupation with class hierarchy as a cornerstone of social order and with an evolution of race relations that has proven challenging for both sides of the "color line"; an insistence on the proscribed roles of women as a second cornerstone, coupled with anxiety if they veer from those roles; the use of local color to build a portrait of region, matched with a resentment of how others from outside the South define the same region; and an idealization of the land, paired with a nostalgia for what has been lost and a respect for what has been endured.

But even if the persistence of these themes clearly connects Nordan's book to the southern tradition, does the "vision sprung from ruin" explain the reliance on magical realism? especially as it's understood from the earliest Spanish American perspectives? In many ways, yes and implicit in that answer is the assertion that a writer such as Nordan is not simply mimicking a curious literary trick or appropriating a style that he found appealing. Instead, for Nordan, magical realism provides a way — and perhaps the only way — for a white southerner in his circumstances to confront the amazements of his own region and the injustice of his own people, to transform a past and even to rewrite history without denying the brutality of known facts, and to glean from a despair both personal and persistently historical some glimmer of hope ahead. If Carpentier understood the necessity of having "forged a language appropriate to the expression of our realities" ("Baroque" 107), then Nordan too saw the need for something extraordinary to help him express what he himself found utterly unbelievable and yet undeniably true: in 1955, two men who remained friends of Nordan's family pistol-whipped a fourteen-year-old child for whistling at a woman, shot him in the head, tied him to a gin fan and tossed him in the Tallahatchie River, and Nordan's family never talked about it once (Nordan, "Making" 75).