As Belcher notes, ‘‘In interviews, Alexie rarely talks about magic realism but emphasizes his own interest in the real, the everyday, and the human.’’ This almost seems contradictory, as the author’s inclusion of magical elements partly withdraws his novel from the realm of the everyday, and yet the novel offers much commentary on the daily lives of modern Spokane Indians. While she astutely concludes that in this novel, ‘‘Indian culture and people frequently embody rationality while the West spews easy, dangerous magic,’’ she concedes that Alexie may not have intended to address this critical paradigm at all. In her essay ‘‘Conjuring the Colonizer: Alternative Readings of Magic Realism in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues,’’ Wendy Belcher discusses how the association of magic with the guitar, a secular Western object, inverts the critically recognized paradigm whereby indigenous or mythical objects are usually sources of magic. In Reservation Blues, Alexie has scattered magical occurrences throughout his otherwise perfectly realistic fictional world, an approach critics refer to as magic realism.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |