Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
Abstract
André Schwarz-Bart’s novels have elicited occasional mentions of magical realism as a literary “style” by critics, while Simone Schwarz-Bart’s fiction has been approached in relation to the “poetics” of the “marvelous real” developed as for 1949 by Alejo Carpentier. This essay argues that in André’s The Last of the Justs and The Morning Star, as well as in Simone’s The Bridge of Beyond, both authors practice almost constantly a form of poeticizing of the narrative that fuses reality and mystery in a narrative mode I have defined under the label marvelous realism; but they both also have occasional recourse to the narrative mode of magical realism (as defined by Amaryll Chanady) in those passages where intrusions of the supernatural are “naturalized” in a manner that allows such phenomena to be integrated without producing a perception of antinomy with an otherwise realistic diegetic context. In one case the supernatural events relate to Judaism and in the other to beliefs of African origins in miraculous visions.
Recommended Citation
Scheel, Charles W.
(2012)
"Réalisme magique et réalisme merveilleux dans l’oeuvre
d’André et de Simone Schwarz-Bart,"
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature: Vol. 79:
No.
1, Article 8.
Available at:
https://crossworks.holycross.edu/pf/vol79/iss1/8