"It may or may not be true. It does not matter": (Magic) Realism and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Edelson, Maria
Copyright Year	2007
Abstract	M ost definitions and descriptions of magic realism stress the privileged position of realism in its fusion with fantasy since the world created by the fusion is m eant to be recognized as still reflecting a reality ontologically identical with that existing “objectively” even though the irrational and the impossible become possible in it. David Lodge, for example, identifies the distinctive feature of magic realism in fiction as one that is present when marvelous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic novel.” 1 The mode of writing with its “oxymoronic label,” as G. Gazda rightly describes it in his dictionary of literary trends and groups,2 often makes the marvelous or the grotesque function as a natural and factual element of reality which is to be taken for granted. Jeanette Winter son’s The Passion (1987) is studied in literary courses at universities and referred to in critical reviews as one of the most outstanding examples of magic realism in British fiction. In his comment quoted above, David Lodge puts the name of Jeanette Winterson with those of two other writers considered representative of the “magic variety when he states that it “has been imported into our fiction from outside rather than springing up spontaneously, though it has been enthusiastically embraced by a few native English novelists, especially women novelists with strong views about gender, such as Fay Weldon, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. M ore specific references to the magic realist aspect of The Passion will be found, for instance, in L. Sikorska’s An Outline History o f English Literature, which contains the suggestion that the magic realism of the book “further undermines the factual realism expected from a historical
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