Both anthropologists and literary scholars have recently investigated novels and
stories as literary anthropology. In doing so, they have been pursuing differentagendas. The anthropologists have tried to use fiction as an artefact of material
culture that may be useful to trace the origins and developments of customs,
beliefs, and socio-cultural patterns of behaviour in different historical times and
places. The literary scholars have been interested in the anthropological
contribution to the issue of fictionality and of why, as human beings, we need
fictions. Among the former, we can mention Nigel Rapport (1994), among the
latter, Wolfgang Iser (1993) is perhaps the most famous. This broad division can
be traced back to different ‘national traditions’, with the British pursuing an
anthropological reading of fictions as an ethnographic field, while the Germans
have looked to broad anthropological questions regarding human ‘nature’.
Both tendencies have been fruitful in that they have produced original
interpretations in their respective fields. Interesting anthropological readings
have been applied in particular to postcolonial fiction, which, because of its
obvious ethnic content, has lent itself to such an enterprise quite easily.
However, although I have spoken of ‘traditions’, these attempts have been far
from systematic and have had a certain provisional or tentative character. The
very fact that ‘literary anthropology’ or ‘anthropology of literature’ is not an
institutionalized discipline, with its specific lecturing posts, but has been
practiced by anthropologists and literary scholars at the juncture of their
respective disciplines, bears witness to its fragmentary condition.
In this study, I intend to pursue the practice of literary anthropology both
as a privileged channel/inlet into what happens to us as readers of literary
fiction, and as an ethnographic enterprise, by focusing on readings of specific
texts. My thesis is that we can consider literary fiction as a magical supplement
to reality, and reading it as an act of ‘ritualization’, whose significance I shall
explain in due course. What I intend to highlight now is that what Austin called
the ‘parasitic’ nature of literary language, far from being a negative
characteristic, is the very condition for understanding fiction as magical
supplement. Furthermore, recent findings in cognitive linguistics confirm that
everyday language and literary language are continuous and not in opposition.
However, literary language is special because of the creative metaphoricity which characterizes it. This, in turn, facilitates heightened emotions in the
reader.
I suggest that there are three levels that work towards a magical effect in
fiction: linguistic, structural-thematic, and technical. I am drawing on Kenneth
Burke’s ideas, as well as on anthropologist Tambiah’s rhetorical interpretation of
magic, in order to account for the first level. As to the second level, what I have
called structural-thematic, I am going to show how mythical and ritual elements
or ‘motifs’ crop up in fictional texts, while, as far as the third, technical level is
concerned, I am referring to the magical ‘know-how’, where the distinction
between natural, supernatural and secular interpretations of magic blurs and
conjuring ‘tricks’ lend a hand to narrative composition.
The rationale behind my study is the attempt to provide a unified theory
which brings together the reader and the fictional text as two elements of the
same dynamic process, one necessary to the other in order to bring out fiction’s
potential magic. I will also be reviewing classical theoretical texts about the
fantastic and magical realism, not in order to follow in their tracks but to
provide a background to my alternative approach. In fact, it is my contention
that literary scholars have concentrated on notions of the fantastic, the uncanny
and magical realism, without interrogating the most profitable and elusive
conceptual category for the advancement of critical discourse about literature,
namely, ‘magic’.
By reading fiction as ‘magic’, I also intend to ‘anthropologize’ Western
discourses of rationality, science, religion, culture, and capitalism through the
reading of specific texts, as an ethnographic ‘fieldwork’. When I use this
neologism in the form of a verb, I intend to point to the self-reflexive gaze that
underlies my conception of literary anthropology in this study, in that an
anthropological eye is turned inward in order to unveil the ‘Other’ inside
Western culture, rather than projecting it on different cultures.
The thesis adopts a phenomenological stance in order to account for the
effect of reading ‘hybrid fictions’ (which I illustrate later) on the reader.
Phenomenology is appropriate to inquire into the structure of the reading
experience as a dynamic encounter between text and reader(s). However, in this
study, it is necessarily informed by the latest findings of cognitive science and
linguistics, and psychology of fiction, empirical disciplines capable of answering questions about the human cognitive make-up at the base of our thought and
emotions.
In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson reveal
three fundamental findings of cognitive science: the ‘cognitive unconscious’ as
the bedrock of our thought, the embodiedness of our minds, and the
metaphorical character of all thought, including abstract concepts and notions
of ‘reason’. If we take into account these fundamental factors and human
beings’ embeddedness in their environment‒‒both natural and cultural‒‒it is
possible to go beyond the millennia-old split between subject and object in
epistemology and to found an anthropology of literature which accounts for the
specifics of the reading encounter, embedded in the reader’s environment and
anchored in his/her embodied existential condition. This is what I attempt here.
I elaborate some conceptual tools based on anthropological concepts of
magic, myth and ritual that account for the effects of a specific kind of fiction,
which I call ‘hybrid’. Accordingly, the first chapter provides a framework and a
methodology, while the second explains what ‘hybrid fictions’ are: fictions
which blend fantasy and mimesis in conspicuous ways and are performative in
character. The third chapter considers the role of the reader of fiction as an act
of ritualization, whereby s/he marks off the fictional world as special and
liminal. Here the role played by ‘myth’ also finds its place. The fourth chapter
introduces the notion of ‘magic’ as an alternative analytical tool for
contemporary cross-genre fiction, by which I mean works that span from the
realistic to the fantastic and magical realist modes. Different ‘kinds’ of ‘magic’
will be investigated and the general role of ‘magic’ in the formation of the
modern mindset will also find its evaluation here. The fifth investigates the two
concepts of quest and epiphany in hybrid fictions and the latter’s relation to
romance. In fact I maintain that hybrid fiction reworks the quest romance in
conspicuous ways. Epiphany is considered both as ‘literary’, thus pertaining to
the characters, and ‘readerly’, impacting on the reader. Moreover, it concerns
the author’s vision too, which is not necessarily mediated or conveyed through a
character. This chapter considers the idea of ‘deformed romance’ and focuses
on ‘quest and epiphany’ as two pivotal elements in fiction that do not always
coincide. Thus ideas on the ‘quest of the hero’ by Campbell and also the
spiritual aspect of the quest as interpreted by Jung and Eliade will be taken into
account here. The sixth chapter dwells on the role of emotions in reading and is composed of my auto-ethnography of reading, where I adopt a socioanthropological
method in order to access the novels selected for later analysis.
Then, the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters elaborate on some of the findings of
cognitive linguistics. The seventh chapter deals with ‘history, magic and flux’,
closely interweaving a narrative idea of history with the insights of magical
thought and the ethos of process philosophy. It shows how the chosen novels are
permeated by magical and alchemical ideas both thematically and structurally.
It is the focus of this chapter to show how these novels expose the reification
tendency at work inside modern and (post)industrial Western cultures and point
to alternative approaches for de-essentializing cultural discourse.
I have chosen three contemporary novels by authors who did not influence
or acknowledge each other. They belong to different generations and have
different concerns and worldviews, yet they all show different stages of what we
could call the cultural ‘genealogy’ of the West. They are the Scottish Alasdair
Gray, the Austro-German Daniel Kehlmann and the Italian Anna Maria Ortese.
The three writers belong to different generations; Alasdair Gray was born in
1934, Daniel Kehlmann in 1975 and Anna Maria Ortese in 1914 (she died in 1998).
In reading their novels, I show how ‘magic’ is a fruitful and flexible analytical
tool and also how it confronts dialectically the logic of rationalism and
capitalism.
The thesis ends with a concluding statement on its interpretive effort,
where its diverse facets are brought together. Two are the objectives of my
work: to inquire into the reading of ‘hybrid fictions’ and its characteristics, and
to show how they can be subversive and critical in the reading process. My
overall aim is to set up an anthropology of literature as an alternative
methodology for studying literature. I have applied this methodology to the
specific issue of ‘hybrid fiction’ in order to provide an example of a holistic
mode of literary interpretation.
