Locating the Sublime: Three Cases of Cultural Magical Realism

The sublime has been a major part of the cultural aesthetic of Western literature. At the advent of the postmodernist literary movement comes magical realism, a genre which stresses a perpetual conflict between the fantastic and reality. What has not been regarded as a major factor of magical realist literature is the complex workings of the sublime into a particular cultural conflict that has come about from various cultural communities and their literary work. Since its ancient Greek roots, the sublime has evolved from being a method of rhetorical persuasion to becoming a complex literary aesthetic. This paper explores such conflict between three differing cultural landscapes and their incorporation of various theories of the sublime. The conflict between Latin America and Europe is expressed through Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The European powers also express conflict through magical realism between the traditional Western and the postmodern Western hegemony in Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Finally, Murakami Haruki explores the tension within Japanese ideology between the traditional and the modern in his magical realist novel Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.