Magic Realism as Metaphysics: Murakami Haruki and the Resistance of Reality Itself

Abstract

This article mines a conceptual trajectory starting from Franz Roh’s Magic Realism and its roots in phenomenology, travelling across the twentieth century to the new metaphysics of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and the novels of Japanese author Murakami Haruki. Reading against any territorialisation of Magic Realism in national borders, I argue that the independent re-emergence of Roh’s Magic Realism in these later authors across disciplines and cultures indicates the genre’s increasingly widespread resistance to the teleological narratives of the late stages of globalized capitalism. Taking up Roh’s initial position which conceptualises Magic Realism as “persistence and duration in the midst of demoniacal flux; […] total quietude in the midst of general becoming” (Roh 22) allows a consideration of Magic Realism as an aesthetic, beginning from its formal, rather than historical, roots. The philosophy of OOO draws on the same philosophical heritage in Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl as Roh, and expands this aesthetic into a metaphysics in which all entities, as in Roh’s Magic Realism, resist reduction to any system of knowledge which would totalise them as parts in a whole.