The goal of this panel is to provide a forum in which to study the tradition of magical realism in French and Francophone Literature. As a literary style, magical realism consists in the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, with magical or supernatural phenomena emerging in an otherwise mundane setting. Often associated with Latin-American literature, in particular with the work of such writers as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and Isabel Allende, magical realism has nonetheless been explored by a wide array of French and Francophone writers, creating a tradition that has been notably understudied. Our panel will thus pursue a twofold goal: first, it will try to understand the historical, cultural, and esthetic reasons of the occultation of the rich tradition of magical realism in French and Francophone literature by identifying the reasons why, despite the number and the quality of the texts explicitly associated with this style, it has been marginalized, not to say ignored by critics. In that respect, our panel will ponder on the contradiction between the voluntary blurring of ontological and aesthetic categories that is a core component of magical realism, and the influential tradition of French classicism, which posits, on the contrary, that mixed genres are impure if not inferior to such forms as history and tragedy. In other words, the panel will try to get to the root of magical realism’s downgrading from the realm of legitimate literary expression. Second, our panel will try to remedy the minimalization of this rich tradition by studying examples in France, Haiti, and sub-Saharan Africa of literary works that appropriated magical realism. In particular, the panel will insist on the propensity of magical realism to offer alternative narratives to colonialism, socially dominant forms of literary expression, and oppressive political systems by focusing on the works of little-known authors who wrote in French.

Our exploration of Magical Realism will start with a presentation by Gautier Roux. Cross-reading two texts by Pierre MacOrlan and André Dhôtel, Roux will explore their individual poetics of magical realism in Le Fantastique social(1926) and Rhétorique fabuleuse (1983). His goal will consist in proving that these two highly inventive and original authors adopt an intuitive approach that allows them to offer a vision of reality that tends to be structured according to an aesthetic whose scope can be identified as both literary and anthropological. This communication will combine the singular approach of these two authors with a theoretical discussion of magical realism as it has been thought and practiced in French.

We will stay in France with Vincent Berthelier’s presentation, dedicated to Marcely Aymé. Berthelier will study the political discourse in the work of Aymé, who explored an early and counterintuitive right-wing use of magical realism. Its satiric nature can seem trivial, but its peculiarity resides first in the sociological microcosm in which it takes place, and second, in the political relativism fostered by Aymé’s irony, constituting, after WWII, an implicit defense of the French collaborators.

Then, Marina Kander will unveil for us the rich tradition of magical realism in Haiti. Her presentation will demonstrate the consistency of the Magical realist tradition in Caribbean literature. Focusing on the presence of the undead in two Haitian novels, Pierre Clitandre’s Cathédrale du mois d’août (1979) and Makenzy Orcel’s L’Ombre animale (2016), her paper will discuss how magical realism calls attention to forgotten stories, allowing a progress towards a self-ethnology while building an alternative narrative to the colonial one.

The next paper will continue our exploration of Haitian literature. Jean-Ederson Jean-Pierre will offer a reading of Dézafi(1975) and Les Affres d’un défi (1979) by Frankétienne through the lens of Alejo Carpentier’s theory of “real maravilloso”. It will show that these novels take place in a realistic setting while extraordinary elements are present throughout the text, ranging from supernatural phenomena such as zombification, to strategies of exaggeration such as the extent of violence in the text. It will also highlight that these elements are presented in a way to make the reader accept them as normal, while focusing on the political dimension of these novels.

Finally, Sara Buekens will focus on the ways in which the literary mode of magical realism proves particularly apt to reflect the indeterminacies, instabilities, and ambiguities that mark the current climatic situation, particularly in the context of oil extraction in Sub-Saharan Africa, emphasizing the unexpected and often invisible character of ecological issues and granting a particular agency to natural elements as they respond to harmful human activities.