“Relax and Enjoy the Show”: Circensian Animal Spaces in Australian and Latin American Magical Realist Fiction (original) (raw)

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2006

Abstract

The Western circus tradition provides a particularly relevant framework for representations of animals in magic realist fiction, since magic realism and the circus are both closely related to Bakhtin's idea of the carnivalesque. Conceptualized as “circensian spaces”, the circus' influence on magical realism manifests itself as what Foucault calls “heterotopias”, “other spaces”, which are inherently contradictory, polyphonic, and “impossible to think”. As the circus traditionally represents, reinforces and at the same time subverts Western conceptualizations of animals, this discussion focuses on the relationship between Linnaean taxonomy and circensian spaces in Peter Carey's Illywhacker, Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits. This article examines the significance of circensian animal spaces within the Australian and Latin American contexts, and discusses why “circensian animals” may be particularly suitable agents in the subversion of Western paradigms.

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