All Souls Rising
By GAIUTRA BAHADUR
Published: April 26, 2010
It was an art critic who coined the term “magic realism,” to describe a new wave of painting in 1920s Germany. The work departed from the moody Expressionism of the day, emphasizing material reality even as it unlocked an elusive otherworldliness in the arrangement of everyday objects. Sometimes, though, the fantastic rubbed elbows with the real: in one painting, a fat general nonchalantly shares a table with headless men in tuxedos.
ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA
By Isabel Allende
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
457 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99
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In literature as in art, the genre has been dominated by men. So critics devised the label “magical feminism” just for Isabel Allende’s multigenerational family chronicles featuring strong-willed women, usually entangled in steamy love affairs against a backdrop of war and political upheaval. These elements are all present in her latest novel, “Island Beneath the Sea,” which is set partly in late-18th-century Haiti. The protagonist, a mulatto slave named Zarité, is maid to a sugar planter’s wife who gradually goes mad. (The Caribbean seems to have had a reliably deranging effect on women in fiction, from “Jane Eyre” onward.) Even before her mistress’s death, Zarité becomes the concubine of her master, Valmorain, submitting to that role across decades and borders, even when he flees to New Orleans after the 1791 slave revolt.
The resulting canvas contains no less than the revolutionary history of the world’s first black republic as Allende portrays the island’s various factions: republicans versus monarchists, blacks versus mulattoes, abolitionists versus planters, slaves versus masters. She revels in period detail: ostrich-feathered hats, high-waisted gowns, meals featuring suckling pigs with cherries. Her cast is equally vibrant: a quadroon courtesan and the French officer who marries her; Valmorain’s second wife, a controlling Louisiana Creole; Zarité’s rebel lover, who joins Toussaint L’Ouverture in the hills. But for all its entertaining sweep, the story lacks complex characterization and originality. And its style is traditional. Where, you wonder, are the headless men — or, in Allende’s case, headless women? Where is the magical realism?
What “magic” there is in the novel appears at the intersection of Haitian history and the voodoo-influenced folklore of the slaves. Indeed, Haiti inspired one of the earliest literary uses of the term “magic realism.” After a 1943 trip there, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier wrote an influential essay arguing that in the natural landscape and politics of the Americas, reality was already fantastical. His fictional expression of this argument, “The Kingdom of This World,” which also features the slave revolt, clearly inspired Allende.
Both novels contain an episode that exemplifies the role of the supernatural in Haitian history, but Allende’s guarded approach reflects a drift from the experimental mode that distinguished her early work. In 1758, the plantocracy burned alive a rebel leader, François Macandal, a one-armed runaway slave and voodoo priest. Legend has it that he escaped the flames by turning himself into a mosquito. “Macandal had often entered the mysterious world of the insects,” Carpentier’s novel explains, “making up for the lack of his human arm with the possession of several feet, four wings or long antennae.” But in Allende’s rendition it is all, disappointingly, just a matter of perspective: “The whites . . . saw Macandal’s charred body. The Negroes saw nothing but the empty post.”
In a welcome revision, Allende brings women to the forefront of the story of the rebellion. She replaces the African war god Ogun with the love goddess Erzulie. (In the one episode that most approaches magic realism, Erzulie possesses Zarité, but even then it’s unclear whether this is merely happening in Zarité’s imagination.) Ultimately, however, Allende has traded innovative language and technique for a fundamentally straightforward historical pageant. There is plenty of melodrama and coincidence in “Island Beneath the Sea,” but not much magic.
