SOURCE: “‘Forget Those Damnfool Realists!’ Salman Rushdie's Self-Parody as the Magic Realist's ‘Last Sigh’,” in ARIEL, Vol. 29, No. 4, October, 1998, pp. 121-39.

In the following essay, Moss discusses Salman Rushdie's self-referential parody of magic realism in his novels.

Magic realism is in danger of becoming what the Australian novelist Peter Carey has called a “cheap cliché” (11). Recently it has been so widely employed that it has lost its cachet as an avant garde form. The problem lies in its popularization by writers of divergent skills and the paradoxical critical depreciation of the form, which directly results from such mass popularity. Magic realism is the accepted juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary in a narrative that otherwise appears to be “reliable” and objective, but the extraordinary loses its extraordinariness when it becomes predictable through repetition. It becomes just a writerly trope. Such an emptying of the form has become...