PERCEPTIONS OF PLACES IN MAGICAL-REALIST NOVELS

Our senses create a connection with the world, structure and define spaces. Perceptions help us give meaning and order to the world we live in. We perceive places subjectively (and even culturally and socially conditioned), visually, but also through their sounds, smells, tastes or textures. The present study, part of a larger project, stems from Paul Rodaway’s theory of perception, defined both as sensation or feeling, i.e. information collected and mediated by senses, and as cognition, i.e. mental process involving memories and associations. Understanding perception as information about the surrounding world mediated by senses, the paper focuses on the way writers use senses such as sight, smell, touch and hearing to build urban fictional worlds in three novels labelled as magical realist, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984). Another useful theory has been that of Kathy Mezei and Clara Briganti (2002), according to which spaces of domesticity shape the people who inhabit them, storing memories and setting the grid for their lives. The paper sets out to answer questions such as the following: how do the characters perceive the settings? How does the description of the different places where the novels unfold use sensory elements to introduce the reader to the atmosphere? Is the visual element predominant or do the authors also resort to the other senses? Are the senses used only in perceiving the external world or are they also used in rendering the inner worlds of the protagonists in the selected works? Are there moments in the text where senses are also connected to memories? Close reading of the texts generally reveals that the background places in which the novels unfold are most often perceived by the characters through sight, smell and hearing, and sometimes by touch, although this happens less frequently.