Chapter 15 - Word, Image and Cinematic Ekphrasis in Magical Realist Trauma Narratives

Summary

I posit that it is time to rethink the taxonomic, epistemological and heuristic values of the visual arts by applying magical realism as an interdisciplinary theoretical tool to analyses of cinematic narratives attempting to capture and to relay the ineffable of traumatic memories. Where the written word struggles to recreate a traumatic reality, the visual image artistically insinuates itself as reality. By applying the concept of intermediality to verbal and nonverbal forms of magical realism, the present argument foregrounds the ekphrastic synergy between word (novels and screenplays) and image (films and photographs), and between cinema (words, sounds and images) and other visual media (paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures). Events that did not register with the psyche at the time of their occurrence may be represented /recreated by the power of suggestion inherent in the magical realist image, in both its verbal and nonverbal forms, as well as in their intermedial hybrids.