Religious or Supernatural Content
5.1 Nature of the Native American folktale: Expressions of Native American spirituality in The Lariat: One of the most important aspects of Native American culture is that it springs from an oral tradition. Not only are the tales and moral precepts passed orally from one generation to the next, but the passing is multi-vocal in nature. Stories are told and retold, and are influenced by current events as well as by the speaker's interactions with his or her audience.
Native spiritual traditions live in song, story, and ceremony. They live in the experiences of those who bring them into being. They live in the dream-space intensity of personal vision and in the shared cosmic ordering of words and actions that people of knowledge perform in ceremony. Songs, stories, and ceremony have an internal consistency. They represent the way things are. They constitute a language of performance, participation, and experience. They represent the cosmic order within which the world realizes its meaning.
Because The Lariat is presented as a tale of white, Christian encroachment into and entanglement with the world of Native American spirituality, de Angulo, an anthropologist specializing in Native American culture, tells the story within the framework of that native tradition. The work is multivocal, told from multiple viewpoints, and retains the dialogic properties that are the basis of all Native American oral tradition. "In Native American cultures generally, conversational communicants include all sentient beings; animal persons, the voices of natural places and forces, and the voices of those who have gone before. Coyote may there, too, making fun of it all".
5.2 Magic Realism in The Lariat: It seems that the power of sorcery that Fray Luis has is an element of magic realism. The description of the rope on page 93 seems a lot like the magic realism in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Lariat does have a postcolonial element: the two conflicting cultures are colonizer and colonized. I'm not sure what to call it in this story maybe religious perfection vs. humanness, or, a conflict between goodness and badness in the story. Seems that magical realism meshes the magical and the real at times. Magical Realism could explain the arrows bouncing off the bear in the story and other parts where the bear is in the story.
Suzanne Baker in her essay, "Binarisms and Duality: Magic Realism and Postcolonialism" talks about magic realism: ...the central concept of magic realism in literature is its insistence on the co-existence of the magic and the real. While a narrator of the fantastic dispenses with the laws of logic and the physical world and recounts an action which may be absurd or supernatural, a narrator of magic realism accepts most or all of the realistic conventions of fiction but introduces "something else," something which is not realistic, into the text. These elements are not highlighted for shock value, but are woven in seamlessly."
The point regarding presenting Magical Realism in a way that avoids shock value is an important one. Plodding readers, those who are mired in everyday "reality" will be shocked or skeptical of talking animals or mice traveling via moonbeam. The more accepting or open-minded reader should not be surprised at such events because, properly presented, the so-called magical elements are everyday events and parts of the natural order.
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