Essay by Lori DeBoer
Janette Turner Hospital’s Borderline opens with a border crossing scene in which a man unnerved about sneaking a bottle of whiskey into Canada commits an act of far greater consequence than bootlegging. He scoops up a Salvadoran refugee, who has fallen from a truck in front of him, and smuggles her into the country. He is aided by Felicity, another witness. The woman—whom the two dub “La Magdalena” —subsequently disappears and they presume her murdered. Gus feels responsible for La Magdalena’s death and begins to see her everywhere, though we don’t know if he is hallucinating, being haunted or simply being followed. The crisis transforms Gus from an unrepentant alcoholic and a womanizer but it also sinks his listing marriage. Gus tries to explain to his wife, Therese, that he has undergone a profound change but she leaves him nevertheless. Throughout the rest of the novel, both Gus and Felicity wander far from family and friends in a mission to find the missing La Magdalena, until they perhaps meet a fate similar to hers.
Gus rues being named for St. Augustine by his pious mother, but the significance of his namesake and the fact that he has clearly undergone a conversion experience offers readers a nudge toward how the otherwise perplexing events in Borderline might be read. For this inventive account—in which the borders between real and surreal, mundane and magic, endlessly blur—takes its cues from the conversion narrative, a traditional form that can be traced from St. Augustine’s influential theological work, Confessions, through its epoch in New England in the 1700s, and on until we reach its secular offspring today. The parallels in Borderline range from the characters being named for saints known for their conversion experiences to the crisis of faith or worldview that the characters undergo when forced to confront larger moral issues. Ultimately, Turner Hospital’s conversion narrative plays in a secular setting, but themes of transformation and witness—as both one who observes and one who tells—clearly underpin the work. The characters in Borderline become party to atrocious acts either first or second hand and, once they partake of this fruit of knowledge, they can no longer be innocents, a plot device that echoes the biblical story of Adam and Eve being cast out of the garden.
Whether or not Turner Hospital consciously patterned her book on conversion narratives is open for interpretation, but she admits to being influenced by her evangelical upbringing. She grew up in a fundamentalist family and reports often feeling isolated and even unsafe at school because of her family’s beliefs. Religious language was part of her daily routine, and she lived a life “prescribed by the faith,” including daily Bible readings and prayer around the family dinner table. “Nobody could get up from the table before Dad reached for the Bible and we took it in turns around the table to read it. Then there was family prayer which we also took in turns. I think this has had a long-term effect on my prose rhythms and style. I think the King James’ Version of the Bible is very much there in my sentences. It has an incantatory effect and I like that particular King James’s cadence which still affects my prose all the way through.” (Stoner, 18)
Although she is no longer religious—and spent ten years as a self-described “agnostic” —she admits that themes of guilt and sin permeate her work:
It’s funny, yes, I’ve come to accept a little ruefully at that , that I am really a religious writer. In fact, my husband, who as you know, is Dean of Theological College, was vastly amused because he knew I would feel a certain amount of chagrin about it, that an article in a Canadian newspaper, Toronto’s Globe and Mail listed me as one of Canada’s most religious novelists. I thought: “Oh, good grief, can’t I shed this religious thing?” But other people notice themes in your work before you do, I guess, and of course I’m steeped with King James’ version prosody and themes, I suppose. And certainly academically, as a medievalist, I love mediaeval art and literature which is, of course, thoroughly Christian. There was no separation of sacred and secular there—it was just all the one whole cloth, so in that sense I’m imbued with those themes, and I still find them artistically beautiful. I absolutely believe in redemption, as a perpetual possibility. (Stoner, 29)
She also believes that “acts of kindness have potent redemptive force that can absolutely change the course of a person’s life, and I suspect that that’s all most of us are capable of—redemptive moments. . . “ (Stoner, 30)
Language is so important as a strategy in Turner Hospital’s storytelling that we cannot leave anything to chance in her storytelling. Like many postmodern writers, such as Salman Rushdie, she uses language to as a referential technique to coax readers to ponder larger meanings within text, with an endless interplay of signifiers that Alistair Stead says serves to blur and complicate “the relations between real and fictional worlds,” which demands the reader to become more deeply engaged. (Stead, 76) Because Turner Hospital actively engages in puns that heighten the allegorical effects of story, looking at other potential namesakes for Borderline characters further illuminates the theme of conversion. We can very well interpret Jean-Marc Seymour’s surname then as a stand in for “see more.” As the teller of the story, he is trying to discern between what is true and what is false, although he will never be able to solve the disappearance of Gus and Felicity, and ultimately is dealing with questions of belief. His hyphenated first names also reference two of the disciples of Jesus, John the Baptist and St. Mark, for whom conversion was crucial. Felicity is named for a third-century Christian martyr (also known as Felicitas) who was a venerated saint for confessing her Christian faith before the Procurator Hilarianus. She was imprisoned with a group of other Christians, including her mistress, a 22-year-old married woman, who were all condemned to die in a Roman game. Because she was eight months pregnant, she would have been excused due to Roman law, but she gave birth to a daughter two days before the games. The baby was adopted by a Christian woman. The martyrdom of this group of Christians and their burial both occurred at Carthage, not coincidentally the name of a border town where La Magdalena and Gus perhaps meet their demise. (Turner Hospital, 273-274) Gus’s suffering wife, Therese, clearly refers to St. Therese of Avila, a woman of some note who admired St. Augustine so much that she dedicated her memoirs to him.
Examining the ways in which the rich discourse of the Bible have informed Borderline is productive if we examine the role canonical and metaphorical language plays as a key for interpreting for supernatural and miraculous events. The events in the Bible could very well fall under the rubric of magical realism, while other critiques have suggested that magical realism in fact functions as a sort of do-it-yourself spiritual guide in fragmented world in which meaning is suspect. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that conversion narratives are not confined to the theological realm and, in fact, the form is particularly ripe for appropriation in all sorts of literatures about the self and in the literatures of many faiths, from Judaism to Paganism. One scholar has even noted the appearance of a peculiar subgenre of racism conversion narratives among White Southerners. Even within Christian conversion narratives, types of conversion vary. Garry Wills, one of the foremost scholars on St. Augustine’s Confessions, identifies the appearance seven different conversion stories from people other than St. Augustine. Most of them typify a sort of vocational conversion, whereupon the individuals already are religious but receive a “calling” of sorts to a more spiritually dedicated life. Conversion narratives are so malleable because they inevitably intertwine with deconversion, as posited by John Barbour, in which people struggle with loss of faith. Barbour believes that conversion and deconversion are different sides of the same coin, whose currency reflects a process of personal transformation in which the narrator rejects past beliefs and replaces them with new ones. Conversion results when a person is confronted with disturbing worldly or unworldly events and experiences a profound moral crisis as a result of that knowledge. Thus, magical realism and conversion narrative converge in Borderline as an aesthetic strategy that heightens the significance of political events and individual stances toward them.
From the outset, politics and religion wend together in Borderline. La Magdalena is none other than a Salvadorian refugee and she appears to Felicity and Gus in an almost miraculous event— “illogically, as though in a vision”—curled like a fetus inside the carcass of a frozen beef that has fallen from a truck in front of them at a border crossing. (Turner Hospital, 25-26) Minutes earlier, the border patrol had hustled a number of illegal immigrants from the truck and Gus had instinctively reached for the St. Christopher medal on the dashboard of his car and “reverted” to Latin by praying: “Mater misericorcdiae, ora pronobis. Now and at the hour of our death, amen.” (Turner Hospital, 22). Felicity, who is a curator trying to secure a painting of La Magdelena for her gallery, has at this moment the experience of modern time being superimposed on the past, a disynchronicity that plagues her throughout the story and imparts an air of unreliability, the whiff of allegory, upon the events. It is Felicity’s inability to be firmly grounded in reality, her tendency to slip through time, that merits Borderline the label magical realism.
Felicity’s grasp on reality is clearly doubted by the narrator of the book, Jean-Marc Seymour, who sees her as living mostly in the mystical world of art, as far removed from present time as she can be, and essentially possessing a dreamy nature. In fact, when the people who appear to be governmental authorities call to question him about her political activities, he professes that she is apolitical. Seymour’s view of Felicity is clouded by his own jealousy because the two have been long rivals for his father’s affection, and rivalry that is complicated by the fact that Seymour is also a rival with his father for Felicity’s affection. The father in question is an artist known as “The Old Volcano,” and Felicity is his on- and off-again lover. In this particular trinity, Seymour feels forsaken by the Volcano, who functions as the Godlike father who is infinitely in control of his world. Felicity, in her flakiness, a ghost of sorts, and perhaps a holy one in her disregard for the world, although it is clear part of her attraction to the Old Volcano is because he knew her father, a missionary who chased God” and died when she was a child. Felicity’s work as an art collector and the fact that the subjects of paintings often incarnate to her pairs ironically with her status as the Old Volcano’s favorite subject to paint. We can muse on this in relation to the historical antecedents of conversion, which originally described how the material in a work of art was transformed by an artist. It was taken up in Christian parlance as “a metaphor for how God remakes a believer.” (Barbour, 1-2)
The shifting ground of belief is one of the earmarks of both conversion narratives and magical realism, and I believe that the commonality of these two “genres” provides insight into how magical realism can function politically. Conversion narratives are far more complex than simply conveying the adoption of a new religion. Ultimately, conversion narratives document someone’s change of belief in the face of uncertainties or doubts about what Barbour calls “ultimate reality.” This doubt about the nature of reality invites discussions about disturbing events—some of which seem out of this world. This doubt is framed in part as a moral questing, because it forms as a response to the suffering the teller sees and their struggle to understand the meaning of such suffering and other mysterious aspects of life. The change in belief is always accompanied by a change in action. (Barbour, 1-3) It is easy to see that any response to suffering can be talked about in terms of an affair of the conscious, in which a person struggles with secular and even political events that cause a crisis of faith. Belief translates into action when the teller views his or her own complicity or responsibility for the suffering of others, which in Christian terms is viewed as a struggle with sin.
The struggle with belief is part and parcel of living a spiritual life in many Christian narratives, a life in which God manifests in miraculous ways. In the Christian Bible, angels appear, a virgin gets pregnant, God has a son, God is his son and also happens to be a ghost, the dead resurrect, a man’s long hair gives him power, manna falls from heaven, a man saves the world’s creatures on a boat, seas part then smite an army, people live for hundreds of years, and loaves and fish are multiplied to feed a crowd—all events that we would dub magic if they had sprung from a manuscript by Rushdie or Marquez instead of the letters of an apostle or a Dead Sea scroll. The converted Christians jailed with Felicity had visions, lucid dreams and saw apparitions before being put to death. Fast forward to the United States in the 18th Century, and we find conversion narratives matter-of-factly combining the mundane and real—“”authentic narrative,” in their own words—with the magical—“remarkable experiences.” Jonathan Edward’s conversion narrative, published in 1736, was entitled: “Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God In the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton.” James Robe wrote, in 1742, a “Faithful Narrative of the Extraordinary Work of the Spirit of God, at Kilsyth. (Hindmarsh, 910) Magical realism certainly is imbued with spirituality, to the point that Molly Monet-Vieras believes that many books that fall under its umbrella are popular because they have become a sort of guide to “spiritual self-fashioning,” a fable of identity formation that is not unlike conversion narrative. She calls this “spiritual fiction” and says it is a “new brand” of magical realism that draws on a potpourri of global religions tenets. “Spiritual fiction, like magical realism, attempts to represent the marvelous aspects of reality yet it does so in order to articulate a sort of spiritual theory or philosophy that the reader can activate in his or her own life.” (Monet-Viera, 105)
One of the slippery issues within magical realism seems to be how the appearance of magic functions politically. Monet-Viera points out that magic does not function in the political realm in Allende’s House of the Spirits. She believes that the characters don’t develop solutions to problems until they give up magic and become more political and that Allende seems to be saying that torture and political brutality cannot be addressed magically. It seems that, while Monet-Viera’s approach is useful, she oversimplifies the experience of magic. If we were to look at the magic within House of the Spirits as a manifestation of the divine and the miraculous, then the appearance of spirits, tables moving and healing by ants seems to provide hope in an otherwise unrelenting atmosphere of despair. When she examines Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, Monet-Viera seems to find an apolitical message, in that the main character has no identity, and is crossing borders. Nevertheless, I believe that if we again apply the narrative conversion as a seeking for identity and meaning, a brand of full-fledged spirituality emerges. This book engages the full matrix of spirituality, creating a kind of east-meets-west amalgamation that crosses dogmatism. Theresa Delgadillo believes that spirituality functions politically in Ana Castillo’s book, So Far From God. She posits that Castillo’s Chicana women resist cultural and religious imperialism by taking elements from the invading culture and successfully amalgamating them with their own.
Although conversion narratives, just like magical realism, do not follow a strict form (in fact, Barbour notes that they tend to invent new ones) they do tend to have essential components that are worth considering. (Barbour, 3) The process of personal transformation is always sparked by a central crisis scene which confronts the teller with a reality that is beyond their ability to understand it. When reality, or supernatural reality, confronts the narrator of the story, the result is a loss of faith characterized by intellectual doubt in a system of beliefs or in truth itself. The moral crisis that results can condemn not only specific actions, but “an entire way of life” (Barbour, 1) In Borderline, the main central crisis scene would be the border crossing, in which Gus and Felicity are confronted with the spectacle of human lives devalued by being transported in a freezer of cattle carcasses. They become personally involved by taking action, moving from bystanders to participants by rescuing a refugee—which is at one time both a criminal and a moral act and, in itself, a repudiation of reality. Other crisis fall from this one: Therese threatens to leave, and eventually leaves, Gus. Felicity is stalked and threatened by agents unknown. The two disappear, leaving Seymour and Gus’s daughter wondering what has happened.
Conversion narratives also bring with them an account of emotional suffering, especially painful feelings of grief, loneliness and despair. In conversion narratives, it is not unusual to find the teller profess to feeling as though they are descending into madness—a state which no doubt impinges on one’s faith in the reliability of reality. Often, people who struggle with their faith comment on the urge to commit suicide. (Hindmarsh, 74) In both St. Augustine’s Confessions and in Turner Hospital’s Borderline, the suffering is both tangible and metaphorical. St. Augustine describes being best with thirst, hunger, bondage, mental confusion, disease and physical motion, such as wandering. Barbour notes that it is the suffering that moves the conversion narrative beyond an intellectual exercise to a deeply existential transformation: “Augustine feels that he has lost control of his will, that he is utterly alone, and that he is experiencing a form of suffering that afflicts every level of his being.” (Barbour, 13) In Borderline, his namesake, Gus suffers similarly. He thirsts for women and alcohol and, when his family deserts him, commences wandering in search of the woman they have known as La Magdalena. Felicity, who has been wandering through time throughout the book, also begins her search and suffers, though some of her struggles have to do with sexuality and what seems to be poor judgment and promiscuity. The struggle with the body and sexuality is an aspect that, oddly enough, makes many modern readers uncomfortable, when you realize that the struggle with sins of the flesh has always been part and parcel of the conversion narrative. St. Augustine was no saint and certainly fooled around in his garden. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who also wrote a secular Confessions, which is ultimately a conversion narrative, was a definite prowler and was known to have fathered many illegitimate children. Instead of judging Felicity and Gus for their rampant sexuality, a more accurate reading would require that we see them struggling in an earthly world.
The use of scriptural language figures heavily into conversion narratives and become tools in which both the teller and the reader can approach events and emotions. In fact, many scholars believe that the telling and the language itself are the most important aspects of the conversion narratives, because they charge the experience with meaning in their attempt to understand the divine. P.G. Stromberg believes that the conversion narrative is, in fact, a ritualized discourse in which the teller connects his or her immediate experience with the language of Christianity. He notes: “Ritual is always a set of activities intended to effect an exchange between the divine and the mundane levels of existence. Ritual is always a point where God and humanity come into contact; along this dimension the only difference between the conversion and other forms of ritual is that the conversion is focused upon an individual rather than being an overtly communal action.” (Stromberg, 11-12) As such, Stromberg believes that conversion relies on relating experiences within canonical language, which is “a set of symbols concerned with something enduring and beyond everyday reality, such as those associated with ‘Evangelical Christianity.’” (Stromberg, 3) He believes that metaphorical language normally functions as the exact opposite of canonical language, and uses metaphor to refer to a whole range of communication about everyday actions, what he calls opaque behaviors, which he believes resists explanatory effort because they are either psychological or symbolic in some fashion. (Stromberg, 13) He believes that canonical language and metaphorical language essentially trade places within a conversion narrative—that is, ritual brings “the canonical into the moment” and “the moment into the canonical.” (Stromberg, 12) When this happens, what was at one time mere religious symbolism becomes “real” for those who believe, and behaviors that might be puzzling or mysterious become true religious convictions. In many cases, ritual can mediate between science, which some believe is the only way of knowing, and artistic/intuitive ways of knowing—tensions that also find interplay within the worlds of magical realism. It is the contradictions between the divine and the mundane, actual experience and common sense that call for conversion narratives, says Stromberg:
Conversion narratives occur in our society because of what is common sense in our society and what is consequently mysterious. In particular, the conversion narrative can be seen as a ritual generated around certain contradictions in our conceptions of character and intention. These contradictions manifest themselves in a believer’s life as personal suffering, and the believer’s attempt to address this suffering draws her into that which cannot be understood in terms of common sense. This attempt is to be understood, from the perspective adopted here, as a process of using language to extend the boundaries of common sense, to bring something that cannot be understood within the confines of the familiar. If the attempt is successful, something that has been mysterious becomes articulable, and a profound sense of meaning is generated.” (Stromberg, 17-18)
It seems to me that magical realism uses precisely this tug between the metaphorical and canonical in language in the same way as do conversion narratives, which certainly explains why some readers—who might certainly be nonbelievers—struggle to determine whether the miraculous and supernatural in magical realism is intended to be literal or symbolic. It does seem to press against the boundaries of what Stromberg calls “the unsayable” and it functions to draw witness to suffering. Although Borderline is told as pure conjecture, it is undoubtedly a form of witness or, as Turner Hospital herself says, through her main narrator: “I began as a simple filer of facts. I was recording the truth, the gospel according to Jean-Marc. I told myself that the truth was tempered because mere accuracy was false.” (Turner Hospital, 185) The act of being a witness, becoming knowledgeable, spurs the action in the book. Gus and Felicity witness the political atrocities around them they cannot help but become involved. As such, their safe or privileged position is eroded, because those who witness their fate suffer the same fate as political victims. That knowledge is made canonical throughout the book by Turner Hospital in a quite self-conscious manner. The appearance of the apples in the garden of Felicity’s aunts, the way that they are peeled, the way that a knife might cut one’s self in that peeling but the way in which they also have healing and magical properties is all a clear directional device—our author does not even need to make a direct reference to the tree of knowledge. When Seymour is invited to his father’s art show opening, he sees it as a “sign” that Felicity is still around, because his father sending him an invitation himself would be so unbelievable it would be a miracle. Another use of canonical language is the way the soul is invoked throughout Borderline. Although we might not think of the soul as magical, again we see canonical and metaphoric language mixing together the mundane and miraculous when Gus has tea with the women at the gas station and hesitates to leave. “It is not every day that he met someone with whom he could discuss the turning points of the soul. This was not something a man should toss lightly over his shoulder. Another cup, a few more minutes, how could it hurt? A simple matter of courtesy. A statement of thanks.” (Turner Hospital, 195)
It seems probably that with globalization and increasing secularization, that local worldviews come under attack at the borders between cultures and countries. Michael Valdez Moses seems to feel that magical realism actually functions as a nostalgic tool, preserving bits of the past for consumption in a modernized world by creating an appealing hybrid of the realist and the fabulous. The genre, he says, is closely related to parables, folk tales, oral family tales and so forth. He equates this hybrid form to a lineage that consists of a father that is traceable to the realistic novel of the 18th and 19th centuries and a mother who is “native to the region.” This means that the magical realist novel becomes a “cultural mediator” of sorts between the two forms and does so by dramatizing the very act of storytelling. He notes, however, that the genre appeals not to people who actually believe in the marvelous, “but those who would like to believe in the marvelous.” The juxtapositions of different belief systems comes up in Stromberg’s treatise on language use within conversion narratives, stating that it occurs on the “the borders of “cleared areas” as those boundaries shift and reality that was hidden can now be discussed. (Stromberg, 13)
Borderline is arguably the most obvious magical realism book in the way in which it draws on conversion narratives compared to other books that fall into that loose categorization, but I would argue that it is the interplay between the miraculous and the mundane and the act of witnessing that makes them so profound. Part of the crisis of faith that Barbour refers to in the conversion/deconversion model is a disaffiliation with community and, as such, the individuals in magical realism all seek ways to realign personal circumstances with grand public and political events, their own beliefs with ultimate reality. As in conversion narratives, the act of witnessing in magical realism directs a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) force on readers because it makes them witness to both what is transcendent and divine and juxtaposes it against suffering, a suffering that has political causes and sometimes has political solutions. Perhaps magical realism is the leading edge of postmodernism because, while the subject matter is to a point declensionist and the knowable center might be elusive, the appearance of the miraculous gives a nod to some transcendent, larger meaning, even if we have to struggle to figure out what that meaning is for ourselves. In Castillo’s So Far from God, Sofia loses all of her daughters but undergoes a conversion in which she finds meaning in political action. In Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamisahita, Bobby finds the courage and the agency to go rescue his son, Sol. In Borderline, even Seymour and the Old Volcano undergo a sort of personal conversion, when the two are finally reunited at an art show. It isn’t exactly forgiveness, because although the Old Volcano is frail, says Seymour, “not that this excuses him for anything.” What happens is that Seymour is “dazzled” by the radiance of the Old Volcano’s work—much like we might be dazzled by the divine in world—and he comes to embrace the old man. It is a hopeful stance, for he has faith that Felicity will make an appearance: “Oh Jean-Marc, she’ll laugh, and we’ll catch fire from the sound of her voice.” (Turner Hospital, 290)
References
Barbour, J.D. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1994.
Bowen, Deborah. “Borderline Magic: Janette Turner Hospital and Transfiguration by Photography.” Studies in Canadian Literature 16.2. 1991.
Burnam, Robert. “Author of Due Preparations for the Plague talks with Roberta Birnaum.” Identity Theory (2003). http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum132.php
Delgado, Theresa. “Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance: Hybrid Spirituality in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God.” Modern Fiction Studies, 44.4 (1998): 888-916.
Gilett, Sue. “Charades: Searching for Father Time: Memory and the Uncertainty Principle. New Literatures Review, Australia, 21. (Summer 1991): 68-81.
Hindmarsh, Bruce D. “’My Chains Fell Off, My Heart Was Free’: Early Methodist Conversion Narrative in England.” Church History 68. 4 (December 1999): 910-929.
Hindmarsh, Bruce D. “The Olney Autobiographers: English Conversion Narrative in the Mid-Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49.1. (January 1998): 61-84.
Hospital, Janette Turner. Borderline. New York: Bantam. 1987.
Hospital, Janette Turner. “Letter to a New York Editor,” Meanjin 47.3 (Spring 1988): 560-564.
Monet-Viera, Molly. “Post-Boom Magical Realism: Appropriations and Transformations of a Genre,” Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, 38.1 (January 2004): 95-117.
Moon, Dreama G. “Racial Redemption and the white Southern Racial Conversion Narrative.” The Review of Communication 1(2001): 97-102.
Popp-Baier, Ulrike. “Narrating Embodied Aims. Self-transformation in Conversion Narratives—A Psychological Analysis].” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung /Forum: Qualitative Social Research (On-line Journal), 2.3 (September 2001). http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-01/3-01popp-e.htm
Stead, Alistair. “The Improprieties of Janette Turner Hospital: Strategic Punning in Borderline and Charades.” Borderblur: Essays on Poetry and Poetics in Contemporary Canadian Literature. Edinburgh, Quadriga.(1996): 74-93.
Store, Ron. Interview with Janette Turner Hospital. LINQ Magazine. 17.1 (1990): 18-37.
Stromberg, P.G. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1993.
Valdez Moses, Michael. “Magical Realism at World’s End,” Literary Imagination, 3 (Winter 2001): 105-133.
Wilding, Michael. “Recent Australian Writing: Janette Turner Hospital’s Borderline and Don O’ Kim’s The Chinaman,” The Working Papers in Australian Studies 29 (1988): 1-17.
Wills, Garry. Saint Augustine’s Conversion. New York: Viking Adult. 2004.
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I have always been fascinated by the work being done in conversion narratives and their question of the role of belief in supernatural phenomena, which relates very closely to magical realism.
