Magical Realism and Deleuze
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Magical Realism and Deleuze
The Indiscernibility of Difference
in Postcolonial Literature
Eva Aldea
Continuum Literary Studies
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Eva Aldea, 2011
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Eva Aldea has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-0998-9 (hardcover)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aldea, Eva.
Magical realism and Deleuze : the indiscernibility of difference in postcolonial
literature / Eva Aldea.
p. cm. -- (Continuum literary studies)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4411-0998-9 (hardcover)
1. Magic realism (Literature) 2. Fiction--20th century--History and criticism.
3. Commonwealth fiction (English)--History and criticism. 4. Postcolonialism
in literature. 5. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995--Criticism and interpretation.
6. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995--Knowledge--Literature. 7. Literature--Philosophy.
I. Title. II. Series.
PN56.M24A63 2011
809'.915--dc22
2010015193
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
For Marcus
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Contents
Preface
ix
List of Abbreviations
x
Chapter 1 Introduction: Magical Realism
1
Chapter 2 Gilles Deleuze and Magical Realism
19
Chapter 3 Models of Magical Realism
41
Chapter 4 Magical Realism and the Signs of Art
73
Chapter 5 Deleuze and the Postcolonial Politics of Magical Realism
103
Chapter 6 Conclusion
146
Notes
150
Bibliography
163
Index
181
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Preface
Since being introduced to magical realism through the short stories of Julio
Cortázar, many years ago, I have always wanted to know why magical realism has
been so fascinating and tantalizing a genre for me and so many other readers.
What exactly is it that makes the appearance of the unusual, strange and supernatural so alluring when it is described in that deadpan, matter-of-fact voice we
have all become so familiar with since the Latin American literary boom reached
the Anglo-Saxon readership in the 70s? I never found a thoroughly satisfactory
answer. Any definitions and descriptions of the genre seemed to me never quite
to get to the bottom of how the interaction between the real and the magic in
magical realist novels and stories actually functions. I mean ‘functions’ in the
way a car or train functions – I wanted to know what drives the fantastic yet
thoroughly familiar engine of magical realism.
There was nothing for it but to investigate the matter myself. Having
come across the idea of the machinic assemblage in Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s work, an early project looking at Cortázar’s stories as such little
literary machines yielded some results. It also pointed to the fact that Deleuze
could provide the thoroughly different approach to magical realism that I was
looking for, partly as a philosopher that could take me back to basics – What is
the real? What is the magic? – partly because of his insistence that the all that is
is in the same way, yet is different. This challenge to hierarchies of being seemed
to me to chime true with the main motion of the magical realist machine.
This book is the final result of a long process of research but also of thought,
the importance of which my guide throughout would never let me forget. I am
very grateful to Andrew Gibson for his long and continued support for, belief
in and acute criticism of my work. I would also like to thank my parents for their
never failing belief in the ultimate fruition of my work, and my friends and
colleagues for their input, patience and support. Finally, a special thank you to
Marcus Cheadle, without whom this book would never have been written.
List of Abbreviations
Primary Works
BD
CR
DV
FR
LP
MC
NC
OHYS
SC
WCS
Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 2005).
Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason (London: Granta Books, 1998).
André Brink, Devil’s Valley (London: Vintage, 2000).
Ben Okri, The Famished Road (London: Vintage, 1991).
Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002).
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1995).
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (London: Vintage 2003).
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory
Rabassa (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (London: Vintage, 1989).
Robert Kroetsch, What the Crow Said (Edmonton: University of Alberta
Press, 1978).
Works by Gilles Deleuze
AO
B
C2
DII
DR
EP
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
(London: Athlone Press, 1984).
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005).
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2006).
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London:
Athlone Press, 1994).
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York Zone Books, 1990).
List of Abbreviations
KM
LS
PS
TP
WIP
xi
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles
Stivale (London: Continuum, 2004).
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1987).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (London; New York: Verso, 1994).
Critical Works
AP
DC
LC
MGP
MRF
MRPD
MRT
MS
OMRF
PNC
PU
SCD
TWL
WAF
Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and
the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).
Jean-Pierre Durix, Mimesis, Genres, and Post-Colonial Discourse: Deconstructing Magic Realism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved
Versus Unresolved Antinomy (New York: Garland, 1985).
Stephen Slemon, ‘Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Discourse’, Lois
Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds), Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995): 407–426.
William Spindler, ‘Magic Realism: A Typology’, Forum for Modern
Language Studies, 29/1 (1993): 75–85.
Robert R. Wilson, ‘The Metamorphoses of Space: Magical Realism’,
Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski (eds), Magic Realism and Canadian
Literature: Essays and Stories (Waterloo: University of Waterloo Press,
1986): 61–74.
Fredric Jameson, ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry, 12/2
(1986): 301–325.
Frederick Luis Aldama, Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in
Oscar “Zeta” Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman
Rushdie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 2002).
María-Elena Angulo, Magic Realism: Social Context and Discourse
(New York: Garland, 1995).
Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational
Capitalism’, Social Text, 15 (1986): 65–88.
Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a
Third Eye (London: Routledge, 1998).
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Chapter 1
Introduction: Magical Realism
A History of Magical Realism:
Typologies and Definitions
Since the incredible success of Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel One
Hundred Years of Solitude, and the following Latin American literary ‘Boom’ of
the late 1960s and ‘70s, magical realism has enjoyed attention from publishers,
the reading public and academia. Yet while magical realism has become established as a literary genre, its definition has remained vague. Although key works
have had a distinct impact, magical realism seems constantly to overlap and
merge with other types of literature and critical currents. As Peter Hinchcliffe
and Ed Jewinsky note, ‘Magic realism has been used for such a variety of
fictions and theories that the very variety compels critics to teeter on the verge
of inconsistency, juxtaposition and even contradiction’.1 On the one hand, a
great number of works referred to as magical realism belong to the realm of
commercial mainstream fiction, for example Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for
Chocolate or Patrick Süskind’s Parfume, which, while they have enjoyed great
popular success, merit only limited academic attention. On the other hand,
many works now commonly referred to as magical realist have attained canonical status, such as Gabriel García Márquez’s prototypical One Hundred Years of
Solitude or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and provide a rich ground for
academic inquiry. However, such key magical realist texts have often been read
primarily as postcolonial or postmodern works, shifting the critical focus away
from their specific magical realist form and function. In spite of this, magical
realism as a term has been neither rejected nor replaced. The fact that it has
been applied widely, almost carelessly, to quite differing works, testifies to both
its allure and its possibilities, at the same time as it also indicates the need for a
reconsideration of the genre.
Cuban-born literary critic Roberto Gonzáles Echevarría believes the ‘general
absence of historical bearings in the formulation of magic realism’ is responsible for the confusion surrounding the term, as he traces the appearance of the
term in three distinct moments in the twentieth century.2 He finds the first use
of the term ‘magical realism’ in a 1925 article on Post-Expressionist painting,
attributed to German art critic Franz Roh. Roh contrasts the fantastic, exotic,
2
Magical Realism and Deleuze
transcendental paintings of the Expressionists with a return to reality emerging
in art at the time, a wish to ‘feel the reality of the object and of space, not
like copies of nature but like another creation’.3 While often mentioned in
overviews of the beginnings of the genre, this definition has had the least
impact on the concept of magical realism commonly used in literary criticism
today, although it has remained a current idea in painting.4 However, Roh’s
article, receiving wide circulation in Latin America, did influence Cuban Alejo
Carpentier to develop the term into a uniquely Latin American concept, which
Gonzáles Echevarría defines as the second moment in the history of magical
realism: lo real meravilloso. In the 1949 foreword to his novel Kingdom of This
World Carpentier criticizes ‘the tiresome pretension of creating the marvellous
that has characterized certain European literatures over the past thirty years’,5
and calls for a ‘marvellous real’ literature of America, born out of the existing
reality of the continent and characterized by a rich style: ‘I have to create with
my words a baroque style that parallels the baroque of the temperate, tropical
landscape [of Latin America]’.6 Finally, a 1955 lecture by Mexican writer Angel
Flores magical realism marks the third moment in Gonzáles Echevarría’s
history or the genre. Flores notes that Latin American romantic literature is
full of elements of realism, and realist works are full of elements of fantasy, and
calls this mix ‘magical realism’.7 Flores points out the affinity of this magical
realist style with the opening sentences of Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’: ‘As
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself
transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’8 Flores explains: ‘The transformation of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach [. . .] is not a matter of conjecture or
discussion: it happened and it was accepted by the other characters as an almost
normal event’. Similarly, magical realism, to Flores, is not weighed down by
‘needlessly baroque descriptions’ but ‘cling[s] to reality as if to prevent “literature” from [. . .] flying off, as in fairy tales, to supernatural realms’.9
To Gonzáles Echevarría none of these historical definitions of magical realism have provided an approach adequately describing post-Boom examples of
the genre, and criticism since the Boom ‘has rarely gone beyond “discovering”
the most salient characteristics of avant-garde literature in general’. In response
to this inadequacy, he goes on to propose the identification of two versions
of magical realism: a ‘phenomenological magical realism’, corresponding to
Roh’s ideas, and an ‘ontological magical realism’, stemming from Carpentier’s
approach. In the former, the interaction of ‘subjectivity and reality, mediated by
the act of perception [. . .] generates the alchemy, the magic,’ but reality
‘remains unaltered’. In the latter, the marvellous ‘exists in Latin America’, and
is ‘revealed to those who believe’ through the act of faith that is literature.10
Even though Gonza
´ les Echevarría is sceptical about the usefulness of the term
magical realism, his division raises some valid questions about the genre: is the
magic understood as the supernatural, or merely a way of looking at reality? Is
the magic inherent in reality or is it purely textual? These questions have shaped
Introduction: Magical Realism
3
contemporary views of magical realism, as we can see in the typology of the
genre proposed by William Spindler in 1993.
Spindler suggests three variants of magical realism. ‘Metaphysical magical
realism’ is characterized by the technique of defamiliarization, creating an
uncanny and disturbing atmosphere, but without an element of the supernatural. Spindler cites Kafka’s The Trial, Borges’s story ‘The South’, and even
James’s The Turn of the Screw as examples.11 ‘Anthropological magical realism’,
to Spindler, corresponds to the most current definition of the genre. It is characterized by the use of ‘two voices’: one rational and realist, and the other
indicating a belief in magic. The implied contradiction or antinomy between
these two voices is resolved by the presence in the text of a specific cultural
world-view, a Weltanschauung where the mythical and the rational coexist.
Spindler links this type of magical realism to a postcolonial search for national
identity, and the struggle to reverse the hierarchy between Western and nonWestern cultures. Among the examples he gives are works by both Latin
American ‘greats’ such as Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and
Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, and by writers from other parts of the world
including Guyanese writer Wilson Harris and Salman Rushdie. (MRT 80–82)
Finally, in ‘ontological magical realism’ the supernatural also appears, but the
contradiction between it and the real world is resolved through a matter-of-fact
presentation rather than by the presence of a particular Weltanschauung. The
magic is not explained in any subjective, psychological way; but rather ‘the
unreal has an objective, ontological presence in the text’ (MRT 82). Spindler’s
examples are Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’, Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s
story ‘Axolotl’, and Carpentier’s Voyage to the Seed (MRT 82–83).
We can easily map Spindler’s metaphysical magical realism onto Gonzáles
Echevarría’s phenomenological magical realism, where there is no supernatural as such, but rather a ‘magical’ consciousness of reality. In addition, what
Spindler seems to have done is to divide what Gonzáles Echevarría’s calls ontological magical realism according to whether the magic originates in a specific
extra-textual reality, or within the text itself. Notably, however, in both anthropological and ontological magical realism, the main characteristics – the ethnic
Weltanschauung or the matter-of-fact narration – perform the same function:
they resolve the implicit contradiction between the natural and supernatural.
However, this division points to the fact that in approaches to the genre a
dichotomy has remained between attempts at defining magical realism through
socio-geographic factors on the one hand, and specific textual features on the
other. The vast majority of current Anglophone literary criticism of the genre is
concerned with what Spindler calls anthropological magical realism, which he
links ostensibly to postcolonial literature. Indeed, many critics read magical
realism primarily in this context, some defining it as a type of literature emerging exclusively in a postcolonial situation. The fact that magical realism can be
concerned with different cultural versions of reality potentially allows it to deal
4
Magical Realism and Deleuze
with questions of cultural hegemony and its role in colonization, and to explore
the politically subversive power of exposing the relativity of such hegemony.
However, many critics also link magical realism with postmodernism, referring
to a number of specific textual characteristics that allows the genre to raise
questions about the nature of reality and fiction.
Reality and Text: Postcolonial or Postmodern?
In his widely read 1988 article ‘Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse’,
Stephen Slemon explicitly links the narrative structure of magical realism to
counter-colonial writing. Although he does not speak of a resolution of an antinomy in magical realism, he offers a familiar concept of it as a ‘battle between
two oppositional systems’, or narrative modes, which remains unresolved or
‘suspended’, so that neither mode takes primacy over the other.12 To Slemon,
‘the metaphysical clash or double vision inherent in colonial history and language is recapitulated in transmuted form in the text’s oppositional language
of narration and mirrored in its thematic level’ (MRPD 420). Slemon thus
concludes that magic realism can be seen to ‘comprise a positive and liberating
engagement with the codes of imperial history and its legacy of fragmentation
and discontinuity’ (MRPD 422). Slemon’s view is echoed in recent major publications on magical realism. In her 2004 study of magical realism, Wendy Faris
argues that the genre is ‘a narrative inscription [that] begins to transfer discursive power from colonizer to colonized, to provide a fictional ground in which
to imagine alternative narrative visions of agency and history’. Novelists such
as Rushdie and Ben Okri use ‘their magic against the established order’ and
‘[this] use of magic often ultimately highlights the historical atrocities narrated
in them’.13 Also note Wen-chin Ouyang’s unambiguous statement in his introduction to the section on ‘The Politics of Magic’ in the 2005 Companion to
Magical Realism: ‘Magical realism is inherently political concerned [sic] not only
with the continuing influence of empire in the postcolonial world but also with
the corruption of political authority set up in postindependence nation-states,
not to mention the attendant cultural politics that partake in the formulation
of a plausible postcolonial national identity’.14
Fredric Jameson has been immensely influential on such postcolonial readings of magical realism, despite never offering a coherent definition of the
genre in literature. His main thesis, based mainly on a reading of films, although
occasionally referring to Latin American literature, concludes that ‘magical
realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of
pre-capitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features’.15 He proposes
that the genre relies on a ‘narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village [sic] or even
tribal myth’ (OMRF 302). Jameson seems to share Carpentier’s view of existing
reality as a base for magical realism, ‘a reality which is already in and of itself
Introduction: Magical Realism
5
magical or fantastic’ (OMRF 311). Jameson’s definition thus coincides, at least
in part, with Spindler’s anthropological magical realism, where the encounter
of the magic and the real in the text mirrors a meeting of old and new cultures.
To Jameson, magical realism is an inherently historical and political genre,
explicitly opposed to postmodern literature, which he elsewhere describes as
‘depthless’ and characterized by a ‘consequent weakening of historicity’.16
Notably, while to Spindler the contradictions implied by the dual cultural context of magical realism are resolved in the magical realist text, to Jameson there
is no such resolution, but rather a distinct clash of cultures. However, while
Jameson continues to be regularly quoted by critics attempting to define the
genre, the notion of a resolution of the contradiction between the magic and
the real remains central to magical realism in literature.
A notable example of the use of Jameson’s ideas in critical studies of literary
magical realism is Brenda Cooper’s Magical Realism in West African Fiction.
Cooper defines magical realism through, first, the political circumstances from
which it emerges, and second, its textual and thematic characteristics. Expanding on Jameson’s approach, she concludes that the often chaotic meeting
between capitalism and a pre-capitalist society in developing countries, and the
ensuing climate of change and ambiguity, is a catalyst for magical realism. While
naming the pre-capitalist world as a ‘critical inspirational source’ for the magic
of this magical realism, Cooper defines it more broadly as ‘the fictional device
of the supernatural, taken from any source that the writer chooses [including
his or her own imagination], syncretized with a developed realistic, historical
perspective’.17 To Cooper, the notion of ‘hybridity’ lies ‘at the heart of the
politics and techniques of magical realism’ (WAF 17–20). In political terms, this
hybridity can allow magical realism to oppose imperialism and promote cultural multiplicity, although, interestingly, Cooper suggests that it may also end
up reaffirming the Western stereotype of the exotic ‘Other’. In technical terms,
hybridity is ‘a syncretism between paradoxical dimensions of life and death,
historical reality and magic, science and religion, [that] characterizes the plot,
themes and narrative structures of magical realist novels’ (WAF 32). Crucially,
such a thematic and stylistic hybridity allows the magical realist writer to ‘see
with a third eye’ or to create a ‘third space’, beyond the binary structure of
colonizer–colonized. So even though Cooper allows that the magic of magical
realism could have a source outside a specific culture, she explicitly links
what she sees as its essential hybridity to a postcolonial context. In addition, at
the same time as she adheres to Jameson’s view that the genre grows out of the
conflictual meeting of pre-capitalist and capitalist societies, her insistence on
the hybridity of the genre, in its creation of a ‘third space’, implies a resolution
of the contradictions between magic and reality and thus between the worldviews or cultures they are linked with.
Furthermore, Cooper characterizes magical realism by listing such elements
as the deformation of time and space, a Bakhtinian use of carnivalesque and
polyvocality, and narrative irony. These features lead her, while situating the
6
Magical Realism and Deleuze
emergence and thematics of magical realism within a postcolonial environment,
to place it, in terms of style, within postmodernism: ‘Magical realists are postcolonials who avail themselves most forcefully of the devices of postmodernism,
of pastiche, irony, parody and intertextuality’ (WAF 29). Thus she again deviates from Jameson’s definition, which placed magical realism in opposition to
postmodernism. However, Cooper fails to explain fully why such devices are
necessary to the genre’s hybrid nature, and thus how magical realism can be
seen as a specific genre distinct from any kind of writing that attempts to find
a ‘third way’ of seeing things through a mix of postcolonial themes and postmodern techniques.
Jean-Pierre Durix’s postcolonial reading of magical realism places the genre
within the context of what he calls ‘New Literatures’, a term he finds more
suitable than ‘postcolonial’ for literature produced in countries that have
undergone a process of colonization.18 He articulates a ‘hybrid aesthetics’ to
describe these new literatures: novelists experiencing a ‘multiple and contradictory’ reality ‘feel the need to approach it from several – sometimes widely
differing – angles’ creating ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ genres. Durix proclaims magical
realism ‘one of the best-known forms of this generic hybridity’ (MGP 187), and
he attempts to define the ‘hybridity’ specific to magical realism in more precise
literary terms than Cooper. He differentiates between the use of the fantastic
in European literature and ‘New Literatures’: in the former the fantastic ‘serves
to protest against the tyranny of “fact” ’, in the latter it serves ‘to incorporate the
old values and beliefs into the modern man’s perception’ (MGP 79–81).
Durix admits that this geographic division of the fantastic is problematic, as
it is questionable whether one can still speak of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ in the postcolonial version of the genre. Since reality in the ‘New Literatures’ wavers
between ‘the Western logos and an uneasy acceptance of ancient spirituality’,
works of this kind cannot really be called fantastic, as the fantastic depends on
the presence of a distinct unreal. Instead, says Durix, these texts are precisely
magical realist (MGP 102). In the European fantastic, real and unreal are
pitched against each other, but in magical realism there is not only ‘an interweaving of the “realistic” and “fantastic” modes but also an implicit questioning
of the polarity on which such terms are based’, and thus ‘versions of reality are
presented in a less conflicting way’ (MGP 146). Durix, then, explicitly links the
resolution of antinomy in the magical realist text to a postcolonial cultural
hybridity, implying that the magical realist text provides a resolution of the
‘widely different angles’ on reality encountered in the postcolonial world.
To Durix the resolution of the antinomy of real and magic is key, but he
also narrows his definition of magical realism by stressing that it must have a
thematic engagement with the conflict between a local community and an
imperial authority. Thus he sees García Márquez and Rushdie as ‘prototypes’
of magical realism, but excludes Borges and Cortázar, whose works lack this
engagement (MGP 146). Durix provides a more specific definition of the
Introduction: Magical Realism
7
‘hybridity’ in magical realism than Cooper, but he also lists elements of grotesque and picaresque as typical of magical realism, as well as features that
Cooper sees as postmodern, such as intertextuality and metatextuality; again,
however, these characteristics appear more circumstantial than necessary for
the central resolution of the antinomy in magical realism.
While Cooper and Durix find some typically postmodern devices in magical
realism, such as self-reflexivity and metatextuality, playfulness and irreverence
towards established cultural forms or categories, they have not been able fully
to integrate these in a definition of the genre. Frederick Louis Aldama argues,
however, that these particular devices do define magical realism. He approaches
postcolonial readings of magical realism critically, suggesting that they have
made the mistake of confusing literary and ethnographic components. He
traces this error back to Carpentier’s work, as well as to Fredric Jameson’s
reading, and sees it repeated in the work of various critics such as Gonzáles
Echevarría, Cooper and Durix. According to Aldama, such critics ‘reify’ the
literary text, on the one hand, and view the empirical world as a narrative on
the other. Aldama, in contrast, proposes a view of the literary, not as a ‘source
of information’ or ‘a conveyor of truth or falsity’ about the empirical world, but
as ‘a narrative with its own kind of rationale’, separate from the extra-textual
world.19 That is, as opposed to those critics focusing on cultural hybridity,
Aldama looks at magical realism as dealing with exclusively textual versions
of reality.
Aldama refers to magical realism’s ‘vibrant interplay between discourse and
story’, a characteristic that makes the genre a ‘rebellious aesthetic’ (PNC 19).
Magical realism derives from realism ‘the formal arrangements selected for
telling the story’, but adds to them the ‘mimesis-as-play’ of intertextuality,
metatextuality and self-reflexivity (PNC 37). According to Aldama, these ‘impurities’ in the discourse are crucial to magical realism, offering a ‘how-to-read
magicorealism contract’ that prevents the reader from hesitating in the face of
the magical elements, allowing them instead to perceive ‘an everyday reality
that is seamlessly both real and unreal’ (PNC 37–39). Aldama thus also suggests
a definition of magical realism that hinges on the resolution of the antinomy
between the real and the magic, but claims that it is the intertextuality and
metatextuality of magical realism that brings about this resolution, ensuring
there is a ‘categorical difference between the invention of limitless possibility
within the novel’s pages and the reality outside’ (PNC 18–19). That is, the resolution of antinomy in magical realism, to Aldama, does not extend to the differences between cultural versions of reality.
Nevertheless, Aldama situates magical realism within postcolonial literature
by default, focusing on US ethnic minority and British postcolonial literature,
and apparently discounting the possibility that the genre could exist in a nonpostcolonial context. Ultimately, he expresses the familiar view that the coexistence of the real and unreal in magical realism is particularly suited to expressing
8
Magical Realism and Deleuze
a specific cultural experience, because of the absence of an antinomy between
two views of the world (PNC 39). Thus, even though he insists that the transaction is purely textual, he suggests a ‘rebellious’ side of magical realism that lies
in its ability to highlight its own artifice and therefore ‘transform perceptions of
the world’. Aldama’s reading is therefore quite similar to other postcolonial
readings of magical realism, yet it does raise some interesting questions about
the definitions of magical realism that we have seen so far. It appears that while
the antinomy between versions of reality could not be satisfactorily resolved by
cultural hybridity alone, the antinomy between textual versions of reality can be
resolved without a parallel cultural resolution. This suggests that definitions of
magical realism must be concerned with the way the text presents reality; merely
a representation of cultural ‘hybridity’, the inclusion of, or encounter between,
different cultural views, is not enough to distinguish the genre. However, it
seems that this resolution can be attributed to a whole range of literary devices,
depending on the critics’ point of view. Most critics, even if they are reading
magical realism as postcolonial, stress that many of these stylistic and structural
characteristics are postmodern.
Theo L. D’Haen suggests that the terms magical realism and postmodernism
denote the same type of literary mode, but that one is used predominantly in
Latin America and Canada, and the other in Europe and the US.20 D’Haen
concludes that magical realism is a subset of postmodernism, referring to Brian
McHale’s and Linda Hutcheon’s approaches to the postmodern.21 Certainly
these two theorists place a number of novels widely referred to as magical realist
within their consideration of postmodernism, and discuss many of the characteristics attributed to magical realism (those very characteristics which critics
point out magical realism has in common with postmodernism). However,
neither offers a specific definition of magical realism as a distinguishable part
of postmodernism.
Hutcheon, however, explicitly labels postmodernism ‘ex-centric’,22 which
D’Haen identifies as the feature which situates magical realism within the
framework of postmodernism: magical realism appropriates the literary techniques of ‘the centre’ or the colonial power, and uses them ‘to create an alternative world correcting so called existing reality’.23 However, in D’Haen’s analysis
of Coetzee’s Foe, Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children and Carter’s Nights At the Circus, it is not clear how, although these
novels speak from the margins and attempt to correct an existing view of
reality, they do so in a way that is specifically magical realist. Again we are
given a description of magical realist texts via a list of literary devices such as
intertextuality, metatextuality, deformation of time and space, bifurcation of
plot, and so on, that are identified as postmodern, and that allow these novels
to subvert existing views of reality. However, this subversion is also what critics
reading magical realism from a postcolonial perspective identify in the genre.
Thus, although D’Haen fails to provide a definition of magical realism, his
Introduction: Magical Realism
9
analysis indicates the fact that marginality and subversion may be seen as the
site where postmodernism, postcolonialism and magical realism intersect.
This is Linda Hutcheon’s thesis in an article analysing postmodernism and
postcolonialism: ‘The formal technique of “magic realism” (with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled out by many critics
as one of the points of conjunction of postmodernism and postcolonialism.
Its challenges to genre distinctions and to the conventions of realism are
certainly part of the project of both enterprises’.24 This conjunction, however,
hinges on the fact that Hutcheon sees postcolonialism and postmodernism as
related by ‘a strong shared concern with the notion of marginalization, with the
state of what we would call ex-centricity’.25 However, such a ‘shared concern’ is
by no means a given: Jameson’s approach to magical realism problematizes
the positioning of magical realism precisely at this intersection. In addition, but
in contrast to Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad identifies magical realism with postmodernism, something that for Ahmad is inherently problematic in the face of a
postcolonial realm that he defines as essentially political. To Ahmad, it is impossible to reconcile the explicitly political concerns of the Third World and postmodern ‘theories of the fragmentation and/or death of the Subject: the politics
of discrete exclusivities and localisms on the one hand, or, on the other – as
some of the poststructuralisms would have it – the very end of the social, the
impossibility of stable subject positions, hence the death of politics as such’.26
This leads Ahmad to dismiss the claim made by postcolonial theorist Homi K.
Bhabha that magical realism has become the ‘literary language of the emergent
postcolonial world’ as a ‘routine feature of metropolitan theory’s inflationary
rhetoric’.27 However, neither Hutcheon nor Ahmad actually consider magical
realism in any great detail, and certainly do not offer any adequate definition of
the genre.
Wendy Faris states that magical realism is ‘an important component of
postmodernism’,28 which she defines using Brian McHale’s distinction between
modernism as an ‘epistemological’ and postmodernism as an ‘ontological’ literary mode. To Faris, the ‘moment of invention, the realisation of the imaginary realm’ is what signals that magical realism, as postmodernism, is concerned
with ‘questions of being’ rather than ‘questions of knowledge’, echoing
Gonzáles Echevarría’s and Spindler’s typologies. Faris refers to John Barth’s
essay ‘The Literature of Replenishment’ in which he takes García Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude to be the perfect example of postmodernism,
describing it as a ‘synthesis of straightforwardness and artifice, realism and
magic and myth, political passion and nonpolitical artistry, characterization
and caricature, humour and terror’.29 In addition, she lists a number of secondary specifications of magical realism, some by now familiar, which also allow
her to place it within the postmodern: metafictionality, linguistic playfulness
and self-awareness, repetition and intertextual reference, an anti-bureaucratic
agenda, a carnivalesque spirit and so on. Once more, however, while these
10
Magical Realism and Deleuze
devices certainly appear in magical realist works, it is not obvious how they
are specific to magical realism. Despite these critics’ attempts, it remains unclear
how magical realism can be satisfactorily described as a particularly postmodern genre. Indeed, efforts to align magical realism with postmodernism,
although interesting, have failed to provide a definition of the genre.
Realism and The Resolution of Antinomy
The closest Wendy Faris comes to a definition of magical realism is in her suggestion that magical realism must be defined in opposition to realism, through
its inclusion of an ‘imaginative moment’: the fantastic or supernatural. Yet
magical realism remains linked to realism in that it ‘combines realism and
the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the
reality portrayed’.30 Realist descriptions, a physical experience of the magic,
and a literalization of metaphors allow the magical elements to ‘grow almost
imperceptibly out of the real’.31 In the end, Faris’s definition conforms to those
already considered: narrative characteristics allow the coexistence of the real
and the magic to be ‘organical’ or ‘imperceptible’, that is, without the appearance of any disparity between them. Definitions of the genre remain vague
and unsatisfactory if they concern themselves only with contexts or list characteristics without giving their specific function in the text, whether these be
‘anthropological’ postcolonial contexts or ‘ontological’ postmodern characteristics. Rather, the idea of the resolution of the contradiction between the real
and the supernatural in the magic realist text appears to be not only the most
often cited characteristic of magical realism, but also its most distinguishing
feature. Unsurprisingly, one of the few fully developed and most convincing
definitions of the genre so far centres on this resolution: Amaryll Chanady’s
seminal Magical Realism and the Fantastic.
Chanady mainly surveys works of Latin American magical realism, including
novels and short stories by García Márquez, Carpentier and Asturias. Her
definition of magical realism is grounded in its opposition to the fantastic in
terms of its narrative treatment of the natural and supernatural. Chanady’s
starting point is therefore Tzvetan Todorov’s famous definition of the fantastic.
Todorov offers a symmetrical analysis of literary genres which places the fantastic at the centre between the uncanny and the marvellous. In all three literary
forms, as Todorov puts it, ‘an event occurs in the “real” world which cannot be
explained by the laws of reality’.32 The thematic and narrative treatment of
this event, and the way this treatment determines the reader’s reaction, is key
to Todorov’s classification of the text. If the supernatural event is explained in
such a way that it is subject to the ‘laws of reality’, Todorov marks the text as
uncanny. If the event is accepted as supernatural the text is marvellous. Only
if the narrative treatment of the event causes the reader to hesitate between
a rational and supernatural explanation is the text fantastic.
Introduction: Magical Realism
11
Chanady emphasizes that the fantastic is essentially different from what
Todorov terms the uncanny and marvellous – categories which include fairy
tales, fantasy, horror, sci-fi and mysteries – ‘because two distinct levels of reality
are represented’ in the text.33 If the supernatural is explained or accepted the
text includes only one level of reality. Chanady’s definition of magical realism is
analogous to the fantastic but moves away from Todorov’s concept of reader
hesitation, instead locating an antinomy between these two levels of reality
within the text itself. While in the fantastic the implicit contradiction between
the natural and supernatural is unresolved, producing hesitation, in magical
realism ‘the supernatural is not presented as problematic’ (MRF 23). In fact,
says Chanady, in magical realism the antinomy ‘which exists on a semantic level’
is resolved by the text (MRF 36). That is, as Spindler indicates, specific characteristics of the text itself resolve the conflict between the natural and the supernatural. While Spindler only defines these characteristics as either the use of an
ethnic world-view or a matter-of-fact narration, Chanady identifies the use of
authorial reticence and focalizers as the particular devices that achieve this
resolution.
Chanady takes the famous episode of the ascension of Remedios the Beauty
in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example:
She watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of
the beetles and the dahlias and passing through the air with her as four
o’clock in the afternoon came to the end.34
In this passage, Chanady notes the absence of an explanation for the magical
event, an absence she terms authorial reticence. Not only does the author
refuse to explain the supernatural, or show any surprise, but the narration
‘provides no information which would suggest an alternative reaction to the
supernatural’ (MRF 151). This authorial reticence implies, to Chanady, an
absence of a hierarchy between two codes of reality presented, and therefore
effects a resolution of the contradiction between them. In the fantastic the narration creates an atmosphere of mystery that underpins the reader’s hesitation,
as the supernatural is rarely described directly, but only implied or hinted at. In
magical realism, on the other hand, the supernatural is described in a detailed,
natural way, and this is essential to the resolution of its antinomy with the real.
Chanady explains that ‘the reader is carried away by the matter-of-fact descriptions so that he does not have the opportunity of questioning the fictitious
world view’ (MRF 123).
To Chanady, the focalizer is the point of view from which characters and
actions are presented. In the above passage, the ‘focalizer [here the narrator]
places a supernatural event on the same level as an ordinary occurrence, and
the narrative voice fuses the two levels (the logically impossible ascension and
the prosaic washing on the line)’ (MRF 36). Chanady states that the magical