Insight Editions · No. 55
A Companion to Magical Realism
Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (eds.)
This collection examines magical realism across literary traditions, tracing how its combination of the fantastic and the real engages local histories, communities, and politics.
A study guide to A Companion to Magical Realism by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (eds.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- The mode travels because cultures stay apart. Hart argues that a literature built on Latin America's riven heterogeneity gave other fissured, postcolonial societies a model (ch1).
- Magic is also literary and communal. Ouyang shows that magic comes from traditions such as the Nights as well as from local myth, and serves the desire for community, which brings the mode close to fantasy (ch2, ch3).
- The roots are visual, mythic and archival. Zamora, Shaw, King and Hart, Wilson, Robinson and Kristal trace magical objects, myths as devices, the earth as archive, the surrealist roots of the marvellous real, and Golden Age myth from Ovid to García Márquez's memoir (ch4 to ch10).
- Fantasy can face history. Henn, Núñez-Faraco, Rengifo, Berkowitz and Sceats test whether fantasy escapes or criticises, in Saramago, Rivera, Montero, Jewish crime fiction and Angela Carter (ch11 to ch16).
- The politics run from subversion to evasion. Fishburn and Swanson find subversion in Carpentier's humour and Allende's children's book; Price finds conservatism in Like Water for Chocolate; Ratner finds subversion in Persian Brides; Morris finds evasion and imperial magic in Nakagami; Fiddian reads Big Mama's Funeral as allegory of a new era (ch17 to ch23).
- Empire and nation shape the magic abroad. Allison, Sperl, Erickson, Jones and Ouyang read magic against British empire in Irish lyric, against an "empire complex" in the Sahara, through nomadic thought in the Maghreb, in Rushdie's butterflies and in Khoury's novel of names after the Lebanese state's collapse (ch24 to ch29).
The volume's argument: one mode, four parts, and a politics tested in each text.
Chapter map
| Ch | Title and author | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction: Magical Realism: Style and Substance (Stephen M. Hart) | The mode travels because it keeps cultures apart, not because it fuses them |
| 2 | Magical Realism and Beyond: Ideology of Fantasy (Wen-chin Ouyang) | Magic comes from literary tradition and desire for community, close to fantasy |
| 3 | Familiar Grounds, Novel Trajectories: The Fantastic, the Real and Magical Realism (Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang) | A celebration of Zamora and Faris; no Latin American straitjacket |
| 4 | Part I Introduction: Genealogies, Myths, Archives (Stephen M. Hart) | Genealogy, myth and archive: overlaid mythical strata |
| 5 | Swords and Silver Rings: Magical Objects in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez (Lois Parkinson Zamora) | Roh's, Borges's and García Márquez's magical objects |
| 6 | The Presence of Myth in Borges, Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo and García Márquez (Donald L. Shaw) | Myths as devices from three sources, not hidden truths |
| 7 | The Earth as Archive in Bombal, Parra, Asturias and Rulfo (Julia King and Stephen M. Hart) | The earth as Foucauldian archive; masculine mastery versus a feminine archive |
| 8 | Alejo Carpentier's Re-invention of América Latina as Real and Marvellous (Jason Wilson) | The marvellous real as surrealism turned on Breton |
| 9 | The Golden Age Myth in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ovid's Metamorphoses (Lorna Robinson) | Macondo's lost Golden Age read through Ovid |
| 10 | Lessons from the Golden Age in Gabriel García Márquez's Living to Tell the Tale (Efraín Kristal) | Life as a dream with moral commitments: the Golden Age secularized |
| 11 | Part II Introduction: History, Nightmare, Fantasy (Stephen M. Hart) | Is fantasy escape or political critique? |
| 12 | History and the Fantastic in José Saramago's Fiction (David Henn) | Saramago: the fantastic grows from ornament to engine |
| 13 | Magical-realist Elements in José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex (Humberto Núñez-Faraco) | The Vortex as forerunner; reality as cruel, not magical |
| 14 | Beyond Magical Realism in The Red of His Shadow by Mayra Montero (Alejandra Rengifo) | Voodoo takes Montero beyond technique |
| 15 | Cops, Robbers, and Anarcho-terrorists: Crime and Magical Realism's Jewish Question (Michael Berkowitz) | Jewish crime fiction and the unsettling of respectability |
| 16 | Flights of Fancy: Angela Carter's Transgressive Narratives (Sarah Sceats) | Carter's tales and Nights at the Circus as disturbing fantasy |
| 17 | Part III Introduction: The Politics of Magic (Wen-chin Ouyang) | A spectrum of politics: subversion, conservatism, evasion |
| 18 | Humour and Magical Realism in El reino de este mundo (Evelyn Fishburn) | Bisociative humour in Carpentier's Haiti |
| 19 | Magical Realism and Children's Literature: Isabel Allende's La Ciudad de las Bestias (Philip Swanson) | Allende inverts civilization and barbarism, with a First-World hero |
| 20 | Unsavoury Representations in Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate (Helene Price) | Magic that conserves gender, race and nation clichés |
| 21 | Not So Innocent: An Israeli Tale of Subversion: Dorit Rabinyan's Persian Brides (Tsila (Abramovitz) Ratner) | From folklore to magical realism; the Orient inside Israeli discourse |
| 22 | Magical Realism as Ideology: Narrative Evasions in the Work of Nakagami Kenji (Mark Morris) | Evasion and imperial magic in Nakagami's roji |
| 23 | Legend, Fantasy and the Birth of the New in Los funerales de la Mamá Grande by Gabriel García Márquez (Robin Fiddian) | Big Mama's death as allegory of a new era |
| 24 | Part IV Introduction: Empire, Nation, Magic (Wen-chin Ouyang) | Magic between empire and the nation-state |
| 25 | Magical Nationalism, Lyric Poetry and the Marvellous: W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney (Jonathan Allison) | The marvellous in Irish lyric, from Yeats to Heaney |
| 26 | Empire and Magic in a Tuareg Novel: Ibrāhīm al-Kawni's al-Khusūf (The Lunar Eclipse) (Stefan Sperl) | A speaking desert writes back to empire |
| 27 | Magical Realism and Nomadic Writing in the Maghreb (John D. Erickson) | Nomadic thought and The Sand Child's endless paths |
| 28 | Of Numerology and Butterflies: Magical Realism in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (Stephanie Jones) | Rushdie's numbers and butterflies; a wish for bounded community |
| 29 | From The Thousand and One Nights to Magical Realism: Postnational Predicament in The Journey of Little Ghandi by Elias Khoury (Wen-chin Ouyang) | Khoury's novel of names after the nation-state's fall |
The volume moves outward from its Latin American core while keeping it in view
About this book
A Companion to Magical Realism by Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang (eds.), 2005. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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Introduction: Magical Realism: Style and Substance (Stephen M. Hart)
From Roh to Macondo
Franz Roh's Nach-Expressionismus (1925) praised post-Expressionist painting for its "calm admiration of the magic of being", the discovery "that things already have their own faces", and for showing "the interior figure" of the exterior world. That tension of surface and innerness reappears in Alejo Carpentier's prologue to The Kingdom of this World (1949), where the "marvellous real" arises from "an unexpected alteration of reality".
Carpentier's centrepiece, Mackandal's execution, is a split event. The slaves see the ropes fall and Mackandal fly over their heads ("Mackandal sauvé!"); the French and their soldiers see him burn. The phrase "few saw" adds a note of ocular empiricism, and the reader's first thought is mass delusion. Yet Mackandal's metamorphoses are told as things "everyone knew", and in the last chapter Ti Noel turns himself into a goose. The Afro-Caribbean subaltern becomes a magical black archive hovering inside a white, empiricist narrative of slave rebellion; the novel "hovers between the real and the marvellous", the vacillation Todorov analysed in 1970.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the magic is no longer locked in an atavistic archive. It migrates with the perceiver: what is magical for the "First World" (a woman ascending to heaven, levitating priests) is ordinary in Macondo, and what is magical in Macondo (false teeth, magnets, ice) is ordinary for the First World. By setting up one paradigm and then reversing it, García Márquez leaves the reader no retreat into Us and Them. Then he "pulls his political punches": the banana company, the massacre of workers, the official denial ("nothing has ever happened in Macondo").
Hart's genealogy of magical realism, from painting to the postcolonial novel
| Novel | Where the magic sits | Political edge |
|---|---|---|
| The Kingdom of this World (Carpentier, 1949) | In the slaves' belief, against white empiricism | Calibanesque: the Haitian revolution |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez, 1967) | Wherever the perceiver stands; reversible | Calibanesque and revolutionary: the banana massacre |
| Midnight's Children (Rushdie, 1980) | In a palimpsest of memory and repeated generations | Partition, rigged elections, "reality ceases to exist" |
| The Famished Road (Okri, 1991) | In the abiku child's spirit sight | Party of the Rich, poisoned milk, Nigerian nationhood |
Heterogeneity, not mestizaje
Hart lists the global spread after 1967: Allende, Esquivel and Sepúlveda in the Hispanic world, and beyond it Kroetsch, Rushdie, D.M. Thomas, Angela Carter, Nakagami Kenji, Süskind, Ben Jelloun, Saramago, Morrison, Okri, Brink and others. Criticism moved from technique (Flores 1955, Leal 1967) to ideology in the 1980s and to postcolonial theory with Slemon (1988), culminating in Zamora and Faris's Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995).
Why did the mode travel? Following Elleke Boehmer, because it can express "a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement". Hart then rejects mestizaje as the governing metaphor. Antonio Cornejo Polar showed that mestizaje rests on a "salvational ideology" of conciliating synthesis that obviates "the social asymmetry of the originating contacts"; he proposes heterogeneity instead, a theory that is "radically anti-metaphoric, keeping as two what others wish to see as one".
Style without substance
Not everyone accepts the postcolonial thesis. Asturias accused García Márquez of stealing his ideas and of succeeding by publicity. William Rowe argued that in the 1980s magical realism became "a genre formula", adopted by Allende and Angela Carter; Raymond L. Williams called Allende's fiction facile imitation; Bloomsbury's website called Harry Potter "magical-realist". One answer would divide "authentic" works (Carpentier, García Márquez, Rushdie, Okri) from a style "emptied of political content" (Carter, Allende, Esquivel, Rowling). Hart finds this manicheistic: what of Morrison, who distanced herself from the label, Süskind's Perfume, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Grass's Tin Drum, or Carter's claim that Yorkshire is a kind of Third World? He also resists the opposite temptation, a purist relativism that treats every instance as unique and incomparable.
Roh's molecules and Carpentier's Haiti
Roh's 1925 book is not a brief slogan. He praises Post-Expressionism for the "calm admiration of the magic of being", for discovering that "things already have their own faces", and for showing "the interior figure, of the exterior world". The lasting image is molecular: the "unending miracle of eternally mobile and vibrating molecules" from which "permanent objects somehow appear", a "variable commotion" that "crystallizes into a clear set of constants". That surface-versus-innerness tension migrates into Carpentier's 1949 prologue. In Haiti in 1943 he saw "thousands of men, anxious for freedom" whose faith in Mackandal's lycanthropic powers "produced a miracle on the day of his execution". The marvellous real arises from "an unexpected alteration of reality", a "privileged revelation" favoured by reality's "unexpected richness".
In the novel the execution is a split event. Slaves see ropes fall and Mackandal fly ("Mackandal sauvé!"); French colonisers and Haitian soldiers see him burned. "Few saw" names ocular empiricism: the reader first reads mass delusion, then must hold both visions. Later metamorphoses are told as what "everyone knew", and Ti Noel turns into a goose. The Afro-Caribbean subaltern becomes a magical black archive inside a white empiricist slave-rebellion narrative. The novel "hovers between the real and the marvellous", the vacillation Todorov analysed in 1970.
Hart five-step genealogy from Roh to postcolonial travel
One Hundred Years and the reversible paradigm
In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) magic is no longer locked in an atavistic archive. It migrates with the perceiver. What is magical for the "First World" (ascent to heaven, levitating priests) is ordinary in Macondo; what is magical in Macondo (false teeth, magnets, ice) is ordinary elsewhere. By setting up one paradigm and then reversing it, García Márquez denies retreat into Us and Them. Then he "pulls his political punches": the banana company, the massacre, the official denial that "nothing has ever happened in Macondo". Hart reads that denial as the Calibanesque edge of the mode.
The critical path from Flores to Zamora and Faris
Hart sketches the critical itinerary: technique (Flores 1955, Leal 1967) to ideology in the 1980s to postcolonial theory with Slemon (1988), culminating in Zamora and Faris's Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995). Global spread after 1967 includes Allende, Esquivel, Sepúlvesda in the Hispanic world and Kroetsch, Rushdie, D.M. Thomas, Carter, Nakagami Kenji, Süskind, Ben Jelloun, Saramago, Morrison, Okri, Brink beyond it. Elleke Boehmer supplies the travel reason: a world "fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement".
Midnight's Children and The Famished Road as test cases
In Midnight's Children (1980) Saleem is "handcuffed to history", born with India at midnight on 15 August 1947. Memory pickles events; time becomes kaleidoscope rather than Genesis-to-Apocalypse. A rigged election makes "reality quite literally cease to exist". In The Famished Road (1991) the abiku child stands, in Ato Quayson's words, for "the fractious postcolonial history" of Nigeria; spirits and disability mark political disempowerment, and "the dead were curiously on the side of the innocents". Hart's claim that heterogeneity explains global travel rests heavily on these two novels.
Counter-voices Hart refuses to settle
Asturias accused García Márquez of theft and publicity. William Rowe called 1980s magical realism a "genre formula" adopted by Allende and Carter; Raymond L. Williams called Allende facile imitation; Bloomsbury's site branded Harry Potter "magical-realist". A manichean split would put Carpentier, García Márquez, Rushdie and Okri on the "authentic" side and Carter, Allende, Esquivel and Rowling on a style "emptied of political content". Hart rejects that split, and also rejects purist relativism that treats every instance as incomparable. Open questions he leaves standing: Morrison's distance from the label; Süskind's Perfume as magic or Gothic; Kafka's Metamorphosis; Grass's Tin Drum and whether Germany can be postcolonial; Carter's claim that Yorkshire is a kind of Third World; whether "Third World" survives the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989); and whether fantastic and magical realism are intimate (Chanady, Durix) or distinct (Lucila-Inés Mena, Bowers).
| Stance | What it claims | Hart's move |
|---|---|---|
| Authentic vs emptied | Only politically freighted Latin American texts count | Calls it manicheistic; Morrison, Kafka, Grass unsettle the cut |
| Purist relativism | Every local magic is unique and incomparable | Rejects it as overwhelming temptation that blocks the companion's comparative work |
| Heterogeneity thesis | Kept-apart worlds explain global travel | Affirmed via Cornejo Polar; evidenced mainly by Rushdie and Okri |
By the numbers Hart cites and the cast around him
Magical Realism and Beyond: Ideology of Fantasy (Wen-chin Ouyang)
Fredric Jameson opened his 1986 essay "On Magic Realism in Film" with "The concept of magic realism raises many problems". Magic can mean anything that defies empiricism; realism, seen from magic, is any grasp of reality outside conventional realism. Yet the term's very "hollowness" is what makes it seductive for Jameson. Alfred J. López brings the problem back to the act of naming: a European term applied to a non-European literature is "the allegory of a colonial fantasy: the mastery of reading as a reading of mastery". He rereads Carpentier, García Márquez and Rushdie as postcolonial desire for alterity, dismissing Jameson's postmodern approach as reduction to technique.
Meanwhile the mode has spread to Africa, Asia and Australia, to film and the arts, and to languages from Arabic and Chinese to Tibetan and Turkish. "There is no stopping it. It is everywhere."
Where does magic come from?
Two generalizations have "found universal sympathy": magic comes from local or indigenous myth, and it speaks against the imposition of Christianity and post-Enlightenment empiricism, so the novel, itself a European import, becomes the site of cultural recovery. Ouyang asks what changes if the "West" is Hispano-Catholic rather than Anglican or French, if Christianity was present before colonization (the Christians of the Middle East), or if the dominant religion is Islam.
Language matters too. Writing in English, French or Spanish means inheriting that tradition; García Márquez both reveres and subverts Greek and Spanish classics, and Borges takes his fantastic from the Western canon. Writers in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese or Persian inherit long written traditions rich in the fantastic, so their magic may come from intertextuality as a decolonizing return to native tradition, an "invented tradition" (Hobsbawm and Ranger) bounded by the nation-state.
| Assumed source of magic | Ouyang's complication |
|---|---|
| Local myth against Western empiricism | Which West: Hispano-Catholic, Protestant, French, British |
| Resistance to Christianity | Prior Christianity in colonized lands; Islam in the Middle East, Africa and India |
| Indigenous belief | Pre-realist Western texts (Borges) and non-Western written traditions |
| Deconstruction of grand narrative | Construction of an imagined community and nation |
Two accounts of where the magic comes from
Desire, nation and fantasy
Is the return to pre-colonial myth part of imagining the nation (Anderson), and does magical realism continue the foundational romances Doris Sommer studied? If so, its magic resembles the fantasy that Jacqueline Rose, in States of Fantasy, finds shaping the State of Israel: desire as both the condition of a state and its political actualization. Todorov placed desire at the centre of the fantastic. Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987) shows magical realism (angels and humans) turning into political allegory of Berlin and the Nazi past.
Jameson's opening and what magic is asked to do
Ouyang opens with Fredric Jameson's 1986 line that magic realism raises "many problems, both theoretical and historical". Across continents, media and genres the term has grounded debates on postcolonialism and postmodernism: natives recovering local cultures and writing back at empire; hybridities that accommodate multiplicities; challenges to European post-Enlightenment realism; remappings of novel and visual arts. The welcome story of diversification-with-a-common-core, she warns, can hide how the label opens and limits creative vistas at once.
Language choice as tradition-trap
Choosing English, French or Spanish as the language of engagement with colonisation means taking on that language's literary tradition and its internalisation of the "Western" canon. García Márquez looks up to and subverts classical Greek and Spanish texts. Magic comes not only from local myths and religions but from pre-realist Western texts. Borges draws the fantastic from the Western literary tradition, including the well-known influence of The Thousand and One Nights. Writing in a language that does not belong to the coloniser affords other mappings, especially where those languages carry their own long fantastic and marvellous canons.
Ouyang on language choice
Desire, nation and the ideology of fantasy
Ouyang presses the politics of desire inside fantasy. Nationalist and postcolonial projects often recruit magical realism to stage a desired nation, yet the same mode can expose the nation-state as a magical fiction that fails. Fantasy is never neutral décor: it carries an ideology about who may speak, which pasts count, and whether heterogeneity is celebrated or managed. The companion's later Parts III and IV take up that charge; here she clears the ground by refusing origin-and-purity games.
Migration, cinema and letting texts speak
Rapid translation, cosmopolis travel, internet and Hollywood redraw literary maps. Story migrates from literature to cinema and sometimes back as a different written text; the film can be "an improvement on and more popular than the original". Under those conditions, questions of discreteness, definition, category and origin matter less than how a text works and how it relates to world and other texts. Her closing invitation: let texts speak their own politics in multi-cultural, inter-generic and cross-media contexts, without abandoning familiar categories of knowledge.
Familiar Grounds, Novel Trajectories: The Fantastic, the Real and Magical Realism (Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang)
The essays revisit canonical names (Asturias, Rulfo, Carpentier, Borges, García Márquez, Allende, Rushdie), add writers who preceded the Boom (Bombal, Parra, Rivera), and bring in writers "analysed in the context of magical realism" for the first time: Yeats, Heaney, Saramago, Rabinyan, Ovid, Bombal, al-Kawni, Montero, Nakagami Kenji, Rivera and Khoury. Sceats and Swanson answer Rowe's charge against Carter and Allende; Jones dispels the idea that Rushdie pours "old Marquezian wine into new Indian bottles".
| Part | Question it asks |
|---|---|
| I Genealogies, Myths, Archives | How magical realism invents its own tradition |
| II History, Nightmare, Fantasy | New forms of magical interaction with realism |
| III The Politics of Magic | Postcolonial nationalist politics |
| IV Empire, Nation, Magic | The nation-state as magical realism's political frame |
Three groups of writers in the volume
Celebration with a method
Ten years after Zamora and Faris (1995), the editors cast the volume as celebration and method. They refuse a Latin American authenticity test. The aim is comparative readability across disciplines so connections show. Canonical names return (Asturias, Rulfo, Carpentier, Borges, García Márquez, Allende, Rushdie). Pre-Boom writers enter (Bombal, Parra, Rivera). Writers "analysed in the context of magical realism" here include Yeats, Heaney, Saramago, Rabinyan, Ovid, Bombal, al-Kawni, Montero, Nakagami Kenji, Rivera and Khoury.
What each Part is for
| Part | Editors' question | Gist they promise |
|---|---|---|
| I Genealogies, Myths, Archives | How the mode invents its tradition | Roh to Ovid, earth archive, Golden Age |
| II History, Nightmare, Fantasy | New forms of magical interaction with realism | Saramago to Carter; miracle or nightmare |
| III The Politics of Magic | Postcolonial nationalist politics of the mode | Subversion, conservatism, children's books, Japan |
| IV Empire, Nation, Magic | Nation-state as political frame | Ireland, Tuareg Libya, Maghreb, Rushdie, Khoury |
Sceats and Swanson answer Rowe's charge against Carter and Allende. Jones disputes the idea that Rushdie pours "old Marquezian wine into new Indian bottles". Every quotation is translated into English; a Guide to Further Reading closes the book. The editors' rhetorical questions are left open: is Rushdie less authentic than García Márquez? Is Allende's use of children's literature worse than her use of magical realism?
Familiar Grounds design
Part I Introduction: Genealogies, Myths, Archives (Stephen M. Hart)
He builds on Ángel Rama's Narrative Transculturation in Latin America (1982), which held that the Boom novel absorbed the Amerindian archive of myth and saw it from the inside. The essays then refine this: Zamora's magical objects, Shaw's many sources of myth, King and Hart's gendered archive, Wilson's Carpentier and surrealism, Robinson's Ovid and Kristal's memoirs.
Hart's three motifs for Part I
Essay-by-essay map of Part I
- Zamora. Genealogy of magic through objects: Roh's oppositional energy, Borges's magical idealism, García Márquez's baroque objects where "magic wells up". Shared concern: visible world versus invisible meanings; opposite directions of inference.
- Shaw. Builds on Ángel Rama's Narrative Transculturation (1982): Boom novels absorb Amerindian myth "from the inside". Then widens the archive: Borges uses Classical myth (Minotaur); Carpentier Classical and Afro-Caribbean (Orpheus, Mackandal); Asturias Mayan; Rulfo Christian with Mesoamerican; García Márquez an Americanist myth. Myths serve new cultural insights, not intrinsic mythic truth.
- King and Hart. Gendered archive: Asturias masculinocentric Mayan capture; Rulfo's Beyond as disorientation; Bombal and Parra de-petrify images of women and release interiorised female consciousness in body and sexuality.
- Wilson. How lo real maravilloso matured: surrealist links, three allegorical journey-moments (Kingdom opening, Ecué-Yamba-Ó, Esteban in Explosion in a Cathedral), jettisoning anachronistic surrealism while restamping its essence in America.
- Robinson. Golden Age from Plato, Ovid, Virgil to Macondo's world "so recent that many things lacked names". Belatedness and literary syncretism despite Ovid's peace-and-prosperity frame versus García Márquez's violence-and-corruption frame.
- Kristal. Living to Tell the Tale as portal into popular memory, United Fruit, family history, and Gaitán's 1948 assassination; magical realism grows from that archival practice.
Part I sequence Hart summarises
Swords and Silver Rings: Magical Objects in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez (Lois Parkinson Zamora)
The term is older than Roh. Novalis used "magical realist" in notebook entries of 1798-99 for a figure who overarches known and unknown, and Roh studied with Heinrich Wölfflin, whose Baroque is built on the play of antitheses. Roh's 1925 book on the Post-Expressionists was translated in 1927 by Ortega y Gasset's Revista de Occidente with the title reversed (Realismo mágico first). Roh himself retired the term in his 1958 survey, calling the movement one of history's "retardations", and the art-historical label that survived was Neue Sachlichkeit. Literary critics, resuscitating the term just then for Latin America, reversed Roh's emphasis, stressing the magic rather than the real.
In realism an object represents only itself; in magical realism it must also represent "the potential for some kind of alternative reality": Clara's three-legged table, Melquíades' magnets, Saleem's nose. Magic may inhere in objects or precede and generate them (Mackandal's spirit force; Borges's idealism in "Tlön"). Either way these texts "conflate sight and insight", and their ability to hold contradictory worlds without reconciling them explains the mode's appeal to postcolonial writers.
Roh's magical objects
Roh praised the clarity, flattened perspective and return to the human figure in Radziwill, Kanoldt, Dix, Grosz, Schad, de Chirico and Rousseau: "a new style that is thoroughly of this world". Mystery "does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it". His formula echoes Shklovsky's defamiliarization (1917). The object, seen "close up from the other side", carries an "incessant tension between submitting to the world and confronting it with creative energy": the more objective the image, the stronger its magic. Ortega's "Dehumanization of Art" (1925) runs parallel, and so do Hulme, Joyce's epiphany, Pound and Eliot.
Borges's poetic objects
The young ultraísta Borges wanted images that are "verbal objects, pure and independent like a crystal or a silver ring" (and, of Quevedo, "like a sword or a silver ring"). But his fiction reverses Roh. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940) the hrönir are secondary objects duplicating lost ones, and the ur, "an object brought into being by hope", is more real still; nouns are formed from adjectives ("round airy-light on dark" for moon). When a Tlönian compass and cone intrude into the narrator's world, their weight fills him with "repugnance and fear". Borges admires the kenning ("sword-water" for blood), Mallarmé's refusal "to name an object outright", and Morris's centaur, where what matters is our belief that the poet had an image.
García Márquez's Baroque objects
The ice and magnets of One Hundred Years of Solitude are "perfect Roh-ian objects" ("Things have a life of their own... It's simply a matter of waking up their souls"), but they are not quiet: exuberant enumeration gives his world a sensuous, theatrical Baroque texture, as when Fermina Daza buys "six of everything" in the Arcade of the Scribes. Where Borges's lists dissolve specificity, García Márquez's heighten it.
The bridge is Carpentier, who soon after 1949 fused his marvellous real with the Baroque because he needed the Baroque for its realism: "Show me the object; make it with your words so that I can touch it". Counter-Reformation art answered Protestant iconoclasm by making visible images a path to invisible truth; attributes (Peter's keys, Catherine's wheel) externalize interiority. García Márquez's characters work the same way: Aurelianos all mind, José Arcadios all eros, Remedios the Beauty levitating like a painted Virgin, Florentino a "Suffering Saint". With Octavio Paz, Romanticism is "the apotheosis of the subject", the Baroque "the metamorphosis of the object", and García Márquez makes "the subject disappear in the baroque object".
| Writer | Kind of object | Direction | Lineage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Franz Roh's painters | Magical object, still and clear | Mystery palpitates behind the real | Wölfflin, Novalis, Shklovsky |
| Borges | Poetic, secondary object (hrön, ur, kenning) | From the invisible to the world | Ultraísmo, Mallarmé, Snorri |
| García Márquez | Baroque object, profuse and dynamic | From the visible to invisible meaning | Carpentier, Counter-Reformation iconography |
Opposite ends of the spectrum, one shared aim
The avant-garde object: Ortega, Hulme, Joyce
Roh did not stand alone. Ortega y Gasset's "The Dehumanization of Art" (1925) made a parallel case for literature: what obscured the poetic object was not abstraction but romantic emotionalism, people "delight in their own emotions" instead of in artistic objects. Ortega took Mallarmé as his watershed, praising poems as "small lyrical objects distinct from human fauna and flora", and his "extramundane" matches Roh's "other side" of the object. In English the analogues were T.E. Hulme (poetry "all dry and hard"), Joyce's epiphany as "a revelation of the whatness of a thing", and the Imagism of Pound, Eliot and Williams. All of them wanted an image crystalline in structure, a sharply focused object whose referent is "both in the world and beyond it". The young Borges's "silver ring" belongs to this family, and Zamora thinks it likely he read the 1927 Revista de Occidente translation of Roh, since he had published in the Revista himself.
Removedness from the real
Borges's favourite devices (the mirror, labyrinth, dream, aleph, trompe l'oeil and mise en abyme) all call visual perception into question and serve his theme of the illusory nature of knowledge. In "Narrative Art and Magic" he asks how William Morris makes a reader see a centaur, and answers that what matters is not the image but "our sustained belief in the fact that he had one". The Aleph and Pascal's sphere are poetic objects that circle their referent without naming it; allegory makes absent narratives more present than the one we read. "The Zahir" and "Funes the Memorious" are parables of failed removedness: one man blinded by a single coin, another by an infinite proliferation of objects. If Tlön takes idealism to its absurd extreme, the Zahir and Funes do the same with pragmatism; Borges aspires to Tlön's idealizing language and works to subvert Funes's utterly specific one.
From painting to prose: the object as the thread of Zamora's genealogy
The subject disappears in the object
The 1920s also revived the Baroque: Lorca and Dámaso Alonso exhumed Góngora for the 1927 tercentenary, Reyes did the same in Mexico, Benjamin published on German Baroque drama in 1928, and Borges wrote on Quevedo, Browne and Góngora before dismissing the Baroque (though never Quevedo or Cervantes). Zamora therefore proposes the Baroque as one more branch of the magical-realist family tree. For García Márquez she borrows Octavio Paz's contrast: Romanticism is "the apotheosis of the subject", the Baroque "the metamorphosis of the object". García Márquez's characters are objectified, from Aureliano's little gold fishes to the Patriarch's body parts, and Florentino's six hundred and twenty-one women are presented as saintly abstinence and martyrdom. By reaching back to a pre-Romantic self embedded in communal and material culture, he lets "the subject disappear in the baroque object" and so awakens the souls of things. Fermina Daza, filling the void of her marriage with things in a Baroque horror vacui, is the emblem.
In the end more unites than separates them: both use defamiliarization to renew our sense of the real, and magical realism has, Zamora concludes, "reinvigorated realistic modes of narration".
Novalis behind Roh, and what Roh actually saw
Before Roh, Novalis (notebooks 1798-99) named a "magical idealist" and a "magical realist" who overarch known and unknown, finite and infinite. Zamora (via Irene Guenther) treats that refusal of either/or instrumental reason as Roh's distant source. Roh studied with Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich (1915-19). Against Expressionism's "ecstatically dilated eyes", Post-Expressionism offers "a new 20/20 vision" that looks at rather than through the world: "we are offered a new style that is full of the relish of existence of objects which are still alive". Magical meaning is not added by the artist; it is discovered in the object.
Borges's silver ring, hrönir and the Zahir
Borges's "The Zahir" (1949) gives Zamora her emblem: a twenty-centavo coin that becomes an object so absorbing that ordinary reality fades. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" the hrönir are secondary objects that reproduce lost ones, "second degree" things that make sight into insight only when the visible is overcome. Kennings, swords and rings in Borges are poetic condensations: the object is a doorway out of empiricism. Zamora labels this magical idealism. She admits Borges's reading of Roh "is not documented".
García Márquez's ice, caramel animals and lists
Where Borges generates objects from ideas, García Márquez lets "magic well up" from baroque lists: ice that is the "greatest invention of our time", magnets dragging pots, caramel animals, Remedios the Beauty's ascent. Ortega y Gasset's lyrical object, T.E. Hulme and Imagist concreteness, and Joyce's epiphanic things form the avant-garde bridge Zamora draws between Roh's painting and Macondo's prose. The subject can disappear into the object: Funes overwhelmed by memory; Florentino's catalogue of lovers (printed as "six hundred and twenty-one").
Zamora object genealogy in five steps
| Mode | Direction | Emblem |
|---|---|---|
| Magical idealism (Borges) | Invisible → world | Zahir, hrönir, kennings |
| Baroque realism (García Márquez) | Visible → invisible meanings | Ice, magnets, ascent |
| Shared aim | Defamiliarise to renew the real | Roh's "relish of existence" |
Benjamin, Trauerspiel and removedness
Zamora links Baroque allegory and mournful objects to Benjamin's Trauerspiel study (she calls it his only book-length study; the A closer look notes the doctoral dissertation on Romantic criticism). Removedness from the real is not escape: it is how objects teach insight. Flaubert's epigraph ("look at it for a long time") and Roh's 20/20 vision bookend the essay: attention makes the ordinary magical without leaving the world.
One generalization, two directions
Zamora's lasting generalization: magical realism's visualizing capacity creates magical meanings by envisioning ordinary things extraordinarily. Borges and García Márquez share concern with visible/invisible relations but move opposite ways along the object thread from Roh. Affinity, not documented influence, carries the genealogy; A closer look keeps that honest. Objects (swords, silver rings, ice, Zahir) are the essay's method and its title.
Subject disappears into the object
Funes drowned in memory; the Zahir eats attention; Florentino's list of lovers (printed count kept) turns persons into catalogue. Zamora's avant-garde bridge (Ortega, Hulme, Joyce) explains why the object can absorb the subject without leaving realism's world. Magical idealism and Baroque realism are opposite ends of one spectrum with one aim: defamiliarise to renew the real.
Zamora: cost and gain of object attention
The Presence of Myth in Borges, Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo and García Márquez (Donald L. Shaw)
Ricci treats Carpentier's "faith" as a special insight, even a "perception of Noumenal Reality". Shaw calls this "a mystique... without proof". Against Camayd-Freixas, whose narrow definition ties magical realism to indigenous primitivism and so accepts only four writers, he shows each author mixing sources.
Five writers, three kinds of myth
Borges. Associated with the movement since Flores (1955), because for him in a world we are not programmed to understand "anything, however outlandish, is possible". The old gaucho "as if outside time" who throws Dahlman the knife in "El Sur" figures the myth of Argentine-ness. "The House of Asterion" uses the Minotaur not for Everyman (Alazraki) but to explore those who choose evil, then shifts into an inverted Redemption myth; several stories use circular time, later central to Macondo.
Carpentier. In The Kingdom of this World the marvel lies partly in Haitian history itself and partly in the Mackandal myth, which drives the revolt after his death. But Carpentier insists Mackandal really burns: the myth is an illusion, used to show the power of collective faith, "even when it is without foundation". The Lost Steps (1953) carries Jason, Sisyphus, Prometheus, the Odyssey and Orpheus; Vassar concludes that humanity "is not operating in a totally closed system", in line with Carpentier's belief in a slow upward spiral of progress.
Asturias. El Señor Presidente (1946), once a protest novel, has been reread as an allegory of the human condition built on Tohil, a cruel tribal god, and an inverted Lucifer myth, with El Pelele as a parody of Christ. Men of Maize (1949) and Mulata de tal (1963) blend, in Prieto's words, "Mayan mythology, surrealist rhetoric" and sociopolitical consciousness.
Rulfo. Pedro Páramo (1955) sets its myths in rural Jalisco, mixing Greek, biblical and popular sources (souls in torment). Juan Preciado's return to a green Comala ruled by his father becomes a parody of Christian belief: a vengeful God-figure "yearning for love but denied it", an incestuous Adam and Eve, and Pedro murdered by his own son "in a transparent reference to the Death of God".
García Márquez. In Big Mama's Funeral (1962) a mythicized matriarch who owns the telegraph poles and regulates the sunshine dies with the feudal era. One Hundred Years of Solitude reduces Colombian history to repetitive cycles ("the linearity of history leads into the circularity of myth") and adds Flood, Paradise, plagues and Apocalypse; "no single myth or mythology prevails".
Macondo: four guises of myth and an open ending
Almost every critic finds the presence of myth most developed in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Shaw borrows González Echevarría's inventory of four guises: stories resembling Classical or biblical myths (the Flood, Paradise, the Seven Plagues, the Apocalypse, a genealogy with a Hebrew Bible ring); characters who recall mythic heroes (José Arcadio Buendía as a sort of Moses, Rebeca as a female Perseus, Remedios ascending in white sheets like a popular print of the Virgin's Ascension); stories with supernatural elements, such as José Arcadio's blood returning to Úrsula; and a beginning, as in myth, in violence and incest. They co-mingle, so "no single myth or mythology prevails".
Nor does any one interpretation. Everything depends on the Apocalypse at the end. Mena and Williamson see history finally devoured by myth, with no myth of final Redemption; Gerald Martin insists the myths live in the characters' minds, not the author's. García Márquez himself said that "reality is also people's myths". Shaw also corrects Camayd-Freixas, who calls the result "degraded myth": the myth is no more degraded here than in El Señor Presidente or Pedro Páramo, it is simply used to express a negative vision of reality. Gabriel's departure from Macondo can be read as escape from its mythical mentality.
González Echevarría's inventory, as Shaw uses it
| Writer | Myths used | What they serve |
|---|---|---|
| Borges | Minotaur, gaucho, circular time | Argentine identity; the psychology of evil |
| Carpentier | Mackandal; Jason, Orpheus, Odyssey | Collective faith in history; a spiral of progress |
| Asturias | Tohil, Lucifer, Mayan lore | Allegory of the human condition; social critique |
| Rulfo | Telemachus, Fall, souls in torment | Parodied Christianity; Mexican filiation |
| García Márquez | Flood, Apocalypse, Big Mama | Cyclical, pessimistic history; end of feudalism |
Against Ricci's mythic consciousness
Graciela Ricci's Magical Realism and Mythic Consciousness (1983, as Shaw dates it) accepts both inherent Latin American marvelousness and a special "fé" that Shaw paraphrases as "conocimiento sapiencial" and even "percepción de la Realidad Nouménica". Shaw calls that a mystique without proof. Inspection of the narratives shows myths used as devices for the writers' own attitudes, not as carriers of intrinsic mythic truth. That is his key distinction.
Writer by writer: Classical, Christian, indigenous
- Borges. Classical primarily: the Minotaur in "The House of Asterion", the labyrinth as intellectual myth rather than Amerindian archive.
- Carpentier. Classical Orpheus in The Lost Steps; Afro-Caribbean Mackandal and Voodoo in The Kingdom of This World; Henri Christophe staged as historical myth.
- Asturias. Mayan folklore in Men of Maize; the maize cycle as living cosmology, not museum exoticism.
- Rulfo. Christian afterlife fused with Mesoamerican death worlds in Pedro Páramo; Comala as limbo where voices replace bodies.
- García Márquez. An Americanist myth of foundation, flood, plague and apocalypse; González Echevarría's inventory of biblical, Classical, heroic and incestuous origin myths that Shaw uses for Macondo's four guises.
Myths express (1) a "primitive" meeting of cultures, (2) the author's view of Latin American nationality and politics, and (3) a wider human condition. Gerald Martin adds that myths live in the characters' minds. The ending of One Hundred Years remains open: apocalypse can be read as curse fulfilled or as readerly choice.
Shaw's polemical hinge
Macondo's open apocalypse
Shaw, via González Echevarría, inventories biblical flood/plagues, mythic heroes (Moses, Perseus, Ascension), supernatural origin in incest, and Apocalypse as reading decision. The end does not close the device/truth debate; it shows myth's third function (human condition) can override nationalist myth. Martin's note that myths live in characters' minds blocks author-mystique readings like Ricci's noumenal faith.
Shaw: inventory without mystique
The Earth as Archive in Bombal, Parra, Asturias and Rulfo (Julia King and Stephen M. Hart)
María Luisa Bombal
Flores in 1955 called Bombal's "oneiric stories" precursors of magical realism's "magnificent flowering", but she is now seen as only tangential. Her strongest lineage is Romanticism, where women are objectified and "petrified". Bombal inverts that relation. In The Shrouded Woman (La amortajada) the dead Ana María is a subject with memories who gains power over men on re-entering the womb of the earth, and the reader sees the burial from below. Nature is feminized and domesticated (a garden, one tree outside Brígida's window, never the pampas or jungle of the novela de la tierra), yet charged with myth.
Bombal claimed only her mother's fairy tales as an influence and denied any campaign: "I was passionate about the personal, the inner world, the heart, art, nature." Her quest, as Lucía Guerra Cunningham notes, is inward, unlike Don Quixote's; in The Final Mist (La última niebla) mist and imagination cannot be told apart, and in "Las islas nuevas" Yolanda's atrophied wing marks severance from a primordial, pre-social space.
Teresa de la Parra
In Ifigenia (1924) and Mama Blanca's Memoirs (1929) nature is an idealized pre-socialized space of childhood or girlhood, before marriage made a woman's role in 1920s Venezuela. María Eugenia, bathing alone and naked, believing herself the living soul of the river scene, loses "all notion of my existence" and awakens to her love for Gabriel Olmedo, an active, sensual agent unlike the Romantic muse. But the episode is parenthetical: she finally conforms. In Mama Blanca's Memoirs the hacienda Piedra Azul, ruled by the mother, is a feminized colonial paradise lost on moving to Caracas. The loss is replaced by generation: children, stories and the memoirs themselves, passed from hand to hand and never seeking publication.
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Men of Maize (1949), "the first great 'magical-realist' novel" for Gerald Martin, opens with Gaspar Ilóm lying dead under the earth, at once a nineteenth-century Mayan insurgent against land sales and a spirit "made of maize" in the sense of the Popol Vuh. Asturias gives the Mayan metaphor postcolonial force: settlers burn the forest, and history is foreshortened as Slemon describes. Only the oppressed can morph into their nagual, while Colonel Godoy's chapter is written realistically; the shamanistic knowledge "hidden beneath the mountains" is an archive the ladinos neither know nor want.
Juan Rulfo
Pedro Páramo (1955) begins with a journey down to Comala and the dead, one of Zamora's "American books of the dead". But where Men of Maize recovers past wisdom, Rulfo's journey to origins is frustrated at every turn. Comala resembles Purgatory; Day of the Dead imagery appears in the skull whose jaw "came off as if it was made of sugar". The dialogue "Aren't you dead?" admits four readings; "The murmurs killed me". "Rather than ontology Pedro Páramo deals in hauntology", and the metaphysical "town without grace" is also a political one, built on Pedro Páramo's murders.
Caves beneath the mountains, a town without grace
In Men of Maize style itself takes sides. The chapter on Colonel Chalo Godoy, who leads the attack on the Mayan peasants, is noticeably more realist than the chapter on Nicho the Postman's lost wife María Tecún, which opens in a Modernist, stream-of-consciousness voice: "From his liana tongue, from his teeth of coyote's milk". Access to magic follows the same line. Only the oppressed (Gaspar Ilóm, Nicho, María Tecún) can change into animal form; in chapter XVIII the postman and the curer descend into caves to see the nagual emerge, and those who return "keep a constrained silence". This "world hidden beneath the mountains" is an archive of which Godoy and his ladino henchmen know nothing, and King and Hart call it the archival substratum in which magical realism germinates.
Rulfo's earth is political too. The boundary dispute between Toribio Alderete and Pedro Páramo is later "dealt with", which means Alderete was murdered, so when Comala is "a town without grace" the phrase works in a metaphysical and a political sense at once. Asturias's strategy is recuperative and metaphorical; Rulfo's world is shorn from its roots, a "radical metonymic unknowledge".
Two male writers, two relations to the buried archive
| Writer | Earth as archive | Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Bombal | A shrouded body re-entering the earth; fairy-tale interior | Feminocentric, inward, sensual |
| Parra | River and hacienda as pre-social girlhood | Feminocentric, nostalgic, parenthetical |
| Asturias | Mayan earth, nagual, caves beneath the mountains | Recuperative, metaphorical, masculinocentric |
| Rulfo | Comala's whispering dead | "Radical metonymic unknowledge", masculinocentric |
Four writers, one archive, divided by gender
Foucault's archive under the soil
Against González Echevarría's Myth and Archive and Rama's residual Latin American legacy, King and Hart take Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge: the archive "emerges in fragments, regions and levels" and begins "with the outside of our language". Embodied in earth, it becomes a subterranean tesoro excavated with imagination and language. Nature shows the visceral materiality of life and death, culture and myth.
Bombal and Parra: feminocentric recovery
María Luisa Bombal joins woman's body to earth and water; burial and desire undo petrified feminine images. Teresa de la Parra's girlhood in nature (Ifigenia and related texts) charts an interior archive before social marriage scripts close it. Both de-petrify the images male Boom precursors had promoted.
Asturias and Rulfo: mastery that fails differently
Asturias in Men of Maize captures Mayan myth through what the essay calls masculinocentric mastery, yet magic sides with the dispossessed: Godoy's realist chapters versus Nicho and Tecún's poetic ones; caves keep the Mayan archive. Rulfo's Pedro Páramo stages a Beyond of Christian and Amerindian melding as disorientation: a murdered neighbour, a town without grace, roots cut into "unknowing". Asturias is recuperative and metaphorical; Rulfo metonymic, a world "shorn off from its roots".
Earth archive path across four writers
Four writers, one binary under strain
The essay's own Rulfo reading (unknowing, echoes, town without grace) strains the "mastery" pole of its gender binary; A closer look notes that. Still, the Bombal/Parra recovery of body and girlhood nature remains the constructive half: feminocentric archive as uncharted, not residual. Foucault's fragment-archive justifies earth as medium: discontinuity, outside of language, treasure that cannot be held whole.
Alejo Carpentier's Re-invention of América Latina as Real and Marvellous (Jason Wilson)
The French connection
For Latin American writers Paris was the capital of culture; Darío was accused in 1888 of a French mindset, Huidobro duplicated his poems in French as "Vincent Huidobro", and César Moro wrote in French while living in Peru and Mexico. Carpentier grew up speaking French (Neruda called him "the French writer"). He reached Paris in 1928, escaping Machado's prison on Robert Desnos's journalist papers, and his attitude to Breton follows Desnos's. When Breton expelled Desnos in the Second Manifesto (1929), Carpentier wrote the closing piece of the counter-pamphlet Un cadavre (1930), recounting his single meeting with Breton, who said that if surrealism in Latin America was Éluard's poetry then surrealism was "foutu". Elsewhere Carpentier compared Breton to a Mussolini.
The surrealist world map rested on exoticism: the less they knew of a culture, the more they expected natural surrealists. Breton found Frida Kahlo "naturally surrealist"; Roger Caillois was expelled for cutting open a Mexican jumping bean to show the worm.
Two stolen terms
Le merveilleux. Carpentier relocated it in Caribbean nature and history, calling the Parisian marvellous "mental, vicarious and bookish", which Wilson calls "a trick", since Nadja and Le Paysan de Paris were grounded in real urban journeys. He linked the urban with reason and the tropics with desmesura (excess).
Les pas perdus. The Lost Steps (1953) answers Breton's Les Pas perdus (1924). Its musicologist leaves his surrealist mistress Mouche ("fly", also Sartre's Les Mouches) for Rosario, a woman of the interior; Mouche, an astrologer citing Rimbaud's "bateau ivre", is "a latter day Nadja, only ridiculed". For Carpentier the steps back to the origins of art are found; for Breton, who rejected history for a new start, they are lost.
Counter-voyages
Against Darío's poem "Caracol", where a shell brings Europe's whispered treasures across the sea, Carpentier writes counter-voyages. In the opening chapter of The Kingdom of this World Ti Noel sees four wax heads in the barber's, calf heads in the butcher's "with wigs of lettuce", and his shaved master: white, wax, dead, food, a surrealist tableau. In Écue-Yamba-Ó (1933) red sugar "tasting of earth, hooves and swear words" returns from the foreign refinery "pale and lifeless": the journey to Paris is a journey to death. In Explosion in a Cathedral (El siglo de las luces, 1962) European glass, polished by the sea, washes up as a "mysterious novelty", a natural objet trouvé; the Ocean is an Unconscious restoring magic lost in Europe.
| Journey moment | Direction | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Wax heads (The Kingdom of this World) | Colonial master in the colony | White culture as wax, dead meat, future execution |
| Sugar crystals (Écue-Yamba-Ó) | America to Europe | Life drained to pale, lifeless whiteness |
| Polished glass (El siglo de las luces) | Europe to America | European debris remade as marvel |
How Carpentier turned surrealism against Breton and renamed it
Lam, Sartre and the refusal
Carpentier contrasted André Masson's uncomprehending jungle with Wifredo Lam's La jungla (1942-43), yet Lam was himself a surrealist, close to Picasso and Breton, who called him surrealism's best hope in 1946. Lam admitted Cuba had no jungle; he painted a "psychic" state. Why did Carpentier deny the filiation? Because by the late 1940s Sartre had demolished surrealism in What is Literature? (1948) and surrealism looked démodé just as Cortázar, Paz and Molina embraced it. So Carpentier said surrealism was over in Paris and badly imitated in Latin America, and "He called it 'lo real maravilloso'."
Paris, Desnos and the refusal to write for Breton
Carpentier arrives in Paris 1928 as a 24-year-old (Wilson's dates imply 1904, though the essay prints 1901-1980), fleeing Machado on Robert Desnos's journalist papers. He spends eleven years (1928-39) bumping into surrealists daily yet refusing Breton's magazine. Desnos is expelled in the 1929 second manifesto. Hispanic painters (Miró, Dalí, Domínguez, Matta, Varo, Lam) could join more easily because the image crosses language; Latin American writers faced the "viaje a París" as cultural submission. César Moro even wrote poetry in French for Breton's journal (1933).
Two stolen terms and three journey-moments
Wilson's core claim: Carpentier took Breton's le merveilleux and les pas perdus and turned them against Paris. Surrealist marvellous stayed urban (Nadja 1928, Paysan de Paris 1926); Carpentier linked urban with reason and tropical nature with desmesura. The three allegorical journeys Hart's Part intro flags: opening of The Kingdom of This World, the start of Ecué-Yamba-Ó, and Esteban's path in Explosion in a Cathedral (El siglo de las luces). Los pasos perdidos (1953) intellectualises the Amazon return; mistress Mouche alludes to Sartre's Les Mouches (1943).
Haiti, Lam and the tourist shock
Breton in Haiti (Wilson prints 1941 with Pierre Mabille; later Lam visit 1944) watches Voodoo and nearly faints: "C'est horrible". Carpentier's Sans Souci / Citadelle revelation: Christophe "much more surprising than all the cruel kings invented by the surrealists". Alec Waugh's Hot Countries (1930) shows the same aesthetics of shock. Wifredo Lam becomes the visual hinge between surrealism and Caribbean form. Wilson's verdict: the gaze that found Haiti marvellous was still an exoticist surrealist gaze turned inward.
Wilson: surrealism inverted, not abandoned
Mouche, Sartre and the Amazon witness
In Los pasos perdidos the musician-protagonist must abandon jungle paradise to witness the twentieth century's crises. Mistress Mouche (French for fly) alludes to Sartre's Les Mouches: bad faith and freedom staged in tropical allegory. Carpentier intellectualises the return; Wilson keeps the surrealist optics visible underneath Americanist renaming. Lam's painting and Sartre's theatre mark the refusal to be only Breton's exotic supplier.
Wilson's theft-and-restamp in one view
Verdict: closer to surrealism than admitted
Wilson's through-line: Carpentier jettisoned anachronistic surrealist elements while restamping essence in America, yet the Haiti revelation still uses surrealist shock aesthetics shared with tourist writing. Eleven Paris years of daily surrealist contact without writing for Breton mark intimate rivalry, not clean break. Lam, Desnos, Sartre's flies and stolen terms (le merveilleux, les pas perdus) are the evidence trail. Re-invention is real; innocence of the French connection is not.
Wilson evidence trail in five beats
The Golden Age Myth in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ovid's Metamorphoses (Lorna Robinson)
Two new worlds
Macondo opens as a village of twenty houses by a river whose stones are "white and enormous like prehistoric eggs", a world "so recent that many things lacked names". The naming recalls Genesis; the "polished" stones suggest an artist-demiurge as much as nature. But the first line, Colonel Aureliano Buendía before the firing squad, already undermines the idyll: the new world is a façade over a much longer ancestry.
Ovid's golden age (Met. 1.89-112) is defined by absences, all of them man-made: no avenger, no punishment, no bronze tablets of law, no pine felled to sail the sea. The earth "gave all things spontaneously", with Italian strawberries, acorns and zephyrs, and Ovid tells it as plain history within a song "from the world's very beginning up to the present time".
Ovid among his models
Under Augustus the Empire was hailed as a new golden age. Virgil's Georgics fused the myth with an ideal of farm work, under a wise Jupiter. Hesiod's first age knew no toil; Lucretius pictured early men as beasts and used "semina rerum" for atoms. Ovid bypasses Virgil to restore Hesiod's toil-free age, gives Jupiter a capricious character, and bends Lucretius's scientific vocabulary to an "intrinsically protean and mysteriously animate universe". The mixing foregrounds artifice: Ovid's motive is aesthetic more than political.
| Source | Golden age | Ovid's use |
|---|---|---|
| Hesiod, Works and Days | Complete rest, no work | Restored, against Virgil |
| Virgil, Georgics | Work-centred, a wise Jupiter | Echoed, but Jupiter made arbitrary |
| Lucretius, De Rerum Natura V | Brute early life; atoms | Vocabulary reversed into magic |
| García Márquez | Macondo as realized utopia | Chroniclers, More, Virgil's rusted armour |
Macondo as someone else's dream
García Márquez builds early Macondo from European texts. The unnamed things echo Cortés writing to Charles V ("As I do not know what to call these things"); the birdsong so loud that one woman plugs her ears exaggerates Columbus's journals; the symmetrical houses, none getting more sun than another, recall More's Utopia (1516); the skeleton in rusted armour echoes the soldier's armour in Georgics 1.493-7. "A truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died" is the Classical utopia actually inhabited.
Robinson's answer to Carpentier's territorial claim
Testing the territorial claim against Ovid
Robinson starts from Carpentier's claim that America's history is a "chronicle of the marvellous real", and from Asturias's and García Márquez's territorialising of magical realism. She then applies those assertions to Ovid's Metamorphoses (completed 7 CE / printed here as 7 A.D.), a text deep inside the Classical Western tradition Latin American writers claim to react against. If Ovid already uses magical-realist modes, the territorial monopoly weakens.
Shared Golden Age, different politics
Macondo's world "so recent that many things lacked names" recalls Golden Age bliss in Plato, Ovid and Virgil. Both texts show belatedness and literary syncretism: layers of prior stories remade. The contextual contrast Hart's intro stresses: Ovid writing in Augustan peace and prosperity (the essay passes lightly over exile in 8 CE); García Márquez writing amid Colombian violence and corruption. Metamorphosis as narrative engine links them: bodies change, names lag, wonder is narrated as fact.
Robinson: Classical vs LA claim
Syncretism and belatedness as shared form
Robinson's comparative point is formal: both Ovid and García Márquez write as latecomers inside already-crowded myth libraries. Names lag bodies; metamorphosis is narrative fact. Territorial claims (Asturias, Carpentier, García Márquez) meet a Classical text that already naturalises wonder. The companion's Part I thus refuses a single birthplace even while honouring American overlays.
Golden Age against monopoly
Lessons from the Golden Age in Gabriel García Márquez's Living to Tell the Tale (Efraín Kristal)
Time, house, archive
The book opens in 1950 as his mother appears in a Barranquilla bookshop: "I'm your mother... I've come to ask you to please go with me to sell the house." The journey to Aracataca reaches back to United Fruit rails "built at night" because the sun made tools too hot, and forward to 1965, when the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him on the road to Acapulco. The house is a ruin and earns nothing; instead the trip yields his material: the square in Ciénaga where the army shot the banana strikers in 1928, his parents' telegraph courtship (Leaf Storm, Love in the Time of Cholera), his grandfather the civil-war colonel, a plantation called Macondo, and a Proustian soup at the doctor's house.
For form, he found in Kafka's "Metamorphosis" the impassive voice of his grandmother Tranquilina Iguarán; "popular memory" corrected official history; at school he recited "the unrepeatable poetry of the Spanish Golden Age". In Barranquilla, among Don Ramón Vinyes's group, people "lived then in the shadow of poetry", reading Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka and Borges in Argentine translations.
| Layer of the past | Where it surfaces |
|---|---|
| Pre-Columbian and Indian | Arawak Indians on the sierra, coca and ginger |
| Colonial era and slavery | The family and region's history |
| Civil wars, War of a Thousand Days | The grandfather; No One Writes to the Colonel |
| American domination | United Fruit, the 1928 massacre, Panama's "amputation" |
| La Violencia | Gaitán's assassination, 9 April 1948; censorship |
The political education
Anti-imperialism came early, from the grandfather's account of the massacre and the loss of Panama, which left "a nation with an Andean mentality". A teacher who "admired Lin Yutang and believed in apparitions of the dead" was a living instance of magical realism. The turning point was 9 April 1948: Gaitán, whom he had not believed in until he heard him "inventing a lingua franca for everyone", is shot; bootblacks batter the chemist's shop; a well-dressed man urges on the crowd and drives off in a "too new" car, suggesting "a false assassin" was killed to protect the real one; Fidel Castro appears as a sensible pragmatist. Kristal finds these sections refreshing because they are "stripped of any flights of fancy".
Between the massacre and the Bogotazo lie two smaller lessons. A teacher at Zipaquirá lent him a book with a citation attributed to Lenin, "if you do not become involved in politics, politics will eventually become involved in you", though literature still seemed an escape from a depressing reality. Neruda's arrival in Bogotá in the late 1940s, with the conviction that "poetry had to be a political weapon", challenged that quietism. His first political act was Gaitán's "march of silence", joined "without political conviction, drawn by the curiosity of the silence". Kristal sets the Bogotazo inside La Violencia, with at least 200,000 reputed dead, and cites Hobsbawm's reading of it as a frustrated social revolution, a reading García Márquez came to share.
Kristal's stages of the memoir's political education
The image of a literary life
The memoir presents a coherent project: novelist, journalist and activist in one, "indivisible". Yet much is left unsaid. He sympathizes with the Communists but keeps his distance, and the Party leader Gilberto Vieira himself advised him to serve the country "without compromising myself with anyone". The book mounts a "pre-emptive defence" against charges of too much or too little radicalism. Kristal also criticizes its sexual politics: the claim that women "sustain the world while we men mess it up" cannot account for the women driven into prostitution by La Violencia, who filled the brothels he fondly recalls.
The café scene and the problem of time
Kristal opens Living to Tell the Tale with a staged apprenticeship: April 1950, the 22-year-old offers Leaf Storm's opening to Don Ramón Vinyes in a Barranquilla café. Vinyes comments on the handling of time, García Márquez's "life-or-death problem". Two months earlier the memoir began in medias res: the mother in mourning at the Mundo bookshop, "I've come to ask you to please go with me to sell the house". The Aracataca journey opens vistas: Sierra Nevada, Arawak lines, United Fruit rails and camps, heat that adults treat as "daily surprise".
Four archives inside one autobiography
- Popular memory: legends and talk that pre-form the novels' tone.
- United Fruit: rail lines, banana camps, the company as modern myth and real violence.
- Family history: transformations of kin into Buendías and leaf-storm households.
- Gaitán's assassination (1948): national trauma that "so traumatized the Colombian nation".
Magical realism, for Kristal, grows from this archival practice rather than from a sudden stylistic invention. The memoir is itself a highly wrought temporal framework, not a lazy late reminiscence: time doubles forward and back as the formative lesson.
Kristal: Living to Tell the Tale as formation story
Memoir as wrought magical-realist training
Kristal insists Living to Tell the Tale is literary art: temporal doubles, café apprenticeship, mother's house-sale journey. United Fruit rails and Gaitán 1948 are not backdrop; they are the archive magical realism grows from. Golden Age lessons are thus modern and political, not only Ovidian (contrast Robinson, Ch. 9).
Two Golden Ages in Part I
Part II Introduction: History, Nightmare, Fantasy (Stephen M. Hart)
The five essays move from Portugal and pre-Boom Colombia to Haiti, Israel, Jewish America and England: Saramago's flying machine, Ricardo Reis outliving Pessoa, and an Iberia floating towards America; Rivera's Vortex as a forerunner; Montero's Voodoo-haunted Haiti and a day of impossible snow; Berkowitz's Jewish crime novels under the shadow of Borges's Funes; and Carter's Bluebeard reversed and a girl with eyes in her nipples in Nights at the Circus.
The Janus-like dilemma of Part II
Borges's epigraph and Dedalus's nightmare
Hart opens Part II with Borges's line that "metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature" and Joyce's Dedalus: history is a nightmare to awake from. The essays test whether fantasy is retreat or critique. In every case empirical laws turn upside-down; the supernatural walks "the tightrope between the miracle and the nightmare".
Five essays, five geographies
- Henn / Saramago. Flying machine of 1717, Ricardo Reis outliving Pessoa, Iberia floating toward America: history-rooted fantastic across Raised from the Earth (1980), Baltasar and Blimunda, Ricardo Reis (1984), Stone Raft (1986). (Hart's intro says "three" novels yet names four.)
- Núñez-Faraco / Rivera. The Vortex as forerunner: myth, magic, ethnic heterogeneity, jungle flora/fauna, denunciation of injustice.
- Rengifo / Montero. Haitian everyday harshness plus Voodoo; impossible Caribbean snow as repertoire piece that still serves revelatory religion.
- Berkowitz. Israeli and Jewish-American crime under Borges's Funes: Grossman, Horn, Auster, Goldberg (printed "Mylka"), Katz, Charyn.
- Sceats / Carter. Bluebeard overturned; Nights at the Circus (eyes in nipples; tiger-hot mirror shards) destabilising gendered police lines between fantastic and real.
Part II itinerary from Iberia to England
History and the Fantastic in José Saramago's Fiction (David Henn)
Critics have passed over the fantastic: Frier mentions "seductive flights of fancy", Pontiero ignores Pessoa's return from the grave, a Spanish critic calls it a mere "concession to the fantastic", another follows The Stone Raft's links to Don Quixote "without being at all distracted" by a peninsula sailing round the Atlantic.
A monastery on the ground and a craft in the air
In 1709 the Brazilian-born priest Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão launched a balloon-like apparatus in Lisbon, the Passarola. In Baltasar and Blimunda (1982) it becomes a bird-cum-boat that flies far and high. The novel opens in 1711 with John V's vow to build a Franciscan house at Mafra if an heir is born; the plan swells to a monastery-palace with a 220-metre façade, paid for by Brazilian gold and built by up to 20,000 men. Saramago turns from king and architect to the anonymous labourers.
Against that mundane mass he weaves three fantastic threads: Blimunda's clairvoyance (she sees an unborn child, a tumour, water under the soil), the collecting of human wills as small dark clouds, and flight powered by sunlight on globes of wills. This meets Todorov's definition of the fantastic and, since nothing is explained away, his fantastic-marvellous, the sub-genre "we have come to label" magical realism. The craft carries the trio over Mafra as they flee the Inquisition; later it rises with Baltasar alone, and nine years on Blimunda sees him burned and captures his will.
Poets and politics in 1936
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) runs from late December 1935 to August 1936. Pessoa died on 30 November 1935; his heteronym Ricardo Reis, a monarchist doctor who left for Brazil in 1919, sails back a month later. The epigraph, "Wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world", is a posture Saramago called "idiocy". Reis lodges in "a neutral place requiring no commitment", visits Pessoa's grave, and on New Year's night finds the dead poet on his sofa, allowed nine months before "total oblivion". There is no rational explanation, so again the fantastic-marvellous.
Around them press Mussolini in Africa, the Rhineland, Salazar's New State, the Hitler Youth and the Spanish rising of July 1936, while Reis watches ships. His lovers carry names from his odes, Lydia and Marcenda, but Lydia is a lusty chambermaid who becomes pregnant to his indifference. In August he follows Pessoa into oblivion: the fantastic exposes the passivity of two intellectuals before Fascism.
| Novel | Historical anchor | Fantastic element | Role of the fantastic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baltasar and Blimunda (1982) | Mafra, John V, the Inquisition, 1711 onward | Clairvoyance, captured wills, the flying Passarola | Dramatic aspect; the novel could stand without it |
| The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984) | Lisbon, Dec 1935 to Aug 1936 | Pessoa returned; a heteronym made flesh | Plot-driving; exposes intellectual passivity |
| The Stone Raft (1986) | Iberian entry into the EC, 1986 | The peninsula adrift | Plot-driving allegory of governments versus citizens |
Henn: the fantastic grows from ornament to engine across three novels
Henn notes that because The Stone Raft is an allegory, Todorov would not count it as fantastic literature at all; allegory refers the reader back to the world. Its opening marvels are "parodic and ludic diversions" that set up a reading Saramago then redirects.
Henn's central contrast between two novels
Fantastic as means, not end
Saramago called himself a realist who always admitted "some element of the fantastic", "not an end, but a means". Henn tracks growth from an aspect of Baltasar and Blimunda to an all-encompassing, plot-driving device in Ricardo Reis and The Stone Raft. Critics, he says, have been "rather timid" about the political point.
Baltasar and Blimunda: monastery and flying craft
Set around the building of Mafra and the 1717 "flying machine" (passarola) of the priest-inventor, the novel roots wonder in labour, war and absolutist spectacle. Blimunda's visionary sight and Baltasar's will bind love story to historical engineering. Magic never floats free of the ground of Portuguese history.
Ricardo Reis and The Stone Raft
After Pessoa's death, the heteronym Ricardo Reis returns to Lisbon in 1936 and empirically outlives his author: dictatorship, Spanish Civil War shadow, and the uncanny persistence of a literary name. In The Stone Raft the Iberian peninsula uncouples from France and drifts toward America: geopolitical allegory as literal geology. Raised from the Earth (1980) supplies the rural-political base Henn ties to the later international books.
Henn: escalation of Saramago's fantastic
Political points Henn says critics miss
Across the three (or four) novels, fantastic means serve: labour critique at Mafra; anti-fascist Lisbon of 1936 where a dead poet's name outlives the body; Iberia's literal drift as allegory of Europe's edge and America's pull. Timidity, for Henn, is refusing to read the fantastic as politics with teeth. Saramago's self-description as realist-plus-fantastic means blocks any purity test that would exile him from the companion.
Henn against timid readings
Magical-realist Elements in José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex (Humberto Núñez-Faraco)
Context: rubber, borders, outrage
As secretary of the 1922 Boundary Commission between Venezuela and Colombia, Rivera travelled the Casanare and heard of rubber tappers enslaved by landowners and of Peruvian advances under Casa Arana. His denunciation embarrassed a conservative government that let it pass. The novel blends Classical, Romantic and modernista styles with a fragmented voice; critics fault its three-part structure, but its self-consciousness lets the jungle stand as a textual metaphor that consumes and rebuilds its own resources. Fleeing the burnt plains, Cova mocks the Romantic idyll: "Poor fantasies of those who know only domesticated retreats!"
Five anticipations
Rivera knew nothing of the avant-garde's taste for the primitive, so unlike Carpentier he had nothing to prove to Europe. He simply wrote a regional perception of reality as suffused with magic, without always testing it against his rational protagonist.
| Feature | Example in The Vortex | Later echo |
|---|---|---|
| Myth and legend | The priestess Mapiripana's revenge on a lustful missionary | Myth over the conqueror's claim |
| Magic and the supernatural | Mauco's prayers: he became a banana tree, then an ant | Metamorphosis in Carpentier's Kingdom of This World |
| Ethnic and cultural heterogeneity | The fireside dance of "conquered peoples" | National recognition of plurality |
| Fantastic jungle and fauna | Tambocha ants, caribes, yagé visions of weeping trees | The jungle of The Lost Steps |
| Injustice and criminality | Rubber slavery; the San Fernando de Atabapo massacre | Denunciation within the marvellous |
In the Mapiripana story the friar who tried to burn her ends in delirium, chasing his soul as a blue butterfly flies "immense and luminous as an archangel", the "last vision of all those who die of fever". The two world views coexist, though a medical reading is left open. The vengavenga love potion and the homesick song of the piapoco bird work as fact. The march into the "green cell" recalls "the legendary heroes of the Conquest", and in yagé dreams trees "held fast by their ankles" curse the axe and foretell a Nature that will cover cities: an ecological outcry.
Three of the five anticipations Núñez-Faraco finds in Rivera
Style: melodrama and violence
An early critic, Eduardo Castillo, sneered that the book's "red aura of blood and crime" ensured success. Núñez-Faraco accepts a melodramatic, populist streak: water serpents, knives, Cova dragging Griselda by the hair, gunfights through a door. "Violence had won" Cova's heart; the book stands among the foundational novels of violence in Colombia. Behind it lies a patriotic programme against Peruvian incursion, with Alicia and Griselda as figures of a betrayed mother country and Cova's restored dignity and paternity closing the book. The horror of the setting outran Rivera's earlier modernista poetics (Tierra de promisión) and demanded "the loathsome and satanic".
Núñez-Faraco's closing contrast
Rubber, borders and The Vortex as forerunner
Rivera's only novel (1924) is the great jungle novel of the rubber boom: borders, debt peonage, and outrage at Amazonian extraction. Núñez-Faraco does not call it magical-realist; he reads it the Borgesian way, as modifying "our conception of the past", so that later Carpentier, Asturias and García Márquez could exploit its motifs.
Five anticipations
The essay lists characteristics that locate The Vortex as forerunner: (1) myth and legend; (2) magic and the supernatural; (3) ethnic and cultural heterogeneity; (4) jungle flora and fauna as active presence; (5) denunciation of social injustice and criminality. Style mixes melodrama and violence; the jungle is antagonist and archive.
Closing twist: cruelty over marvel
Rivera may have come closer to truth than the marvellous real: Spanish American reality is not magical but "tremendously cruel, absurd, and grotesque". That line undercuts tourist marvel and keeps Part II's nightmare pole alive.
Nunez-Faraco: five anticipations plus a twist
Melodrama that tells a modern extractive truth
Núñez-Faraco grants The Vortex's melodrama and violence, then revalues them: rubber debt, border chaos and jungle as antagonist anticipate Boom strategies without sharing Boom ontology. Closing preference for "cruel, absurd, and grotesque" over marvellous real is Part II's sharpest anti-tourist line. Rivera modifies the past Borges-style so later magical realists can inherit motifs without Rivera himself wearing the label.
Vortex path from context to twist
Beyond Magical Realism in The Red of His Shadow by Mayra Montero (Alejandra Rengifo)
Montero as Caribbean writer
Born in Cuba in 1952 and raised in Puerto Rico from her teens, a journalist by profession, Montero writes from inside what Benítez-Rojo called the Caribbean archipelago: "a discontinuous conjunction" of whirlpools, sunken galleons and "uncertain voyages of signification". Her range is wide: erotic novels (a Sonrisa Vertical finalist in 1991, a winner in 2000), Caruso in 1920 Havana amid santería in The Messenger, Puerto Rican sovereignty in The Captain of the Sleep, and a pianist's novelised memoirs in Vana ilusión. Three earlier novels turn to the supernatural, and Haiti, learned in childhood from a French woman, is their crucible.
| Novel | Setting | Supernatural thread |
|---|---|---|
| The Braid of the Beautiful Moon (1987) | Haiti under Duvalier | Voodoo deities, tontons macoutes, spells, with a veneer of real history |
| The Red of His Shadow (1993) | Haitian cane-cutters in the Dominican Republic | Rival gagás, possession by loas, the land of the dead |
| In the Palm of Darkness (1995) | Haiti under Duvalier | The near-mythical blood frog; a closing shipwreck |
Is it magical-realist?
Rengifo sets the novel against Leal's definition (no dreams or invented worlds; an "attitude toward reality" that seeks the mystery in things) and Carpentier's marvellous real (a miracle or "privileged revelation" grasped in an "extreme state"). It fits some of both, yet she warns against applying either "lock, stock and barrel" and cites Shaw (Chapter 6): magical realism "will not go away" and has "even invaded Galdós criticism", and one must get beyond Carpentier's claim that the marvellous is "actually observable".
Zulé's story
Over Holy Week, Queen Zulé Revé leads her gagá through the cane fields, knowing the bokor Similá Bolosse has sworn to kill her where their processions cross. Flashbacks fill in her past: sent from Haiti because of "un amarre al agua", a bond with water that killed her mother and brothers; initiation by fire and descent among the dead; marriage to old Papa Coridon; love for yellow-eyed Similá, who fled the chaos after Baby Doc's fall. On the day Similá leaves, it snows in Colonia Engracia: a hundred parrots strip the only ceiba of its pods and the fluff swirls like snow. The people are annoyed rather than amazed, like Macondo under Mauricio Babilonia's yellow butterflies. With the fluff on his face Similá becomes Bull Belecou; Zulé is left as Erzulie Freda. At the crossing it is not Belecou but Carfú, through her stepson Jeremie Candé, who kills her. The gods need human bodies, and life goes on.
The arc of Zulé Revé in The Red of His Shadow
Why Montero belongs here
Cuban-Puerto Rican Mayra Montero inherits Carpentier and García Márquez obliquely. In El rojo de su sombra / The Red of His Shadow (1993), Voodoo is not decorative technique: it gives magic revelatory, religious weight. Rengifo's claim: Montero goes "beyond the use of magical realism simply as a technique".
Zulé, Gavilán and impossible snow
The narrative follows Zulé and the world of Gagá / Voodoo where spirits animate, control and sometimes destroy ordinary Haitian lives. An impossible day of snow on a Caribbean island cites the repertoire of magical realism, yet the essay insists the religious system, not the snow, is the centre. Harsh everyday Haiti and brooding supernatural share one plane.
Rengifo: Montero past pure technique
Beyond Carpentier's Haiti
Montero writes Haitian Gagá after Carpentier's marvellous real, but Rengifo's "beyond technique" claim hinges on Voodoo as lived religion, not surrealist shock. Impossible snow cites the repertoire; Zulé's fate shows spirits destroying as well as animating. Oblique legacy: same island archive, different ethical weight.
Two Haitis in the companion
Cops, Robbers, and Anarcho-terrorists: Crime and Magical Realism's Jewish Question (Michael Berkowitz)
Critics of Auster and Grossman, he notes, say almost nothing about their engagement with magical realism, which separates these books from the "realistic" Jewish fiction of Roth or Yehoshua.
| Novel | Crime | Magical-realist element |
|---|---|---|
| Grossman, The Zigzag Kid (1994) | Grandfather Felix Glick, master con-man, kidnaps Nonny, "son of a policeman and a criminal" | Coincidences that "could not possibly be coincidences" |
| Horn, Four Mothers (1996) | Rape by yeshiva students; a rock thrown at a car | "Hidden forces": the rock's hole collapses a café on the killer |
| Auster, Leviathan (1992) | Sachs blows up replicas of the Statue of Liberty | History read "as if it were a work of the imagination" |
| Goldberg, Bee Season (2000) | A lawyer mother burgles strangers' homes | Spelling and Abulafia's mysticism; stolen objects as Tikkun Olam |
| Katz, The Escape Artist (1997) | White slavery in a Buenos Aires brothel | Hankus's magic, illusion and escape |
| Charyn, The Isaac Quartet | The Marrano Guzmanns' prostitution empire | Isaac as Babel's Benya Krik; a Funes-like mind |
The Israeli novels
Nonny's grandmother Lola has "different standards of behavior"; the book's fantasy settings set it apart from Grossman's earthbound Someone to Run With. Shifra Horn welcomed the magical-realist label. Her narrator Amalya invents a policeman father for school forms, while her lawyer mother defends Arabs robbed of their land. The irony runs deeper, since Amalya was conceived in a gang rape by yeshiva students of "pure souls", a crime driven by sinister forces.
New York
Auster, like Anita Brookner, keeps Jewishness evasive. Yet his Leviathan circle is plainly New York Jewish. Benjamin Sachs studies Alexander Berkman, who shot at Frick in 1892 and was deported with Emma Goldman in 1919. He calls himself "America's first Hiroshima baby" and tells of Kropotkin, Mrs Jefferson Davis and Booker T. Washington taking tea together, turning facts into tropes "embedded in the real", until the mixed-up world grows inside him and he is blown up beside a Wisconsin road. In Bee Season the rabbi father grooms speller Eliza through Abulafia, the son drifts to Hare Krishna, and the steady mother turns out "mad. But she is also a criminal".
South America in New York
Katz's Sofia, trafficked from Russian Poland to Buenos Aires, loves Hankus, once Hannah Lubarsky, an escape artist whose magic lifts a straight love story into the picaresque. Charyn's Isaac Sidel rises from detective to Commissioner to Mayor, sees himself as Babel's gangster, and faces the Guzmanns, Marranos turned "meateaters" in white slavery. Jewish women here are criminals too: Sylvia Berkowitz plans a murder with lamps.
Berkowitz: crime and magic combine to unsettle respectability
Jews, crime and inexplicable force
Berkowitz's six novels share: Jews straying from conventional roles; crime; forces that override cause, effect, gravity and coincidence. The mix unsettles respectability, especially gender, and may assert that Jews are "normal" like everyone else. Borges's Funes the Memorious, with "inner violence and betrayal", shadows the set.
Israeli pair and American four
- David Grossman, The Zigzag Kid; Shifra Horn, Four Mothers: Israeli frames where memory and family plot meet the uncanny.
- Paul Auster, Leviathan; Myla Goldberg (printed "Mylka"), Bee Season; Judith Katz, The Escape Artist; Jerome Charyn, The Isaac Quartet: New York and diasporic stages where crime, language mysticism and anarcho-terrorist edges intersect magical-realist technique.
South America in New York appears as borrowed geography and as Borges's long shadow. Magical realism here is not steam and jungle; it is suburb, precinct and synagogue under pressure.
Berkowitz: Jewish question meets magical crime
Crime as the Jewish question's pressure point
Berkowitz's "cops, robbers, and anarcho-terrorists" frame uses crime to unsettle respectability discourses, especially gender. Magical overrides of cause and effect do not float free of diaspora anxiety: Funes's total memory as violence; Bee Season's language mysticism; Auster's Leviathan plotting. Asserting that Jews are "normal" is itself an ideological move inside and against stereotypes. Part II's nightmare pole (Hart) here is suburban and precinct-based, not jungle.
Berkowitz: magic under Jewish respectability
Six novels, one pressure: respectability
Berkowitz's Jewish question is not whether Jews can write magical realism, but what happens when crime and inexplicable force meet discourses of respectability. Gender straying, anarcho-terrorist edges and Funes's inner violence rewrite steamier-clime assumptions. Diaspora Brooklyn and Tel Aviv become Part II geographies equal to Haiti and the Amazon for the companion's map.
Jewish magical crime on the companion map
Flights of Fancy: Angela Carter's Transgressive Narratives (Sarah Sceats)
Carter's politics take the side of the disempowered: we are creatures of history with no refuge, and identity is made by social forces, not essence. "I am all for putting new wine in old bottles", she said, "especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode." Everything counts, and above all what we edit out of reality: freaks, outlaws, cannibals, fairies, monsters.
The Bloody Chamber: fairy tales disturbed
Fairy tales have been read as worldly instruction (Perrault, whom Carter praised for his abrasive practicality) or as initiation into sexual adulthood (Bettelheim). Carter plays with both sets of expectations.
| Tale | Traditional source | Carter's turn |
|---|---|---|
| The Bloody Chamber | Bluebeard | The mother, not the brothers, rescues the bride; the wife is complicit through her "capacity for corruption" |
| The Courtship of Mr Lyon | Beauty and the Beast | A "straight" version; marital surrender, economics implicit |
| The Tiger's Bride | Beauty and the Beast | "My father lost me to the Beast at cards"; the Beast licks off her skins to reveal a tiger |
| Red Riding Hood retelling | Little Red Riding Hood | The girl gets into bed with the wolf; no woodcutter needed |
| Wolf Alice | Wolf-child tales | Wolf-girl and vampiric Duke beyond the mirror; reciprocity outside society |
Sceats reads the collection dialectically: male brutality is the thesis, female sexualisation and economic empowerment the antithesis, and gender equality with reciprocity the synthesis, which can only come from beyond the mirror. The tiger will never lie down with the lamb, so the lamb must learn to run with tigers. Read globally, brutality becomes colonisation and empowerment emancipation, with the resolution coming from the periphery.
Sceats reads The Bloody Chamber as a dialectic
Nights at the Circus
Fairy tales are wholly magical, though, so the real test is the novel. In a 1982 talk Carter attacked bourgeois mimesis: "whose life are you supposed to be imitating? Obviously a trapeze artist has got as much claim to be alive as a solicitor." Fevvers, a cockney aerialiste with wings, tells her life to the sceptical journalist Walser ("Is she fact or is she fiction?"), helped by Lizzie's tampering with time. In St Petersburg a Grand Duke shows her Fabergé eggs, one holding a jewelled birdcage meant for her. She distracts him sexually, drops his toy Trans-Siberian Express on the rug, and at the moment of his climax runs down the platform onto the train itself. It is "a deus ex machina, albeit without the deus", and it releases the tight urban plot into the chaos of Siberia.
Sceats's answer to whether Carter rewrites history from the margins is "a qualified 'no'": she questions how we read history rather than offering an alternative, which fits Hart's tightrope image in Chapter 11.
View from elsewhere: Japan makes Yorkshire strange
Angela Carter (1940-1992) wrote from a "view from elsewhere". Years in Japan turned Doncaster foreign and Ilkley into Transylvania. Fantasy and symbolism sit beside psychological and political plausibility until telling "fantastic" from "real" becomes "difficult or even pointless". Sceats answers Rowe's formula charge by showing gendered categories under attack.
The Bloody Chamber and Nights at the Circus
The Bloody Chamber reworks Bluebeard so the traditional role ascribed to women is overturned: curiosity, rescue and desire redistribute power. Nights at the Circus evokes magical-realist tropes (girl with eyes in her nipples; mirror shards too hot because they absorbed a troupe of tigers) while destabilising the gendered police line between fantastic and real. Carter's claim that Yorkshire can be a kind of Third World returns as Hart's open question from Chapter 1.
Sceats: fantasy as feminist method
Disturbed fairy tale as method
Sceats shows Carter rewriting Bluebeard so female curiosity and rescue rewrite the moral. Nights at the Circus then scales up: circus as world where gendered real/fantastic borders fail. Japan as training in estrangement makes English provincial life available to magical-realist reading without claiming colonial equivalence. Hart's open question (is Yorkshire Third World?) stays open; Sceats supplies the formal evidence that Carter belongs in the companion anyway.
Sceats: Carter's path into the mode
Part III Introduction: The Politics of Magic (Wen-chin Ouyang)
| Ch | Essay | Ouyang's one-line thesis |
|---|---|---|
| 18 | Fishburn on Carpentier | Humour makes "space for the unsayable to be said" |
| 19 | Swanson on Allende | A children's book exposes North/South and civilisation/barbarism polarities |
| 20 | Price on Esquivel and Arau | Novel and film recycle colonial, patriarchal, racist ideology |
| 21 | Ratner on Rabinyan | A magic-soaked Persian past questions Israeli ethnic and gender policy |
| 22 | Morris on Nakagami | Evasion that quietly turns the "ghetto" into an ideal community |
| 23 | Fiddian on García Márquez | An old world deconstructed; a new political order heralded |
Ouyang's spectrum for Part III
Said's power and Ouyang's fine differences
Edward Said on the "realities of power and authority" that make texts possible frames Part III. Magical realism is taken as inherently political: empire, post-independence corruption, national identity. Yet "there is politics and there is politics": each text picks its interlocutor and the categories of knowledge it dismantles. Style and genre produce fine differences in identity politics that a single "subversive" label would flatten.
The essays Ouyang queues
Fishburn on Carpentier's humour; Swanson on Allende's children's beast-city; Price on Esquivel's reactionary chocolate; Ratner on Rabinyan's Persian brides; Morris on Nakagami's outcast Japan; Fiddian on Big Mama's funeral as postcolonial allegory. Together they test whether magic always writes back, or sometimes conserves.
Ouyang frames Part III
Humour and Magical Realism in El reino de este mundo (Evelyn Fishburn)
Two theories that meet
Fishburn defines magical realism, after Gerald Martin, as "the cultural sparks which fly from the juxtaposition and clash of different cultures", with European and Afro-American belief systems both treated as valid knowledge. Humour, after Koestler, Freud and Bergson, comes from contexts colliding, from an "appropriate incongruity", from "something mechanical encrusted upon the living". Unlike satire it lacks a corrective faith; unlike irony, which Frye ties to "the good that ought to be", humour deals with "what is". Carpentier's prologue found in Haiti a real version of the juxtapositions surrealism had to manufacture: Christophe's Sans Souci in the jungle, the ruined Citadel, Pauline Bonaparte. Two mindsets run in "contrapuntal dissonance" with no hierarchy, though Spanish and European learning set the home key.
| Mechanism of humour | Episode | What it exposes |
|---|---|---|
| Hidden connections between unlike things | Ti Noël sees wigged heads at the barber's beside calves' heads at the butcher's | The absurdity of French fashion and rank |
| Unmasking authority | Kings "wigged in false hair", effeminate in the rigadoon, against African princes who are leopards | The artificial power of the French monarchy |
| Saying the unsayable | Ti Noël's crude account of infant baptism and rejected skeletons | The cruelty of the doctrine, once named |
| Double interpretation (Bergson) | Mackandal burned while the slaves rejoice at his escape | A parallel with Christ's resurrection; faith that proves pragmatically true |
| Inversion, mimicry | Christophe's black court in Napoleonic dress | Napoleonic pomp itself |
| Cultural misreading | Mlle Floridor's Phèdre before the slaves | The supposed universality of European art |
Mackandal and Ti Noël as Christ figures
The burning of Mackandal shows the principle of the whole book: Europeans see a slave die, while the slaves see him escape. Fishburn reads the rejoicing as a parodia sacra that undoes Christ's uniqueness as saviour, and the reader's trust in empirical fact is teased, since Mackandal's spirit really does bring about the revolt. Ti Noël's identification with Christ builds up until women wave cloths "like the palm spread before Jesus one Sunday", and the last chapter is headed Agnus Dei. The Voodoo storm that will "round off the work of men's hands" echoes Revelation's thunder and hail. Fishburn reads the ending, against more hopeful critics, as the darkest humour: "a smile of despair" at another doomed belief.
Fishburn: two mindsets in contrapuntal dissonance
Race, misreading and Phèdre in the tropics
The Europeans in Rome touch Solimán to see if his sweat is black, and he poses as nephew to Haiti's ex-king. The French dismiss "people who worshipped a snake", and Madame d'Abrantès is assured there are no snakes in the Antilles. Solimán massages Canova's marble of Pauline to bring her to life, which links animism to Pygmalion and Galatea: discontinuity on the surface, continuity beneath.
The novel's "carnivalesque apotheosis" is Ti Noël in Christophe's lace coat, a straw bicorn on his head, sitting on three volumes of the Encyclopédie. Fishburn ends by contrasting this serious humour with the hilarity of García Márquez, Donoso or Allende: neither humour nor magical realism offers solutions, only a "heightened awareness" of perhaps unresolvable dualities.
Fishburn: the parodia sacra running through The Kingdom of This World
Against the humourless Carpentier
José Oviedo cited Carpentier as proof Latin American letters lacked "a good laugh"; Rodríguez Monegal left him out of "Traditions of Laughter". Evelyn Fishburn counters: The Kingdom of This World is full of serious situations told humorously. Humour and magical realism share the collision of incompatible frames; double focalization yields Koestler's "bisociative shock". Comedy is not relief: it distances a pessimistic spiral of failed revolutions.
Continuities: Mackandal, Ti Noël, Phèdre
The first chapter's clash of expectations (what slaves see versus what colonisers see) is her clearest case of an alternative mindset decentring the dominant one. Mackandal and Ti Noël read as Christ figures inside a comic-serious frame. Race, misreading and a tropical Phèdre show European high culture absurdly transposed. Neither humour nor magical realism seeks consolation; both heighten awareness of "perhaps unresolvable dualities". That, for Fishburn, may be their strongest connection. She reads Carpentier's vision as essentially pessimistic, though some critics call it optimistic.
Humour as magical realism's partner
Ti Noël's countercultural eye
Fishburn dwells on Ti Noël before the prints: French kings in false hair who "were gods only when they strutted the stage of their court theatres", versus a black king receiving French dignitaries at centre stage. Cattle and aristocracy blur; wigs look like garnish "border of lettuce leaves". The comedy is countercultural reading, not slapstick. A darker irony under the wigs anticipates the guillotine: immobile faces framed by curls. Bergson's mechanics of the comic and Koestler's bisociation supply her theory pair; neither humour nor magical realism offers solutions, only "heightened awareness of perhaps unresolvable dualities".
Continuity with Hart's split stake
Where Hart (Ch. 1) stresses the split Mackandal execution as ocular empiricism versus faith, Fishburn stresses the same double focalization as comic engine. Pessimistic spiral of revolution (some critics still call the novel optimistic) stays visible because laughter keeps distance without consoling. That is her answer to Oviedo's humourless caricature.
Fishburn: comic eye inside Kingdom of This World
Phèdre in the tropics and the music-box king
Cultural miscegenation reaches carnivalesque apotheosis when Ti Noël, having looted Sans Souci, wears Christophe's satin dresscoat with a straw bicorn, sits on three volumes of the Grande Encyclopédie, plays with a doll and listens to a German Ländler on a music box, on his way to understanding his role as king and saviour. Phèdre in the tropics has become farce; assumptions of European art's universality are "irreparably undermined" (Greenblatt's Marvellous Possessions is cited on transparent-culture assumptions). Fishburn insists Kingdom is prototypical and paradigmatic even if García Márquez, Donoso or Allende invite words like hilarity and mirth that Carpentier's sterner comic does not. Humour here is bisociative shock, not cheerfulness.
Carnivalesque apotheosis in Kingdom
Race, misreading and the preferred means
Fishburn's middle chapters track racialised sight-lines and European high culture misread in the tropics until Phèdre becomes farce. Carpentier's preferred means of expression, she argues, is the comic even when vision is pessimistic. Optimistic readings of the novel miss how laughter keeps failed revolution at a workable distance without promising repair.
How to read Kingdom's politics
Magical Realism and Children's Literature: Isabel Allende's La Ciudad de las Bestias (Philip Swanson)
Three shared tensions
Critics split between those for whom the fantastic marks the unknowable nature of literature and reality, and those for whom it opens new views of social reality. Political readings now dominate, but they are not simple: the ice in One Hundred Years of Solitude can mean free thought or human error. Some argue García Márquez's allegory makes weak politics while Allende's House of the Spirits, by subverting its own magic, gains political edge.
| Tension | In children's literature | In magical realism |
|---|---|---|
| Fantasy versus reality | Entertainment or instruction? | Escape or political critique? |
| Power | Adult author, child reader: control versus freedom | Metropolitan author, "Third-World" subject |
| Innocence | Rose's Peter Pan: the child as colonised subject | The "primitive" as innocent; nature and the New World |
Both forms have also been linked to the popular and the feminine, which raises the same questions of power and position.
The story
Allende's grandchildren asked for a tale from her Amazon stories. Fifteen-year-old Californian Alexander Cold, whose mother is having chemotherapy, travels with his tough grandmother Kate, a reporter for the International Geographic, to find the Beast, a kind of Amazon Yeti. With Nadia, a guide's daughter, he is taken by the People of the Mist, meets the shaman Walimai, finds El Dorado (real, but its gold false) and the Beasts' kingdom, and foils the businessman Mauro Carías, who plans to kill the Indians with measles disguised as vaccination by Dr Omayra Torres. Echoes run from Harry Potter to Tintin and Indiana Jones.
Relativism and the reversal of savagery
Beyond Manaus the travellers enter "a magical land" "where the rules he was used to didn't count". Swanson admits that marvelling at a magical Other risks a neo-colonial gaze and a Borgesian cliché ("dreams within dreams"). But in Allende ambiguity is an anti-hegemonic gesture, not Boom scepticism, and her middlebrow spirituality since Paula (1994) still voices humane concern against late capitalism. Assumptions are reversed: printing and vaccines are "white man's magic", Walimai wears the Swiss Army knife as an ornament, the chief pities "the poor creatures dressed in stinking cloth", and the anthropologist Leblanc realises "they themselves were the savages, not the Indians". Commerce and science, the core of Victorian juvenile adventure and of Sarmiento's programme, here form a conquest repeated through disease. Like Vargas Llosa's Iquitos, Manaus and Santa María de la Lluvia are fragile oases; the dragon is beautiful, as in Chinese tradition, and Nadia, "wild and wise in the jungle", stands for the good side of "barbarism".
Swanson: City of the Beasts inverts Sarmiento, with limits
The First World as subject
The book is also about the North. New York is Alexander's real barbarism: he is robbed by a punk girl named Morgana, and the novel alludes to the Columbine massacre. The magic reaches the USA too: the Rahakanariwa bird appears in his dream before the trip, and he comforts his mother in Texas by visiting her in spirit. Representation is suspect everywhere: Leblanc poses with a dead anaconda, the Indian warrior Tahama feeds him lies, and the scam relies on the magazine's authority. Kate's writing, an echo of Allende's "magic of words", protects the Beasts by persuading the world they do not exist. Swanson defends Allende as a popular, feminine, emotional communicator, not a plunderer of Rowling, and quotes a sixteen-year-old reviewer whose views on "society" were shaken.
Shared paradox: magic and children's books
Does magic reveal or obscure reality? The same tension, Swanson notes, shapes children's literature since Sarah Fielding's Governess (1749): didacticism versus imagination. Jacqueline Rose, John Stephens, Thacker and Webb supply the children's-lit theory frame; Harry Potter is cited as consolatory rather than subversive.
City of the Beasts: invert Civilization and Barbarism
Allende's City of the Beasts (2002) follows adult magical realism's political path: it inverts Civilization and Barbarism and North/South, yet still centres a First-World boy (Alexander) as hero. Walimai, spirit wife, dragon and sloth-like Beasts stage indigenous knowledge; flute calming recalls Joffé's The Mission (1986). Ambiguity in Allende is "anti-hegemonic gesture", not Boom-style reactionary scepticism. On its own terms Swanson calls it "a successful variation on the practices of magical realism for a new generation", while noting the First-World subject problem.
Swanson: children's magical realism and its limit
White man's magic and the knife
Alexander's journey from First to Third World challenges assumptions: vaccinations and print as "white man's magic"; the Swiss Army knife becomes Walimai's adornment before later freeing Alexander (complicating relativism). Iyomi of the People of the Mist pities foreigners in "stinking cloth". Climactically, arrogant anthropologist Professor Ludovic Leblanc, who dazzled the world with jungle tales, is undone by the encounter. Emotional humane concern faces late-capitalist pressure to conform.
First-World boy as limit
Swanson grants the book success as magical-realist variation for a new generation, yet keeps the structural problem: the hero remains a First-World boy, and flute-calming of Indians risks The Mission's soft colonialism. Allende's ambiguity is anti-hegemonic, not Boom scepticism; Thacker and Webb's charge against Harry Potter (consolation over meaning-making) is the foil Allende partly escapes and partly risks.
| Move in City of the Beasts | Political gain | Residual limit |
|---|---|---|
| Invert Civ/Barb, North/South | Challenges First-World assumptions | Boy hero still centres the gaze |
| Walimai, Beasts, spirit wife | Indigenous knowledge on the page | Risk of folklore picturesque |
| Leblanc humbled | Science/arrogance satirised | Transculturation may still favour Alexander's tools |
Allende's defence: popular magic, not plunder
Swanson closes against the charge that Allende cynically plunders Rowling as she was accused of plundering García Márquez. Her turn to children's literature is "a natural progression": using writing's magic to communicate important issues simply yet challengingly in a popular format. She reaches young readers in North America "as much" as in Latin America; the novel itself implies an audience that needs stimulation beyond TV and video games. A sixteen-year-old web review (Meghan Ormerod, Black Star Review, July 2004) reports being forced "a long way into my imagination" and questioning whether "our civilization is just the reverse: no ceremony, only massacres". Swanson: that is "exactly the sort of reaction Allende would have" wanted. Middle-brow emotional understanding of human and political issues is, here, a feature not a bug.
Allende children's magic: verdict
Three shared tensions named
Swanson opens children's magical realism through three tensions shared with the adult mode: didacticism versus imagination; consolation versus meaning-making; First-World gaze versus inverted Civ/Barb. City of the Beasts works all three without resolving them into pure subversion or pure comfort. That unresolved set is why he calls it a successful variation rather than either plunder or masterpiece.
Unsavoury Representations in Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate (Helene Price)
The magical machinery
Tita, youngest daughter of a landowning family in revolutionary Mexico, is barred from marrying Pedro by a tradition that she must care for her mother. Pedro marries her sister Rosaura instead. Tita's emotions pass into her food. Twelve chapters, each opening with a recipe, span about forty years, told by a grand-niece reading Tita's cookbooks, a frame like Alba's notebooks or Melquíades's parchments. The past setting, the US-Mexican border and touches of folklore and taboo complete the formula. Price reads the magic episode by episode.
| Magical event | Surface effect | Price's reading |
|---|---|---|
| Tita born in a flood of tears, the salt used as seasoning | Hyperbole accepted as normal | Destines her to the kitchen; unlike Sor Juana she does not use it to learn |
| Tears in the wedding cake: weeping and "collective vomiting" | Rosaura's day ruined | Magic punishes the woman who blocks a conventional marriage; women swapped as commodities |
| Quails in rose-petal sauce as aphrodisiac | Gertrudis burns the shower, is carried off by a Villista | Pedro, a weak man, drives every woman's feelings; a romance cliché |
| Tita's virgin breast feeds Rosaura's child | "Ceres herself, goddess of plenty" | Essentialism: women "natural" or "unnatural" by their power to nurture |
| Tita eats matches and burns with Pedro | Love as inner fire | She lives to be his wife; John Brown's voice ends the film |
Mamá Elena is strong but only as a ruthless matriarch-patriarch; Tita accepts her fate, and the knitting of an enormous blanket recalls Penelope and Pelagia in Captain Corelli's Mandolin: female passivity and fidelity. The film adds a holy-family gaze on Tita's breasts. Following Deborah Shaw, Price sees even the consummation as conformity to an ideal of wife and mother.
Price: three ideological effects of the magic in Like Water for Chocolate
Race and class
Gertrudis, child of an affair with a mulatto, is played by a red-haired actress. Her dancing and sexual hunger are traced to "who had given Gertrudis her rhythm and other qualities", a racial stereotype of the kind Coulthard documented. The Indian servants Nacha and Chencha are content members of the family: an idyll of racial harmony that never existed. Kraniauskas notes that middle-class audiences find comfort in "the servants in their kitchen". Chencha's broken Spanish and a grinning performance make her a caricature, which the English translation does not even register.
Style without substance
Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate (1989) and Alfonso Arau's film (1992) were huge hits: novel in twenty-nine languages; top-grossing foreign-language film in the USA in 1993. Price's second glance finds them running against magical realism's revolutionary ethos. Magic props up reactionary patriarchal femininity, condones master-slave dialectic, fetishises Mexicanness. The works use "the style rather than the substance" of the mode and are not intrinsically postcolonial.
Magical machinery that binds Tita
Tita's magical birth, tears in the wedding cake, quail in rose petal sauce: each marvel intensifies domestic destiny rather than freeing her. Race and class hierarchies stay picturesque. Where Swanson defends Allende's children's politics as variation, Price prosecutes Esquivel as conservative comfort sold as exotic liberation.
Esquivel: success versus political reading
Cinderella machinery and the rose-petal spell
Price reads the plot as Cinderella: Mamá Elena as wicked stepmother, Nacha as fairy godmother, Rosaura as ugly sister. Wedding-cake tears punish the woman who blocks Tita's conventional marriage dream; magic polices true love rather than freeing Tita from the marriage script. Quails with rose petals fused with Tita's blood act as aphrodisiac: desire projected as edible magic. Women remain commodities "swapped" without regard for needs. Film (Arau 1992) intensifies the spell by making each guest cry as Tita passes.
Fetish Mexicanness
Commercial triumph (29 languages; top US foreign-language film 1993) sells a tablespoon of magic that reinforces patriarchal femininity and picturesque Mexico. Price's verdict stands against market enthusiasm: style of magical realism without postcolonial substance. Compare Swanson's more generous Allende reading (Ch. 19) and Morris's worry that subversion is not automatic (Ch. 22).
How magic serves convention in Esquivel
Seduction without consciousness-raising
Price's conclusion: as Tita seduces Pedro through food, magic seduces reader and spectator, yet employs none of the "political-consciousness-raising powers" Theo D'haen associates with the mode. Film laboratory backdrops contrast Mexican magic theories for the spectator; white patriarchy dominates; women's strength stays domestic; Mexico is charmingly backward. The Revolution is "flimsy backdrop" to an essentialist love story. If Carpentier's novelists are "witnesses, historians, interpreters of our great reality", Esquivel and Arau reveal how Europeans, Americans and urban middle-class Mexicans wish to perceive rural Mexico. Style, not substance.
Price's final contrast
Not So Innocent: An Israeli Tale of Subversion: Dorit Rabinyan's Persian Brides (Tsila (Abramovitz) Ratner)
Two journeys, two modes
On one night two cousins leave the same house. Flora, fifteen, pregnant, "big body and little brain", goes looking for her deserting husband Shahin. Nazie, an eleven-year-old orphan, thin and quiet, goes at dawn to ask the mullah's permission to marry her cousin Moussa. Flora's plot becomes magical realism and Nazie's stays realistic. The two reflect and destabilize each other, enacting the is/is-not hesitation that defines the mode.
| Stage | How the fantastic works | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Folklore | Women's tales: the whore's demon twins, the eclipse curse, the plague of shroud-chewing dead | Easily rationalised; confirms an Orientalist view of the "irrational" East |
| Discredited telling | Gossip in a harem-like world; Shahin, cross-eyed liar, the only male storyteller | Fantastic narration tied to gender and gullibility |
| Magical realism | The narrator confirms the snakes in Lily's cellar | The fantastic becomes objective; categories collapse |
The turn comes through the story of Nazie's birth during the plague, a female history of resistance: a mother who defied a husband wanting the girl dead, nature, and a waiting community. That legacy lets Nazie later dodge the law against underage marriage. The cousins' bond refuses the Cinderella script and offers support rather than rivalry.
The house of snakes
Alone and outside the village, where hearsay cannot reach, Flora finds Shahin living with Lily, a Bahai seller of snake-venom remedies, tattooed with snakes to her fingertips, in a shell-covered house with stone fish in dry fountains. Shahin's tale of snakes paying in gold is undercut by a plausible history: merchants fled, leaving money in the walls. But the narrator then adds that "a family of snakes moved into the basement", and the fantastic gains credibility. Readings multiply: psychoanalytic (phallic snakes, dead stone fish), metaphysical (Lily as Lilith), and an ironic Eden in which the seductive snake-woman ruins "innocent" man. Drawn into their bed, Flora flees, mistakes a window for a door and falls to her death: a literal fall from grace, the uncanny in Cixous's sense, the real emptied of meaning.
Ratner: from ethnic folklore to magical realism in Persian Brides
Ratner: two cousins, two journeys, two modes
From Orientalist folklore to magical realism
Dorit Rabinyan's Persian Brides sits around 1900 in a Jewish Persian village "ruled by cunning ghosts, devils and strong-minded women". Pre-state, oriental, female: Israeli discourse can file it as ethnic folklore. Tsila Ratner argues it is "far from being innocent". Fantastic elements move from Orientalist folklore to magical realism, exposing Orientalism inside Israeli discourse and turning fixed East/West categories into hybrid, negotiable ones.
Two journeys and the house of snakes
Ratner tracks two narrative journeys and two modes: folklore colour versus magical-realist negotiation. The house of snakes concentrates gendered power, ghost rule and communal fear. The novel's "outside" position becomes a way to critique the centre that romanticises it.
Ethnic colour as critique
Hybrid categories inside Israeli discourse
Ratner's move: what looks like exportable ethnic colour is a negotiation that exposes Orientalism at home. Ghosts, devils and strong-minded women are not museum folklore; as magical realism they scramble East/West fixes. Pre-state Persian Jewish setting becomes a mirror for post-state Israeli reading habits.
From colourful outside to critique inside
Strong-minded women and cunning ghosts
Ratner's Persian village is ruled by ghosts, devils and strong-minded women: the fantastic is gendered power, not tourist spice. Moving that material from Orientalist folklore file to magical-realist negotiation means Israeli readers cannot keep East as colourful outside. Hybrid categories become the essay's political gain: East/West stops being a filing cabinet.
Ratner: from file to negotiation
Magical Realism as Ideology: Narrative Evasions in the Work of Nakagami Kenji (Mark Morris)
Fushía and the Japanese in Latin America
Morris starts with Fushía, "Japonito", the leprous pirate of Vargas Llosa's The Green House (1965), based on a real Japanese-Brazilian renegade, Tushía, whose legend Vargas Llosa heard in the jungle in 1958. Brazil and Peru took most of Japan's emigrants; the first Akutagawa Prize (1935) went to Ishikawa Tatsuzō's story of migrants to Brazil, and quarter of a million Nikkei Brazilians later went "back" to Japan. Morris's "Borgesian fantasy" is that Fushía walked out of Nakagami's A Thousand Years of Pleasure (Sennen no yuraku, 1982), whose title multiplies and inverts One Hundred Years of Solitude.
A Thousand Years of Pleasure
Six tales of doomed Nakamoto men are told by Oryū, the ageless midwife and memory of the roji. Shin'ichirō leaves for somewhere that may be Argentina and writes back four surreal letters (a silver prairie, children who "shit silver and die", "Destruction of the Incas", a drunk turned eagle) before dying beside a cup of mercury. Miyoshi hangs himself, and the dragon tattooed on his back crawls out, coils round his body and soars into the storm.
| Source | What Nakagami took |
|---|---|
| Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha | A fictional county as blueprint for the roji |
| García Márquez's Macondo, Chronicle of a Death Foretold | Lineage, curse, homosocial violence |
| Vargas Llosa's Lima, Piura, The Time of the Hero | Strutting young males, barrio life |
| Borges, "Man on Pink Corner" | Knife-fighting toughs (themselves partly from Asbury's Gangs of New York) |
Casanova's account of peripheral writers who must be consecrated by the centre, and so take up the newest "inventions", fits Nakagami well.
Evasion
The roji stands for a real buraku. Burakumin were once officially hinin, "non-human", and the 1871 Meiji edict that freed them was met with farmers' bamboo spears; Oryū fears another earthquake could bring slaughter. Yet in Nakagami's stories the roji people seldom clash with mainstream Japan: they fight, love and kill one another, and conflict stays in the past. Morris's shorthand is a Macondo without the United Fruit Company. That evasion may be why middle-class readers could read Nakagami "without feeling challenged". Imagery of tainted blood and animality also echoes the pseudo-science once aimed at burakumin, risks only an insider could take.
Morris: how Nakagami's magical realism evades and then mystifies
Wings of the Sun
In Nichirin no tsubasa (1984) the roji has been demolished. Tsuyoshi and "Mr Tanaka" take seven old aunties from a home on a road trip in a refrigerated fish van: a roji on wheels, and "an ultimate evasion" since there is no home to return to. An auntie tells of the roji's origin: a couple who drowned their other babies to raise one animal-like child, then began tanning hides. The community founds itself through ancestral crime, not exclusion by others. At Ise, Auntie San sweeps the gravel and feels she once served a dazzling god, taking on his pollution. At the Imperial Palace she kneels: "It's because the Emperor lives here that the likes of us rubbish are able to live our own lives."
What Nakagami took, and what he made of it
Nakagami's roji and borrowed Macondo
Mark Morris reads Nakagami Kenji's outcast (burakumin) fiction against borrowed models: Macondo's lineage and curse, Vargas Llosa's barrio males, Borges's knife-fighters. What Nakagami makes is the roji: doomed Nakamoto men, ageless midwife Oryū, silver letters, a dragon tattoo. Auntie San as "auntie of all burakumin" who "enjoys the job" may tease liberal readers; Morris hears half-serious politics: emperor and outcast joining against "the great middling mass of ordinary prejudice".
Empty centre, constructive or consoling?
Aunties vanish into Barthes's "empty centre" of Tokyo, from which an anti-democratic ideology might still console. Morris tests Zamora and Faris's subversion claim; Ouyang's Part intro "constructive role" flattens his worry. Death date as printed "in1994" is wrong: Nakagami died August 1992.
Morris: invention versus ideology
Emperor, outcast and the middling mass
Morris's political worry: Nakagami may be half-serious that emperor and burakumin outcast can join against ordinary prejudice's middling mass. Comic obscenity of the aunties does not cancel the anti-democratic consolation available from Barthes's empty centre. Borrowed Macondo curses and Borges knife-fighters become local roji invention, yet ideology may still console rather than liberate. That is why Zamora and Faris's subversion thesis needs testing case by case; Price's Esquivel (Ch. 20) is the commercial twin of this worry.
Morris against automatic write-back
Mystificatory value: Morris sticks with Jameson
Morris ends by preferring Jameson (and Latin American critics Jameson draws on) to Zamora and Faris's subversion claim. Magical realism's assault on rationalism has "inevitable ideological impact", but texts are "not necessarily" subversive; one must watch their "mystificatory value". Historical note: after the 1871 Meiji proclamation that theoretically freed burakumin, many felt gratitude toward the Emperor; early fiction often showed aristocratic, not middle-class, sympathy. At journey's end the aunties disappear from the van with most of the gear: empty-centre vanishing as narrative fact. Comic obscenity and ideological consolation share one ending.
Morris: history under the comic ending
What Nakagami took and remade (detail)
Macondo supplies doomed lineage and curse logic; Vargas Llosa supplies barrio male energy; Borges supplies knife-fighter honour. Remade: Nakamoto men, Oryū the ageless midwife, silver letters, dragon tattoo, aunties who enjoy the job. Borrowing is openly admitted; ideology is the open question Morris will not let Zamora and Faris close.
Legend, Fantasy and the Birth of the New in Los funerales de la Mamá Grande by Gabriel García Márquez (Robin Fiddian)
A living legend behind the story
Critics have missed a source: García Márquez's 1952 articles on La Marquesita de la Sierpe, a kindly, rich Spanish woman of the Colombian coast who mothered her dependants, toured each year healing and solving debts, could be in several places at once and walk on water, but could not raise the dead because "the soul of the dead did not belong to her". She "had a pact with the Devil", people said, and lived as long as she wished, over two hundred years. The two texts are intertexts.
Tone, structure, Big Mama
"This, oh incredulous people of the world, is the true story of Big Mama, sovereign of the kingdom of Macondo", who ruled for 92 years and whose funeral "was attended by the Pope". The voice is popular street storytelling addressed to universal readers, but northern Colombian places and the Pope lend worldly credence to its claim to be a "chronicle". It privileges local types, the bagpipers of San Jacinto and the smugglers of La Guajira, over the President, and wants to record the "national commotion" before "the historians" arrive. Who speaks, and for whose truth?
| Element | In the story | What it figures |
|---|---|---|
| Wealth | Three colonial encomiendas, enlarged by marriages of convenience, rented to 352 families | A distorted Spanish colonial heritage; treasure buried in the War of Independence |
| "Moral possessions" | A list of forty items: territorial waters, the flag, human rights, free elections, linguistic purity | A conservative class (Bogotá, "the Athens of South America") owning democracy's words |
| Allies | Father Antonio Isabel, gun-toting Nicanor, medal-chested officers | Church, caciquismo and army after independence |
| The State | Nine days of mourning; Big Mama a "heroine who has given up her life for the fatherland" | National connivance in feudal power |
| The people | Believed she owned "past and future rainfall" and leap years; never thought she could die | Complicity in their own mystification |
The narrator's carnivalesque demolition fixes on her bulk, "the full weight of her guts and her authority squashed into her old rocking chair", and turns misogynous when she dies "a virgin and without issue" despite "matriarchal" breasts. Then she fades from view: the Pope arrives by gondola, overnight, and hands out sweets in a backwater for weeks. The rotten corpse is buried as "a lesson and a warning".
Fiddian: from legend to postcolonial allegory in Big Mama's Funeral
Modes of fiction
Nothing here is fantastic in the way of Poe, Borges, Fuentes's "Chac Mool" or Cortázar. A 114-year-old matriarch with a State funeral is implausible, not magical; there are no flying carpets yet, as in One Hundred Years of Solitude, nor the indigenous world of Asturias's Men of Maize. The text gives a simulacrum of a popular mind-set, held at critical distance. It fits two of Slemon's three features: the foreshortening of history, so that the story "metaphorically contains the long process of colonization", and the local site as metonym of the culture. It fits less well the third, "disjunctive language" and gaps, which Fiddian thinks Slemon took from One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its clash between Buendías and others.
Nothing magical, everything allegorical
"Big Mama's Funeral", last-written story (end of 1959) in the 1962 collection, shifts García Márquez from mid-1950s realism toward fantasy/magical realism. Fiddian finds "nothing magical", only credibility stretched by humour. Through Slemon's postcolonial model it becomes allegory of colonial and post-colonial power; the last line, "the birth of a new era", answers the Cuban Revolution of January 1959 (and echoes Pérez Jiménez's fall in Caracas, 1958, which García Márquez watched).
Legend, people, narrator
1952 articles on La Marquesita ground a living legend the folk "believe". Hyperbole and humour make literal truth hard to hold. People are victims of feudal abuse and complicit in mystification. Slemon's disjunctive language fits One Hundred Years better than this story, where the narrator's view wins in the final paragraph. Jameson's line that satire carries a utopian frame seals Fiddian's tricontinental reading.
Fiddian timeline from folk legend to Cuba
Slemon's three fits, unevenly
Fiddian maps Slemon onto the story: (1) history foreshortened; (2) local standing for the whole; (3) disjunctive language of narration. The third fits One Hundred Years better; here the narrator's final clarity ("birth of a new era") overrules popular gaping at "the spectacle of power" while relatives strip the house. Goetzinger had called the story fantasy; Higgins used magical realism in scare quotes. Fiddian prefers allegory timed to Cuba and tricontinentalism (Leopoldo Zea in his wider work).
Complicity and loyalty
Ordinary people are victims and mystified accomplices; Big Mama gets fewer apologies still. Closing note that the heralded order "really did materialise, for some years at least" and that García Márquez "remained stubbornly loyal" is offered without debate.
Fiddian's uneven Slemon fit
Tricontinental seal
Written as Castro entered Havana, after Pérez Jiménez's fall, the story "captures and translates the seismic shift" in Caribbean and world political order. Fiddian links that to tricontinentalism and Leopoldo Zea. Satire's utopian frame (Jameson) and the narrator's "sufficient clairvoyance" line make the Cuban dating more than biographical trivia: it is the essay's claim that fantasy here is history's allegory, not Macondo décor.
Tone, structure, Big Mama as living legend
Fiddian rebuilds the story's tone from 1952 Marquesita articles through hyperbolic funeral spectacle. Big Mama concentrates feudal land, Church and State; her death is public theatre. People's belief and narrator's satire run on parallel tracks until the last paragraph chooses the narrator. That choice is why Slemon-3 (disjunctive language) fits poorly and allegory-by-date fits better.
Fiddian: tone to political seal
Part IV Introduction: Empire, Nation, Magic (Wen-chin Ouyang)
| Ch | Essay | Empire or nation at stake |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | Allison on Yeats and Heaney | Lyric myth and folklore imagine an Irish nation against British empire |
| 26 | Sperl on al-Kawni | Tuareg myth writes back to an "empire complex"; but Sufi Islam, an imperial legacy, is internalised |
| 27 | Erickson on Ben Jelloun | Nomadic thought escapes both "Western" and "Islamic" systems |
| 28 | Jones on Rushdie | Under the attack on exclusive religion, nostalgia for a simpler world |
| 29 | Ouyang on Khoury | The nation-state, dead or alive, shapes a "postnational" Lebanese novel |
The five essays of Part IV
Anderson's nation-ness and magic outside the homeland
Benedict Anderson's claim that "nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time" still holds for Ouyang more than two decades on. Magical realism both imagines nations rooted in "time immemorial" through local myth and religion, and subverts the post-Enlightenment realism nationalism shared. That nationalist impulse, disguised in criticism as empire-writes-back hybridity, shows most clearly outside the mode's Spanish American "homeland".
The Part IV itinerary
Allison on Yeats and Heaney; Sperl on al-Kawni's desert Qur'ān of matter; Erickson on Ben Jelloun's nomadic Sand Child; Jones on Rushdie's butterflies and bounded communities; Ouyang herself on Khoury's Little Ghandi and the postnational predicament. Empire, nation and magic meet where the nation-state fails as paradigm.
Ouyang opens Part IV with Anderson
Magical Nationalism, Lyric Poetry and the Marvellous: W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney (Jonathan Allison)
Todorov and poetry
For Todorov the fantastic is the hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations; once we choose, we pass into the uncanny or the marvellous, the fairy-tale world where "neither a hundred years sleep nor a talking wolf" surprises. Cornwell argues that poetry, being about language and incantation, sets up a different kind of suspended disbelief. Allison accepts that most legend-based lyrics are marvellous, and they carry the same political charge critics find in the fantastic.
Yeats and magical nationalism
A founder of the Dublin Hermetic Society and a member of the Golden Dawn, Yeats put magic at the centre of his thought. After Parnell's fall (1891) he saw energy "as full of energy as a boiling pot" move into culture; Foster calls this thinking "from hand to mouth". "Progress is miracle, and it is sudden", Yeats wrote in 1900, the germ of the "terrible beauty" of Easter 1916, both human will and supernatural power.
| Work | Source | Marvellous element | National charge |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Stolen Child | Fairy-abduction lore | A child led away by a faery | A world beyond suffering and time |
| The Wanderings of Oisin | Fenian legend | Three hundred years with Niamh | The pre-Christian Gaelic past |
| The Valley of the Black Pig | Millenarian prophecy | Visions of a last battle | Revolution as apocalypse |
| The Song of Wandering Aengus | The Dream of Oengus (8th century?) | A trout becomes a "glimmering girl" | For O'Hegarty, endless longing for self-rule |
| Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902, with Lady Gregory) | The Shan Van Vocht | An old woman leaves as "a young girl... the walk of a queen" | Martyrdom for the nation |
Yeats's Aengus differs from the book: in the tale Oengus wins his fairy bride and they fly off as white birds, but Yeats stops at the vow to pluck "the silver apples of the moon". O'Hegarty's obituary read this as an aisling about Ireland: "we knew what they meant". Allison sees an ideology of noble, perpetual longing, even of the nobility of defeat. Kuch calls Cathleen properly fantastic: she is "neither explained nor explained away", both a worn old woman and the nation.
Allison: two uses of Irish legend in lyric
Heaney's air ship
In the anonymous medieval tale translated by Kenneth Jackson, monks at Clonmacnoise see a ship sailing in the air; its anchor catches in the church, a sailor "swimming" down is held until he cries "you are drowning me". In Heaney's twelve-line lyric in Lightenings (Seeing Things, 1991), a kind abbot, Heaney's addition, has the man freed, and he "climbed back / Out of the marvellous as he had known it". Before the abbot speaks, "A ship appeared above them in the air" gives a moment of real hesitation: the fantastic inside a lyric. "The annals say" keeps the national frame.
Todorov, lyric and a politics of the marvellous
Todorov limited the fantastic to fiction. Jonathan Allison asks how the marvellous works in lyric poetry. Lyrics shaped from indigenous folklore can convey counter-cultural values and counter-imperialist descriptions of experience. Yeats made a "politics of the marvellous": irrational Irishness against Anglo-Saxon administrative reason. Heaney revisits the same sources freed from decolonising duty; for the sailor, the monks are the marvel (the air-ship poem).
Magical nationalism and its afterlife
Yeats's folklore project is nationalist instrument and aesthetic program at once. Heaney's later air ship shows the marvellous travelling without the same anti-imperial brief: wonder persists when the political assignment loosens. Allison thus widens magical realism's media beyond the novel without claiming Yeats "is" a magical realist in the Boom sense.
Allison: lyric marvellous across two generations
Air ship: who is marvel to whom
Heaney's sailors see Irish monks as the wonder; perspective flip undoes one-way anthropological marvel. Yeats needed irrational Irishness as anti-imperial tool; Heaney can revisit folklore without that duty, showing the marvellous survives decolonising assignment. Allison thereby answers Todorov's prose-only fantastic with lyric evidence.
Allison: marvellous from Yeats to Heaney
Empire and Magic in a Tuareg Novel: Ibrāhīm al-Kawni's al-Khusūf (The Lunar Eclipse) (Stefan Sperl)
The empire complex
Shaykh Ghūmā, a Tuareg chief, loses children, friends, beloved, animals and finally his desert, yet wins a last political victory. Flashbacks show an unbroken assault from the North, whose marks are despotism (the prison) and rapacity (oil, gold, water, people).
| Power | In the novel |
|---|---|
| Romans | The first layer; Bordello dreams of Scipio Africanus |
| Ottomans | A governor's first building is a dungeon; Saʿādi Bey ruined by greed for gold; Nūri Bey's "right of the first night" |
| French | An oil expedition halted by a Tuareg confederation |
| Italians | Track victims across the desert; imprison Ghūmā |
| Independent Libya | "New colonialists", worse than the Italians; an Italian archaeologist finds Tānis's treasure for them |
Against them stand freedom ("the desert is freedom", Ghūmā tells his Italian captors) and zuhd, abstinence: "the glory of the desert people is abstinence", a mystic virtue that sets desert against oasis, nomad against settler.
Two magics
Social magic, from diviners and witchdoctors, many of them women, comes from the African south (Timbuktu, Agadez, Kano). It is often pre-Islamic and ineffective against empire: the great diviner Muhammadū is captured while defecating. The stronger magic belongs to the desert itself: wind in the palms "dispenses revelations", "the language of eternity which discloses the secret of existence and, at the last moment, recoils". The words chosen (waḥy, the disclosure of a secret) are Qur'ānic and Sufi, so even sober passages seem to hold "something inexhaustible", Leal's aim to "capture the magic that palpitates in things".
Sperl: three sources of the marvellous in al-Khusuf
Lucretius in the desert
Like Walcott, who in Omeros finds Homer's heroes among St Lucian fishermen, al-Kawni handles classical antiquity, but to devalue it as imperial baggage. The Italian captain Bordello, drunk, quotes Lucretius while ordering the torture of the shepherd Ājjār: "far better to lead a quiet life than to long for sovereign authority". Al-Kawni renders "quiet" as sakīna, the goal Ghūmā says he seeks, and Ājjār lives that quiet life. The heir of Rome betrays its wisdom, which the nomads draw from nature itself. Al-Kawni also fuses Atlantis with Tanit/Tānis and Herodotus's Garamantes, so that a prehistoric Sahara, attested by rock engravings, becomes history and the periphery becomes the centre.
Sperl also finds a fourth layer, Islam, alongside indigenous, African and European ones. As Arabic and as the clergy of the oases it belongs to empire, yet among the Tuareg it lives in symbiosis with older belief. In Arabic āya means both a Qur'ānic verse and a sign of divine power in nature, so al-Kawni's vision may subvert monotheism or fit within it. Sperl leaves both readings open.
Empire complex and the epic of the desert
Ibrāhīm al-Kawni, born 1948 in the Libyan desert, grew up speaking Tamashek, learned Arabic after twelve, read Dostoevsky in Poland and Russia, and set out to write "the epic of the desert". The Sahara is "God's regent on this earth"; "God, man and beast are joined into one body called Sahara". Stefan Sperl reads the four-volume al-Khusūf (1986-88) as magical realism writing back to an "empire complex".
Two magics and Lucretius
Magic lies less in sorcerers than in a desert that speaks revelation. Islamic Arabic both serves empire and sacralises nature: "a kind of Qur'ān made of matter instead of words". Lucretius in the desert names a materialist-sacred double: atoms and signs, matter as scripture. Tuareg life, Arabic form and European reading collide without mestizo fusion.
Sperl: al-Kawni's formation and desert magic
Arabic as empire's tongue and nature's scripture
Sperl's paradox: Islamic Arabic serves historical empire yet, in al-Kawni, sacralises desert nature into a material Qur'ān. Two magics: sorcerer-display versus revelatory landscape. Writing back to the empire complex means neither simple nativism nor European surrealism, but Tuareg-speaking childhood translated into Arabic epic form after Dostoevsky. Lucretius names the materialist sacred: atoms that signify.
Four volumes, one desert body
al-Khusūf (1986-88) keeps the Sahara as joined body of God, man and beast. Sperl's "empire complex" names the psychic and political residue al-Kawni writes back to without becoming a European surrealist in the sand. Revelation-language of landscape (literal desert) is the magic; sorcerer scenes are secondary. Tuareg childhood, Arabic school-tongue and Dostoevsky abroad produce an epic that sacralises matter.
Empire complex answered by desert epic
Magical Realism and Nomadic Writing in the Maghreb (John D. Erickson)
Magical realism, the fantastic and the margin
The fantastic, for some critics, ends in rational explanation, or, for Caillois, in "a strange and almost unbearable irruption" of demonic forces into an orderly world. Magical realism instead presents magical and real as coequal, coexisting rather than one displacing the other. Lyotard denies there is a margin at all: "What speaks of margins is the Empire". Following Valbuena Briones, the mode is "a universal tendency"; the 1001 Nights shows it in Arabic.
| Concept | Source | What it opposes |
|---|---|---|
| Leveling | Erickson | Master narratives that claim universal truth |
| Nomadic thought | Deleuze and Guattari | Statist, theocratic, nativist and globalising "totalistic" ideology |
| Refusal to be domesticated | Kateb Yacine | Poetry that teaches men how to live; the true poet "break[s] all frames" |
| Delusion of oneness | Maffesoli | Homogeneity as the root of totalitarian violence |
| Translation | Khatibi | Simple reversal; instead, reworking the colonial tongue |
Erickson names Djebar, Mokeddem, Boudjedra, Djaout, Laâbi and Khatibi, but Ben Jelloun best fits the mode, from L'Écrivain public (1983), whose scribe writes letters that say the opposite of what illiterates dictate and invites us to read in any order, like Cortázar or Queneau. Against Robbe-Grillet's "stable, coherent... thoroughly decipherable universe", Ben Jelloun offers masks, errancy and absence.
The Sand Child
On the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech a storyteller claims to hold the book of Ahmed/Zahra, a girl raised as a boy. It has seven gates: Thursday (birth), Friday (childhood), Saturday (an adolescence with blanks "left for the reader to fill in"), then Bab El Had, after which they pass only through forgotten breaches in the wall. "Our steps invent the path as we proceed"; "Circular streets have no end!"; "You do not know where I am leading you. Fear not, I do not know, either."
Erickson: The Sand Child dissolves its own narrative
The narrative disintegrates: a notebook blurred by tears, unreadable signatures, insects carrying words away, a stream through the pages, a misting mirror, and finally a book "emptied of its writings by the full moon", a palimpsest. Tellers multiply. The Blind Troubadour, a thin disguise for Borges, has been "thrown into one tale by another tale", sits in a Marrakech café and in Buenos Aires at once, receives a woman bearing a letter from Stephen Albert of "The Garden of Forking Paths", and quotes "The Circular Ruins": "someone else was dreaming him". Like Ts'ui Pen's infinite book, the novel takes all forks at once.
Resistance that levels master narratives
For John D. Erickson, magical realism is a narrative of resistance that "levels" master narratives, exposing them as "just one discourse among many". In francophone North Africa it merges with nomadic thought (Deleuze and Guattari): writing that crosses frontiers as desert nomads have for millennia.
The Sand Child: keys do not exist
Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Sand Child (1985) pushes that logic until "keys do not exist". Gender disguise, storytelling circles and Borgesian labyrinths deny a single unlockable truth. Erickson celebrates nomadic multiplicity; Jones's later Rushdie chapter will counter-weight that celebration with yearning for bounded community. Magical realism, the fantastic and the margin meet where French colonial language carries an anti-colonial desert form.
Francophone Maghreb Part IV
Margin, fantastic and the road not taken
Erickson opens with Frost's road not taken: magical realism as other perception of empirical/fantastic relations. At the margin, francophone Maghreb writing levels European master narratives. Ben Jelloun's storytelling circle, gender disguise and absent keys push until interpretation cannot close. Compare Jones (Ch. 28): where Erickson celebrates nomadic multiplicity, Jones fears monumentalized impurity and seeks bounded community. The companion lets both stand.
Part IV debate: open roads versus belonging
Sand Child as limit case
Erickson's Ben Jelloun reading pushes magical realism until interpretive keys fail: gender, storytellers and desert nomad thought deny master closure. That limit case sets up Jones's Rushdie caution and Ouyang's Khoury form-collapse. Part IV's sequence is deliberate: Ireland's marvellous nationalism, desert matter-Qur'ān, Maghreb nomadism, Rushdie's bounded butterflies, Khoury's holes.
Part IV cascade Erickson helps open
Of Numerology and Butterflies: Magical Realism in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (Stephanie Jones)
Between falling and flying
The novel opens after the blast: Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha fall from a hijacked jet over the Channel, singing, "angelicdevelish". The bomb itself is told only on page 87. Benjamin's history that "blasts open the continuum" and Bhabha's aesthetic of "shock" fit this. Yet Jones notes that the same stasis also produces the Imam, "frozen" in "a dream of glorious return", who flies home, erases the word "clock", and swallows his people at the palace gates. Suspended moments can lead to monologic annihilation as well as to migrant freedom. Flight and fall, angel and devil, are deconstructed but not glorified; the two men "tease, bicker and chat" in ordinary terms.
Between two and 1001
Booker traces Rushdie's pairs collapsing into the Scheherazadean 1001 (Saleem among the midnight children; Chamcha, "Man of a Thousand Voices"). Jones adds the neglected number three.
| Number | Example | Meaning for Jones |
|---|---|---|
| Two | Gibreel and Saladin; Saleem and Shiva | Binaries shown to be interchangeable |
| 1001 | Midnight's children; the Thousand Voices | Infinite metamorphosis, the power of fiction |
| Three | The sisters of Shame; the Furies of Fury; Lat, Uzza and Manat | A feminine force against monotheism, but shown as destructive, screeching, uncontrolled |
The three goddesses of the recanted verse, "the exalted birds", later attack Gibreel on Mount Cone, "clawing at his eyes". The image reveals a "residual patriarchal" fear, but also a wariness of alterity collapsing altogether. Rushdie's religions are not simply absurd. They carry nostalgia and "a hole at the heart" of the self.
Jones: the numerology of The Satanic Verses
The butterflies of Titlipur
The Ayesha Haj, based on a real case in which thirty-eight Shia Muslims walked into the Arabian Sea expecting it to part, follows an epileptic orphan who leads her village to the sea, cloaked in butterflies. Gibreel's dream sequences are radically defocalised (Faris): he both causes and suffers the events, and the reader cannot fix a moral view. When a foundling is left at a mosque and Ayesha says "Everything will be asked of us", the crowd stones the baby. Her phrase is a slight variant of Gibreel's "Everything is required of us, and everything will be given", which links the scene to the scribe Salman's altered verses. The point is the moral need to interpret, against mere recitation.
Critics flatten the butterflies: a sign of chastity (Suleri, who thinks the real event makes magical realism "obsolete"), a death instinct (François), "religious illusions" (Al-Azm). Jones follows Faris: magical images reveal their motives "after some scrutiny", and these work on every plane. They seem now Allah's, now Satan's; they heal and gather the scattered pilgrims, then refuse to enter the mosque after the stoning. They were the familiar spirits of the local saint Bibiji, and Titlipur ("butterfly home") has grown into a banyan tree so fully that tree and village are one. They signify an organically bound community; at the end, moths replace them and the village "crumbled to dust".
Against monumental multiplicity
The Satanic Verses is Zamora and Faris's "most controversial magical-realist text of all". The fatwa (Khomeini 1989; printed claim it "was lifted in 1998" overstates Iran's 1998 non-pursuit statement) made it easy to read as boundless multiplicity. Stephanie Jones, after Slemon, warns magical realism can become a "monumentalizing category". Rushdie explores thrills and discomforts of endless multiplicity, yet also, "with trepidation", seeks relief in bounded communities, organic and diasporic, and distrusts "a pure form of impurity".
Numerology: two, 1001, three, butterflies
Between binary collapse and 1001-night infinity, other numbers matter: winged destroyers in threes; Ayesha's Titlipur butterflies as a soft community that heals and leads, then fails under stoning. Chamcha's devil horns become rubber badges of protest; he refuses then rejoins "his own kind". Renewal of small collectivities challenges monologism more fully than "abstractions of a pure multiplicity". Bhabha's transit aesthetic and Benjamin's shock supply theory Jones both uses and resists when stasis is not liberating.
Jones: numerology against pure impurity
Ayesha, Titlipur and the soft touch of wings
Ayesha, epileptic orphan, leads villagers to a sea she says will part for Mecca. After disaster, "every single member of the pilgrimage" is found and led back by long lines of butterflies, healed by "the soft touch of wings". Immediately afterward the baby is stoned: bounded community and violence share one sequence. Jones reads this less as pure carnival failure than as moral need to interpret and commune at a mundane level. Booker's "alternative myths for the modern age" fill a religious hole; Jones hears also doubt about doubt and about collectives of faith.
Chamcha's horns and the refusal of pure impurity
In London, Chamcha's "You're not my people" concedes the other half of a life spent leaving them. Devil's horns become rubber protest badges; supporters draw him in "almost despite the impetus of the carnivalesque narrative itself". Against Faris's Scheherazade children and pure multiplicity, Jones places affiliation as Rushdie's fuller challenge to monologism.
Between Bhabha's shock and bounded relief
Jones uses Bhabha's transit aesthetic (after Benjamin) then notes that textual stasis is not always liberating shock. Flying/falling binaries deconstruct themselves; 1001-night declarations open the text even as narrative strands resist encompassing slogans. The fatwa over-determined reception; Jones recentres numerology and butterflies as the novel's own argument about multiplicity's thrills and discomforts. Affiliation, not pure impurity, is the hard ask.
Jones recentres the Verses
From The Thousand and One Nights to Magical Realism: Postnational Predicament in The Journey of Little Ghandi by Elias Khoury (Wen-chin Ouyang)
Story against death
As in the Nights, story keeps death at bay; when the story ends, life ends. The novel copies the Nights' frame-within-frame: in seven chapters, a novelist-narrator searches for a story; the waitress-turned-prostitute Alice tells him about herself and about Abd al-Karim, called Little Ghandi for no reason anyone can give, a waiter, restaurateur, garbage man and shoe shiner. Each name mentioned starts another story. The fantastic is grounded in this world, a reality "more fantastic than fantasy".
Sectarianism as the fantastic
In the long fifth chapter names multiply out of control, and the theme of sectarian nonsense emerges. Reverend Amin, married to a Greek Orthodox priest's daughter, moves from Evangelical preacher to Protestant pastor; his grandmother Um Tanios, bedridden and senile, dreams of the Prophet, is raised up by Muslim neighbours, has her house made a shrine, and is fought over at her burial. Father John concludes "it was all the same in the end". Alice tells him she is a Muslim: "I was a student of the whorehouse. It's all the same, Father." Alice moves from militia leader to militia leader, a symbol of Lebanon that Ouyang calls "misogynous".
| Borgesian technique (Irby) | In The Journey of Little Ghandi |
|---|---|
| The work within the work | Civil war frames invasion, which frames the novelist, who frames Alice, who frames Little Ghandi; voices overlap |
| Contamination of reality by dream | Um Tanios's conversion; doubt whether the narrator ever met his characters |
| The double | Alice and Little Ghandi as doubles; the son Husn as Ralph (murder suspect) and Ghassan (hairdresser); names repeating down the generations |
| The voyage in time | Five versions of one life, readable in any order like Cortázar's Hopscotch |
The book fits Faris's "Scheherazade's Children", magic growing "organically out of the reality portrayed" with no antinomy of two worlds. But Ouyang finds postmodernism and magical realism both "unsatisfying" labels. Khoury writes, not rewrites, history; he shows no nostalgia, recovers no local past from empire, and does not harmonise diversity, since "the secular suppression of sectarian differences is precisely the problem". For him death is literal, not literary: "We write, we resist and we die."
Ouyang: the nation-state's fall gives Khoury's novel its form
Postcoloniality, nationalism, realism
Beirut went "from the Switzerland of the East to Hong Kong, Saigon, to Calcutta", Camelot into the Nights' City of Brass. Bashir al-Jumayyil's assassination and the Israeli occupation ended the Lebanese "state of fantasy" (Jacqueline Rose). Khoury, editor of the literary pages of Al-Safir, rejected "cultural invasion" as an oxymoron: cultures interact, and resistance through anti-Orientalism only traps Arabs in self-orientalization. The real enemy is sectarianism, "a form of nationalism gone awry". The war is a memory war: "mythical memory", the ground of sect, triumphs over "historical memory", the ground of nations. "They want us to forget, so that we drown in illusion and kill one another."
The Arabic realist novel had served nationalism, twinning hero and nation in parallel journeys. After 1967 that optimism faded. When the paradigm collapses, the novel "loses its uni-form" and must search for form, collapsing and colluding with the nationalist "form shaping ideology" (Bakhtin).
Three strands Ouyang finds in the novel
Stories full of holes
"All stories are full of holes. We no longer know how to tell stories." The refrain opens each middle chapter of Elias Khoury's novel (1989; Haydar translation The Journey of Little Gandhi, 1994). Set during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, it marries the Nights' fantastic (via Borges and Cortázar) with magical realism. Form comes from the collapse of the nation-state as paradigm: story breaks along sectarian destruction, yet "story is history" still holds.
Sectarianism as the fantastic
1943 Lebanon as nation-state; 1975-91 civil war; 1982 invasion and Bashir's killing. Mythical memory (sect) defeats historical memory (nation). Ouyang: combination of fantastic and real is "more in line with magical realism" because stories stay grounded in this world; civil-war reality is "more fantastic than fantasy". The novel struggles to write, not rewrite, history. Khoury's own criticism (Lost Memory; Time of Occupation) laments that the Lebanese writer can no longer "see, to discover, to record and give testimony".
Names as episteme
Opens: "When I found out their names, I found out the story". Closes: "When we knew the names, the story began, and when the names were extinguished, the story began". No transformative plot; heroes gain no insight; chronology and geography stop organising life; chapters swell from 12 pages to 102 and shrink to 7. Little Ghandi's life fits one paragraph: "a man who lived and died, like millions of men". Title printed throughout as "Ghandi" (error for Gandhi).
Ouyang: form follows the state's fall
Nights, Borges, Cortázar: other interlocutors
Ouyang stresses that Khoury's precursors fall outside mainstream magical-realist canons: The Thousand and One Nights via Arabic intertextuality, plus Borges and Cortázar, more than García Márquez. Arabic novel's relation to the Nights differs from European and Spanish American uses; ontological priorities diverge. Death in postmodern play can be literary; here it is literal. Magical realism locates politics in postcolonial resistance to European grand narrative and realism; postmodern labels "obfuscate the singularity of each text".
Lost memory and the state of fantasy
Khoury's criticism (Lost Memory; Time of Occupation) and earlier horizon-searching essays chart fading nationalist optimism after mid-century. The "Lebanese state of fantasy" (Jacqueline Rose's term, borrowed) takes its final blow in the 1982 invasion, reminiscent of Crusades and French colonisation. Resistance should not only answer Orientalism with anti-Orientalist cages; it needs self-examination. Form disintegrates as testimony's conditions collapse: five versions of one life, chapters that balloon and shrink, names that start and extinguish story.
Ouyang: Khoury's interlocutors and historical break
Story is history across modes
Ouyang's finale: the postnational Arabic novel locates the nation-state's collapse as site of disintegration of form, not national longing for form (Nicola Miller's In the Shadow of the State in the frame). Khoury grapples with European realism's history and realisms imported or generated in earlier postcolonial Arab nationalism; this exceeds Bloom's anxiety of influence or simple rebellion against European realism. Despite skepticism about language's hold on reality, "the function of the novel as history has held fast". Whether conventional realism, nationalist realism, postcolonial magical realism, postmodern anti-realism, or postnational counter-realism, "story is history". That sentence is the essay's last word and Part IV's seal.
| Mode Ouyang names | Relation to nation |
|---|---|
| Conventional / nationalist realism | Nation as form to build |
| Postcolonial magical realism | Write back; hybrid nation myths |
| Postmodern anti-realism | Play; literary death |
| Postnational counter-realism (Khoury) | Form disintegrates with the state; story still history |
Alice, occupation, five versions of a life
Ouyang tracks Alice's disappearance against the occupation frame (printed 1982-84 withdrawal compresses a messier timeline; A closer look flags this). Little Ghandi's life in one paragraph stands for millions. Five versions replace plot insight; chapters that swell to 102 pages and shrink to 7 mime a public sphere that cannot keep one story shape. Form is the politics.
Khoury: occupation breaks narrative measure
What to Keep from the Companion
Numbered takeaways
- Magical realism travels because worlds stay apart. Hart's thesis is that a literature of riven, heterogeneous reality gave other fissured societies a model; the mode does not fuse cultures, it keeps them side by side.
- Its politics are never given in advance. Ouyang's "there is politics and there is politics" is the book's refrain: the same device can subvert, conserve or evade, and only a close reading of style and genre decides which.
- Magic comes from books as well as from myth. The Nights, Ovid, Borges and Cortázar are sources as real as Amerindian belief; intertextuality is a root of the mode, not a dilution of it.
- Seeing is the mode's first act. Zamora returns it to Roh's painting and defines it by its visualizing capacity: ordinary things envisioned in extraordinary ways, from Borges's poetic objects to García Márquez's Baroque ones.
- Myths in these novels are devices, not revelations. Shaw rejects a Latin American "mythic consciousness": myths come from Classical, Christian and indigenous sources and serve the writers' own attitudes.
- The earth is an archive, and gender decides who reads it. King and Hart find Asturias and Rulfo trying to master the earth, while Bombal and Parra open a feminine archive in nature.
- The marvellous real owes more to surrealism than Carpentier admitted. Wilson shows Breton's terms turned against Breton, and an exoticist gaze turned on Carpentier's own culture.
- Tradition, not territory, can generate the mode. Robinson finds magical realism already in Ovid, which weakens Carpentier's claim that only America's virgin land could produce it.
- Blurring dream and reality does not cancel moral duty. Kristal reads García Márquez's memoir as a political secularization of the Golden Age theme that life is a dream.
- Fantasy can face history rather than flee it. Part II's question, escape or critique, is answered in Saramago, where the fantastic grows from ornament to engine of the plot.
- Some forerunners are harsher than their heirs. Núñez-Faraco's reading of The Vortex suggests that Spanish American reality is cruel, not magical, and that Rivera may have come closer to the truth.
- Religion can push the mode past technique. Rengifo's Montero gives Voodoo a revelatory weight that a purely stylistic magic lacks.
- Magic and crime together unsettle respectability. Berkowitz's Jewish novels use inexplicable forces to loosen discourses of gender and of Jewish normality.
- A "view from elsewhere" makes home strange. Sceats's Carter uses fantasy to give a disturbing picture of the real, until the line between fantastic and real stops mattering.
- Humour and magic share a mechanism. Fishburn traces both to the collision of incompatible frames, the bisociative shock that keeps a pessimistic history readable.
- Children's books can carry the mode's politics. Swanson shows Allende inverting Civilization and Barbarism, while a First-World hero limits the inversion.
- Popular success can mean conservative magic. Price argues that Like Water for Chocolate uses its "tablespoon of magic" to prop up patriarchal and national clichés.
- Folklore becomes critique when the frame shifts. Ratner's Persian Brides moves from Orientalist folklore to magical realism and so exposes the Orientalism within Israeli discourse.
- Magic can be a way to evade conflict. Morris finds Nakagami's roji dreamed through Latin American models, and the same magic lets the fiction avoid confronting mainstream Japan.
- Allegory can answer a revolution. Fiddian reads Big Mama's Funeral as colonial and post-colonial allegory whose "new era" points to Cuba, 1959.
- Magic serves nation-building as well as its critique. Ouyang's Part IV shows the mode imagining nations from "time immemorial" while subverting the realism nationalism shared.
- The marvellous works in lyric too. Allison's Yeats sets irrational Irishness against imperial reason; Heaney returns to the same sources freed of that duty.
- A desert can speak. Sperl's al-Kawni makes the Sahara itself the magical agent that writes back to an empire complex.
- Nomadic writing refuses keys. Erickson's Ben Jelloun uses the mode as resistance that levels master narratives into one discourse among many.
- Multiplicity has a price. Jones's Rushdie explores endless multiplicity but also seeks relief in bounded communities; the mode can become a monumentalizing category.
- When the nation falls, story still holds. Ouyang's Khoury builds a novel from the Nights and Borges on the ruins of the Lebanese state: "story is history".
The book's master question and its four possible answers.
Frameworks
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Riven reality (Hart) | The mode keeps heterogeneous worlds side by side rather than fusing them | Explaining why the mode spread to postcolonial societies |
| Fantasy and intertext (Ouyang) | Magic comes from literary traditions and serves desire for community | A text draws on the Nights, Ovid or Borges rather than local myth |
| Visualizing capacity (Zamora) | Ordinary objects envisioned in extraordinary ways | Reading objects, images and the link to Roh's painting |
| Myth as device (Shaw) | Myths serve authorial attitude, from three sources | Someone claims a novel reveals a "mythic consciousness" |
| Earth as archive (King and Hart) | The earth stores the dead; masculine mastery versus a feminine archive | Reading burial, land and gender together |
| Marvellous real (Carpentier, read by Wilson) | The marvellous lies in American nature and history | Testing Carpentier's claim against its surrealist roots |
| Escape or critique (Hart, Part II) | Fantasy either flees history or criticises it | A novel mixes historical events with impossible ones |
| Bisociation (Koestler, via Fishburn) | Humour and magic both collide incompatible frames | A grim history is told comically |
| Spectrum of politics (Ouyang, Part III) | Subversion, conservatism and evasion all use magic | Judging a best-seller or a national classic |
| Postcolonial allegory (Slemon, via Fiddian) | Magical realism encodes colonial and post-colonial power | A story seems to stand for a nation's history |
| Magical nationalism (Ouyang, Part IV) | Magic imagines nations from "time immemorial" | A text roots identity in myth or religion |
| Nomadic thought (Deleuze and Guattari, via Erickson) | Writing that crosses frontiers and refuses fixed keys | Reading Maghrebi or diasporic fiction |
Strengths and limits of the volume
- Magical realism travels because worlds stay apart. Hart's thesis is that a literature of riven, heterogeneous reality gave other fissured societies a model; the mode does not fuse cultures, it keeps them side by side.
- Its politics are never given in advance. Ouyang's "there is politics and there is politics" is the book's refrain: the same device can subvert, conserve or evade, and only a close reading of style and genre decides which.
- Magic comes from books as well as from myth. The Nights, Ovid, Borges and Cortázar are sources as real as Amerindian belief; intertextuality is a root of the mode, not a dilution of it.
- Seeing is the mode's first act. Zamora returns it to Roh's painting and defines it by its visualizing capacity: ordinary things envisioned in extraordinary ways, from Borges's poetic objects to García Márquez's Baroque ones.
- Myths in these novels are devices, not revelations. Shaw rejects a Latin American "mythic consciousness": myths come from Classical, Christian and indigenous sources and serve the writers' own attitudes.
- The earth is an archive, and gender decides who reads it. King and Hart find Asturias and Rulfo trying to master the earth, while Bombal and Parra open a feminine archive in nature.