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© Kim Anderson Sasser 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSasser, Kim, 1977–Magical realism and cosmopolitanism : strategized belonging / Kim Sasser.pages cmISBN 978–1–137–30189–5 (hardback)1. Magic realism (Literature) 2. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Fiction—21st century—History and criticism. 4. Cosmopolitanism in literature. I. Title. PN56.M24S27 2014809.3’911—dc23

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v

Acknowledgments vii

1 Magical Realism’s Constructive Capacity 1 The Authorial Circle and Latin American Magical Realism 4 Magical Realism and Postcoloniality 8 Magical Realism from the Metropole 11 Postmodern Magical Realism 13 Magical Realism in Postmemorial Holocaust Literature 15 Magical Realism’s Unsavory Stage 17 Defining the Mode 20 Three Magical Realist Modi Operandi 25 Controversy? 40

2 “How Are We to Live in the World?”: Cosmopolitan Cartographies 42

Why Belonging Now? 42 “How Are We to Live in the World?”: Belonging’s Question 45 The (Relatively) New Cosmopolitans 48 Literary Cosmopolitanisms 51 Literary Cosmopolitanisms: Approaches 54 Strategizing Belonging 62 Cosmopolitan Toolbox 65 Narrative Enfleshment 67 Conclusion 69

3 Vernacular (Hu)manism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road 71 Jeremiah’s Camera Case 74 Other Humanisms 87 The Engendered Postcolonial Nation 95 Lo real maravilloso 99 Conclusion 106

4 Universal Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence 107

Layer One: Particularism 110 Layer Two: Doubling 114 Layer Three: Exile 120 Universal Cosmopolitanism 126

Contents



vi Contents

Beyond Hybridity 132 Magical Realist Metamorphosis 139 Conclusion 144

5 The Family Nexus in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban 145 Political Families 148 Inner Worlds 156 Wider Worlds 163 The Magical Braid 168 Belonging to People 178

6 Uncanny Subjectivity in Helen Oyeymi’s The Icarus Girl 180 The Concentric Circles Debate 183 TillyTilly 188 Abiku/Ibeji 190 Alter Ego 196 The Doppelgänger and the Uncanny Self 198 Cautionary Cosmopolitanism 204

7 Making a Spectacle of Itself: Magical Realism as Cosmopolitan Form in the Era of Late Globalization 208

Bidimensionality 211 Spectacality and Brockmeier’s The Illumination 212 Antinomy 216 Renewal 219

Notes 222

Works Cited 237

Index 249



1

1Magical Realism’s Constructive Capacity

Communities are to be distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.

Benedict Anderson1

Since literary magical realism exploded out of Latin America and into international critical attention in the mid-twentieth century, the limbs of its narrative genealogy have continued to be sketched in both lower and higher than the branch bearing the immense impact of el boom. Perhaps the most often cited figure from magical realism’s pre–Latin American and pre-literary phase is Franz Roh, who deployed the term in 1925 to describe the German painting movement Magischer realis-mus, as critics such as Irene Guenther, Kenneth Reeds, Wendy Faris, and Lois Parkinson Zamora have discussed.2 Guenther traces the term even earlier, in fact, plotting a point in the late eighteenth century when it was deployed by Novalis, the German Romantic philosopher (34).3 By the time the term migrated transatlantically to Latin America, magical realism had formally mutated at least three times already, becoming a fixed literary concept after being developed in Latin American literature.

Following the boom of the 1950s and 1960s, magical realism began to be recognized as a global literary phenomenon. Magical realism has now been written by authors from innumerable countries of origin and thus is not the sole property of Latin Americans, as Alejo Carpentier might have us believe. Erik Camayd-Freixas, who himself contends for the delimitation of a distinct Latin American magical realism, still con-cedes that the mode is “today’s most compelling world fiction” (583). In addition to Carpentier, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, and Isabel Allende, among other significant Latin American magical



2 Magical Realism and Cosmopolitanism

realists, key contributions to the mode’s corpus have since been recog-nized in the works of Jack Hodgins, Louise Erdrich, Robert Kroetsch, and Toni Morrison. Beyond the American continents, Wen-chin Ouyang points out: “[Magical realism] is in Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tibetan, and Turkish, to name but a few languages” (“Magical” 15).

One recent example of magical realism is Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence (2008), analyzed in this study. Considering this novel in conjunction with the landmark 1949 publication of Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (El reino de este mundo), these two novels represent a significant development in magical realist author-ship in the East and West Indies.4 Furthermore, they form two temporal poles between which there is a nearly 60-year time span, a figure that does not include texts preceding the Latin American boom.

Magical realism has traversed boundaries of many kinds: temporal, geographical, linguistic, and formal. Since its transformation from phi-losophy and painting to literature, a more recent trend has been the meta-morphoses from literature to theater and film.5 Clearly, magical realism has proven extremely elastic, and it is just this adaptability that explains a significant aspect of its creative and critical persistence.

Yet, despite this rich history, literary magical realism has been under-estimated. I am not here merely responding to skeptics of the mode by pointing to the stubborn endurance of the term, though that point is true. What I want to draw attention to addresses those within the magi-cal realist fold, as it were: those who have engaged or are engaging with the literary form creatively and/or analytically. I mean to contend that magical realism has proven to be far more malleable than perhaps any-one deploying the term within very particular historical moments, loca-tions, and political frameworks may have been able to foresee, crucial as these specific usages have been to the mode’s development and geneal-ogy. Frequently, the mode has been circumscribed within these particular historical usages, critics and authors wedding the form to secondary fea-tures such as thematics, cultural resources and deployments, and politi-cal concerns; yet, we are just beginning to see that magical realism (and here I am concerned with its literary narrative form) is flexible enough to structure diverse projects and even divergent, incompatible views. This is a benefit, I hasten to add, for it means that the mode is capable of transcending any specific historical exigency. Returning to Carpentier at this point, then, we may extend his argument about the “baroque” attributes of lo real maravilloso to magical realism in general: the



Magical Realism’s Constructive Capacity 3

form’s adaptability recommends it as a cyclically recurring spirit as opposed to a “historical style” frozen in time (“Baroque” 95).6

In making a distinction between formal characteristics and second-ary features, I am participating in a long-standing critical argument, a “secular schism in Magical-Realist scholarship” that can be traced to Roh and Carpentier, as Camayd-Freixas describes (584). In their anthology, Zamora and Faris comment on the divergent views among two of the mode’s founders: “Roh’s emphasis is on aesthetic expres-sion, Carpentier’s on cultural and geographical identity,” the latter being reflected in primitivist thematics such as Afro-Cuban voodoo (“Introduction” 7). Significantly, Camayd-Freixas observes, Zamora and Faris formulate magical realism as a conversation that should include both Roh and Carpentier, aesthetics and secondary features, as is implicit in their inclusion of both in their anthology and explicit in the view they espouse here: “Despite their different perspectives, Roh and Carpentier share the conviction that magical realism defines a revi-sionary position with respect to the generic practices of their times and media; each engages the concept to discuss what he considers an anti-dote to existing and exhausted forms of expression” (Magical Realism 7).7

While I agree that magical realism includes both aesthetic and secondary aspects, this is true only in a specific sense. A robust under-standing of magical realism requires both a close-up view in which one perceives the numerous different applications (such as regional identity formation), including how these specific usages have adapted the mode, as well as a bird’s-eye view, a panoramic perspective of the magical real-ist timeline in its entirety, including an understanding of why and how magical realism as a theoretical nexus has attracted myriad usages, a mapping I endeavor subsequently to achieve.

As examples of the mode continue to proliferate, the need to separate form from supplementary features employed during particular stages has again become compelling. The Roh/Carpentier debate, then, is not only prior but also current, and it impresses upon us today the necessity of working toward resolving it. This debate, I suggest, is at least one sig-nificant exigency giving rise to contemporary critics advocating expan-sions in our understanding of the mode, as I will describe in more detail later. For now, it is enough to note that this conversation indicates that the critical registers available to us for engaging with magical realism are too narrow, and, I will argue, this problem stems from a restricted, fixed view of the mode, one that has married secondary features to formal features.




Untangling these issues requires a new look at magical realism and some of its most basic presumptions. What are the implications of mag-ical realism? What might it mean for a narrative to be written in this modality? How do we as readers and critics interpret its conspicuous magic? What is the potential range of narrative magic’s functionality? This study re-poses and responds to these questions lying at the heart of magical realist hermeneutics with a view to re-evaluating limited critical paradigms.

The Authorial Circle and Latin American Magical Realism

While numerous critics have traced the genealogy of the term magical realism – an illuminating project – in what follows, I track vicissitudes in authorship, or changing perceptions of who qualifies as an authentic magical realist storyteller. By studying the barometer of authorship one is able, first, to isolate precise points when magical realism has been wed to secondary features and, second, to track alterations in treatments of those secondary features from one stage to the next. Sometimes when the authorial circle is widened, the broadening is justified by the new grouping’s continuance of prior political and/or cultural agendas; at other times, those secondary features are abandoned when they are no longer perceived as mandatory ingredients, when the expansion neces-sitates their abandonment, or simply when the concerns of authors and critics and/or historical circumstances have changed. When this timeline is seen from a long view, it becomes evident that magical real-ism encompasses divergent incarnations and incompatible usages. The thread that unites these varied stages is the fantastic assumption that magic and realism might cohabitate in a single imaginative world, a foundational and formal feature.

It should be noted that by using authorship as a guiding rubric I do not always follow a temporal progression, but an expansion, or widen-ing, of what begins as a very restricted group identity. Moreover, these are not completely isolated categories; they overlap at certain points so that some authors might be situated within more than one phase.

As mentioned, the term magical realism did not originate in Latin America. Prior to two key applications of it in the early twentieth cen-tury, Roh’s painterly as well as Italian Massimo Bontempelli’s artistic and literary, Guenther identifies Novalis’s late eighteenth-century usage (34). She also mentions its application in early to mid-twentieth- century German literary criticism, as well as in the classification of numer-ous authors from Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium (59–60).




Günter Grass was employing this technique in 1959 against the tyranny of the Nazi regime in his novel The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel), as Faris shows (“Scheherazade’s” 179). This is the same time at which the boom authors were writing. In fact, Grass’s novel precedes García Márquez’s seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad; 1967) by eight years. Nevertheless, it is in Latin America that the mode is first extensively developed as literature and gains wide recognition.8 One can look to this phase, then, to discover formative frameworks.

Magical realism evolves significantly in Latin America in the 1940s, following the prior translation of Roh into Spanish in José Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente in 1927. According to Amaryll Chanady’s timeline, by the mid-twentieth century magical realism has been appropriated from Roh and German painting now to refer explicitly to “a means of expressing the authentic American mentality” and an “autonomous literature” (Magical 17). As she describes it, magical real-ism is deployed at this time to “territorialize” – Chanady’s term – Latin America and its exclusive, marvelous ontology (“Territorialization”). Carpentier, Asturias, and García Márquez are key figures advancing this position. In his Nobel Lecture, García Márquez territorializes Latin America when he contends that Latin Americans’ “crucial problem” is “a lack of conventional means to render [their] lives believable,” thereby coyly intimating that magical realism is the only literary form capable of expressing their “outsized reality” (“Solitude” 89).

A significant mechanism of territorialization involves the source from which narrative magic was frequently derived. Chanady explains that “the presence of the supernatural is often attributed to the primitive or ‘magical’ Indian mentality,” or imported African mentality, it could be added (Magical 19).9 In Carpentier’s short story “Journey to the Seed” (“Viaje a la semilla”), for example, after “el negro viejo,” the old Afro-Cuban servant Melchor, causes time to reverse with the waving of his stick and a string of unintelligible words (a chant?), the narrative juxta-poses a superior, autochthonous connection to the natural world with the loss of this connection that stems from Catholicism and Western learning and legal practices (59).10

African and American Indian indigenous worldviews offered a pivotal political strategy through which Latin American intellectuals combated the hegemony of (neo)colonialists: they countered the latter’s purported superiority and rationality through the antirationalist beliefs originat-ing outside the so-called West, namely Central and South America.11 From this early, crucial foundation, then, magic is deployed against Western reason. This is a determinative paradigm, one that recurs




throughout later engagements with the mode, even if the resource base for magic does not stem from indigenous beliefs.

Latin American magical realists were not completely original in their tactic. As Chanady shows (‘Territorialization’), Carpentier, Asturias, and Julio Cortázar furthered the strategy begun by two other contem-poraneous movements. One is antipositivism, a reaction to the rise of the US as a neocolonial force.12 “The antipositivistic subversion of the neocolonial hierarchy” criticized and rejected reason in order to claim both “difference” and “superiority” from those who imposed rational-ist models of thinking and being upon them. Their purpose in doing so was to undermine key premises on which Western claims of supremacy were grounded: “It is hardly surprising that Latin American intellectuals questioned the European rational canon. One of the criteria for the con-ceptual ‘Calibanization’ of the colonized was their supposed absence of reasoning faculties.” She adds: “Claiming that a Latin American (or generally Hispanic) philosophy was different but equal to the Franco-German tradition, and even criticizing the claim to universality of European philosophical systems, became a means of questioning one of the main criteria of Western superiority” (133–6). The Surrealists had also been utilizing techniques such as automatic writing and eccentric juxtapositions in order to critique reason from within the empire, and this through the “valorization of non-European mentalities” of so-called primitive peoples (Chanady “Territorialization” 137–41). In the 1920s Asturias and Carpentier were both affiliated with French Surrealists while they were in Paris, though Carpentier later explicitly rejects the Surrealists’ “manufactured mystery” for “the marvelous real” that “is encountered in its raw state, latent and omnipresent, in all that is Latin American” (“Baroque” 104).

While it is important to note that there are exceptions to the pairing of magic and Latin American indigenous resources, the view that this link is absolutely necessary becomes so pervasive that in 1985 Chanady must actually make a case for the inclusion of García Márquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude in the magical realist literary corpus because he looked for supernatural resources outside of the autoch-thonous, depicting magic that stemmed merely from “the author’s imagination” (“Origins” 56). That Chanady had to propose an argu-ment for García Márquez’s magical realism seems today, 25 years later, bemusing because of the paramount position this novel has acquired in any magical realist canon. Nevertheless, it demonstrates an early point in magical realist theory wherein extratextual features, here indig-enous resources, were viewed as nearly mandatory in the DNA of the




mode. Chanady acknowledges this issue in an earlier text: “The themes treated in magico-realist narrative are often a more important criterion than style or structure, and authors are frequently excluded from the category” when their narratives are not set “amongst the American natives” (Magical 19).

Camayd-Freixas comments on the persistence of this paradigm in contemporary Latin Americanist scholarship. His discussion, unlike Chanady’s, aligns García Márquez’s fantastical fiction with a primitive worldview, if one that stems from the purported general view of all Columbian villagers:

… the Latin American trend has been to reduce the scope of Magical Realism to a handful of authors and texts. While far from a consen-sus, most [Latin American] critics now lean towards an ethnological version of Magical Realism, with Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, and Gabriel García Márquez being the authors most often cited. Here, Magical Realism issues from an alternative world view one might call “primitive” – whether it is that of voodoo practitioners, Guatemalan Indians, or villagers from the Mexican and Columbian hinterlands. The emphasis is anthropological and regional, but what lies behind this is the suggestion of a continental Latin American identity. (584)

This last sentence picks up on an additional significant characteristic of Latin American magical realism. The indigenous resources from which magic was derived were frequently utilized as a tool for the region’s self-definition. The autochthonous was a means through which to recuperate a buried identity and culture, that which preceded the rup-ture of colonization. Chanady explains: “The Otherness of ‘primitive mentality’ … is appropriated by Latin American magical realists in their narrative strategies of identity construction.” In Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso, she offers as an example, “the marvelous is presented as one of the main characteristics of the Latin American continent” (“Territorialization” 138). This usage of the mode links it with the related function of regionalism and nation-building, a potential use of magical realism later harnessed by Nigerian-British author Ben Okri in The Famished Road (Chapter 4) and, in a more troubling way, by Italian Massimo Bontempelli in his fascist cultural work, as will be discussed in greater detail shortly.

As the mode began to be recognized and developed beyond this region, though, critics had to alter their hermeneutical frameworks




accordingly, paring down the perceived requirements from bulky, unnecessary characteristics. Magical realism’s literary DNA could not be forced to encode narrative elements such as a Latin American environ-ment and indigenous myth or the extrinsic criterion of Latin American authorship and identity construction once it was being successfully written by authors from Africa, India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. At the same time, the use of magical realism as a strategy of resistance toward (neo)colonialists and other hegemonic forces could be (and was) transposed to those applications, as was the prominent role of indigenous worldviews as a fantastical resource.13

Magical Realism and Postcoloniality

Homi Bhabha might be used as the herald of the next phase, that in which the authorial circle of magical realist authorship is widened from Latin American writers to incorporate postcolonial writers in general, when he exuberantly proclaims in Nation and Narration (1990): “‘Magical realism’ after the Latin American Boom, becomes the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world” (7). Just prior to Bhabha, Timothy Brennan suggests in 1989 that while magical realism is most closely asso-ciated with Latin Americans, the mode is “actually a more general and inevitable outcome of mature post-colonial fiction” (Salman xii). In fact, so closely allied with postcolonial literature does magical realism become at this point that, as Sara Upstone describes pithily, “in the last decade of the twentieth century it was easy to be convinced, at least in some criti-cal quarters, that magical realism was postcolonial fiction” (153).

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin cite Jacques Stephen Alexis’s 1956 essay “Of the Magical Realism of the Haitians” (“Du réal-isme merveilleux des Haïtiens”) as the moment when magical realism first extended beyond (Hispanic) Latin America’s geopolitical territory. As these editors also suggest, Alexis’s description of magical realism weds postcolonial politics of resistance and self-definition to the autochtho-nous, and thereby continues the political deployment of magical realist aesthetics begun by preceding authors: “Mythic and magical traditions, Alexis argued, … were the collective forms by which they gave expres-sion to their identity and articulated their difference from the dominant colonial and racial oppressors” (Key 132–3). Alexis looks to Haitian tra-ditions, especially those derived from African slaves, to define a unique national identity.

Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s discussion of Alexis is a component of their article on magical realism in Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, a




fact that indicates the mode’s having been circumscribed within a gen-eral postcolonial aesthetic. They explain that magical realism has come to refer to “the inclusion of any mythic or legendary material from local written or oral cultural traditions in contemporary narrative.” According to the editors, these autochthonous resources are deployed for two ends: “The material so used is seen to interrogate the assump-tions of Western, rational, linear narrative and to enclose it within an indigenous metatext, a body of textual forms that recuperate the pre-colonial culture” (Key 132).

As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin implicitly recognize, magical real-ism’s overwhelming success at what Suzanne Baker calls a “postcolonial strategy” lies in its ability to be transposed from its Latin American development to divergent postcolonial contexts.14 In its formal inter-mixture of supernaturalism and realism, the resource for supernatural-ism is provided by indigenous mythology, which is then opposed to hegemonic European frameworks, generic and otherwise. Ouyang has recently complained about this paradigm insofar as it constitutes the dominant critical hermeneutic: “Magic is [understood to be] derived from the ‘supernatural’ elements of ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ myths, reli-gions or cultures that speak directly to the imposition of Christianity in addition to post-Enlightenment empiricism on the ‘natives’ of South America” (“Magical” 16). The formulaic aspect of this understanding of magical realism’s two codes suggests how what appeared, for a time, a politically and aesthetically compelling medium to reflect and recon-struct exploited and marginalized peoples could subsequently become fatigued and reductive.

While this phase might include postcolonial authors within the First and Second Worlds such as Toni Morrison (Beloved [1987]), Louise Erdrich (Tracks [1988]), and Thomas King (Green Grass, Running Water [1993]), the most salient group of postcolonial magical real-ist authors are those Brennan has memorably dubbed “Third-World Cosmopolitans.” These are “literary celebrities from the Third World,” writers born outside the metropolis, but who came in the later twen-tieth century to reside there and are associated with its values and aesthetic practices (Salman viii–ix). They belong to the recent historical moment in which the mass migrations “in[to] England … from Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean, and in North America from Asia and Latin America” that occurred after World War II have reconfigured the demographics and cultural composition of “the imperial ‘centers’” (Salman 6). This has contributed to the appearance of literatures writ-ten in English and marketed in English-speaking locales by authors of




non-English origins. While Brennan is not referring explicitly to magi-cal realists in his discussion of these authors, this same group has grown up in close alliance with magical realism, Elleke Boehmer observes: “As things appear now, the proliferation of postcolonial migrant writing in English has become so closely linked to the runaway success of magic realism that the two developments appear almost inextricable” (Colonial 235). All four of the contemporaneous authors closely analyzed in this text – Nigerian-Londoner Okri, Indo-British-American Rushdie, Cuban-American Cristina García, and Nigerian-British Helen Oyeyemi – can be situated within this category.

Instead of simply transposing Latin American usages of magical realism into new geocultural contexts, the Third-World Cosmopolitan authors depart from several earlier features that seemed central to the mode. The most prominent author among Third-World Cosmopolitans, Rushdie has often employed magical realism toward a celebration of hybridity, whereby he undermines notions of any pure, fixed, and hallowed culture, and thereby diverges from the use of the mode for constructing a regional (Latin American) identity over against the West.

In addition to differing from previous magical realists, Third-World Cosmopolitans, in their advent, signaled a change in the terms of the decolonization struggle in general, Brennan explains. While for these authors’ predecessors nation-building was a priority, the mass migrations of the 1950s and 1960s and the disheartening failures in decolonization with the reinstatement of oppressive new regimes “have in a sense muted the national question … In that way [Third-World Cosmopolitans] deny the old pattern of need to create a national mythos in the country of origin” (Salman 50). A related, key point of distinction between this new generation and earlier decolonization writers is their attitude toward the West, which Third-World Cosmopolitans treat as both “foil and lure.” They criticize the West, but at the same time depict it as the praiseworthy “receptacle of ‘democracy’” (Salman 52).

As a result of their altered sociopolitical and historical contexts, the magical realists of this stage complicate the perception of magical real-ism as an intrinsically anti-Western aesthetic. Rather than utilizing the mode in any simple, outright rejection of the West, its empiricism and empire, the object of their interrogation may just as well include the political projects of their home countries. This stage’s usage con-trasts, as well, with the deployment of narrative magic to construct mythic cultural roots for the nations or regions of their birth, in short to construct nationalisms/regionalisms, a distinction between West Indian Carpentier and East Indian Rushdie. Examples include Midnight’s




Children and Shame, novels that “problematize” India and Pakistan “at an existential level,” describes Brennan (Salman 64). Another is Dreaming in Cuban, wherein Cristina García even-handedly critiques both the United States and Cuba.

Following the Third-World Cosmopolitans, the next significant exten-sion of the magical realist authorial circle incorporates Anglophone authors situated within former British settler colonies such as New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. This development seemed, at first, contentious, as Stephen Slemon reveals when he describes the recogni-tion of English-Canadian magical realism as “perhaps the most startling development for magic realism in recent years, since Canada, unlike the other regions” of the formerly colonized world (Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and Africa) “is not part of the Third World, a condi-tion long thought necessary to the currency of the term in regard to literature” (“Magic” 407–8). The previous statement exemplifies the historically ambivalent relationship between postcoloniality and settler colonies of the Second World, places where the majority population does not identify either with the indigenous population or the original states from which they derive.15 It also exemplifies how tightly bound magical realism has been to particular secondary features.

Slemon mitigates the controversy engendered by this widening of authorial parameters by demonstrating that the Canadian magical realist texts he analyzes maintain the postcolonial thrust of their Third-World counterparts. He works explicitly to “place the concept [of magi-cal realism] within the context of English-Canadian literary culture in its specific engagement with postcoloniality.” Specifically, these literary works continue a resistance strategy, Slemon posits, in that they “tend to display a preoccupation with images of both borders and centers and to work toward destabilizing their fixity” (“Magic” 412). Additionally, numerous narratives of this stage continue the paradigm of integrating the autochthonous into their thematics. The novels of Canadian Robert Kroetsch (What the Crow Said [1977]) and Jack Hodgins (The Invention of the World [1977]) incorporate Canada’s Amerindian populations in a similar way to how New Zealander Janet Frame (The Carpathians [1988]) subsequently integrates the Maori and Australian David Malouf (Remembering Babylon [1993]) the Aboriginal.16

Magical Realism from the Metropole

From this point, it is not a far step to expand the authorial param-eters broadly enough to include Anglo, First-World authors, as Anne




Hegerfeldt does in her Lies That Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen through Contemporary Fiction from Britain. Hegerfeldt, along with Angela Carter (who is perhaps the most renowned British-born magical realist author), defends the authenticity of this phase of magical realism in a gesture similar to that of the preceding group: both continue political solidarity with the postcolonial tradition of the mode. Carter can be seen as aligning the politics of her magical realism with that of her predecessors by suggesting a comparison between feminism (which is central to her work, as in Nights at the Circus [1984]) and decoloniza-tion. Writing at the age of 42, Carter describes herself in her twenties as “suffering a degree of colonization of the mind” because she would “unconsciously … posit a male point of view as a general one” (“Notes” 71). She also perpetuates another Latin American paradigm whereby magic’s necessary resource is local myth, while modifying it for a First-World writer such as herself. In contrast to García Márquez or Rushdie, she comments:

In Britain one has to invent much more; we don’t have an illiterate and superstitious peasantry with a very rich heritage of abstruse fic-tional material. But I realize that I tend to use other people’s books, European literature, as though it were a kind of folklore. In Nights at the Circus, for example, the character Mignon is the daughter of Wozzeck – I’m more familiar with the opera by Berg than with the play – who is left playing at the end: she doesn’t know what is going to happen. That is a reference to a common body of knowledge, a folklore of the intelligentsia. (Interview 81–2)

Carter is clearly cognizant of the Latin American and generally post-colonial paradigms for magical realism, both magic’s (mythological) source and (political) effect.

Hegerfeldt acknowledges her need to justify her focus of study, British magical realists, because, as she points out, “endeavors to move magic realism away from the margins are anything but uncontroversial.” She grants that “the mode is postcolonial,” a quality that she seems to believe is inherent to it, rather than evident in particular usages or inter-pretations: “Regardless of the author’s place of birth, magic realist fic-tion indeed is decidedly postcolonial in that it re-thinks the dominant Western world-view.” By deploying the same techniques to the same end, she reasons, “Western writers may well participate in such a post-colonial project” (2–3). In describing magical realism’s “re-thinking” of the “Western world-view,” Hegerfeldt suggests that the destabilization




of Western ways of understanding and engaging with the world is a definitive aspect of magical realism, and it is by this criterion that she determines the mode to be an intrinsically postcolonial form.

Hegerfeldt’s hermeneutics are limited in that she approaches magical realism with a predetermined framework, one that views all magical realist texts as necessarily being opposed to Western epistemology and working toward postcolonial aims. She does not make a distinction between successful usages, such as magical realism’s historical postco-lonial flowering, and necessary usages of the mode, nor between well-written texts that effectively oppose hegemonic frameworks and those that simply mimic a formula that proves saleable.

Postmodern Magical Realism

A marked furtherance in magical realist theory occurs when critics begin to recognize the mode’s affinities with postmodernism. At this stage, critics tend to draw attention to the way in which magical real-ism deploys postmodern techniques to ends compatible with its long-established postcolonial usages, and the authorial circle is expanded wide enough to include any writer/text resistant toward tyranny of diverse kinds, whether that be generic realism, Western empiricism, a totalitarian regime, or capitalism in the age of globalization.17 While postcolonialism and postmodernism depart from each other in many instances, they converge in magical realism at this point, underlining the way in which all three of these -isms (postcolonialism, postmodern-ism, and magical realism) developed alongside each other in the mid to late twentieth century.

Faris identifies magical realism as “an important component of post-modernism” (“Scheherazade’s” 163), exhibiting “postmodern fictional strategies” such as performativity, metafictionality, and shifting refer-ences (175–7, 181). In her evaluation, magical realism continues to deploy the supra-rational to destabilize Western hegemony, but she recasts this tactic in postmodern terms. First, narrative magic does not require an indigenous resource. She gives the example of Francine Prose’s novel Bigfoot Dreams, which relies on “tabloid writing” as a magical realist resource. This seems characteristic of recent instances of magical realism, she argues: “They are urban, ‘first world,’ mass cultural analogues of the primitive belief systems that underlie earlier Latin American examples of magical realism” (182–3).

Second, the combination of narrative magic with realism retains in Faris’s postmodernist evaluation its effect of political resistance;




however, this is not aimed exclusively toward a colonizing force, but toward all “totalitarian regimes”:

These texts, which are receptive in particular ways to more than one point of view, to realistic and magical ways of seeing, and which open the door to other worlds, respond to a desire for narrative freedom from realism, and from a univocal narrative stance; they implicitly correspond textually in a new way to a critique of totalitarian dis-courses of all kinds. (“Scheherazade’s” 179–80)

On the structural-symbolic level, plurality (represented by the combina-tion of magic and realism) disrupts univocality and its homogenizing view of the world (represented by realism). This situation creates an “ontologi-cal disruption” that, in turn, “serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption,” writes Faris together with Zamora (“Introduction” 3).

Faris’s treatment of magical realism marks an important advance in critical treatment in several related ways. To begin, in her treatment of First-World texts, she frees magical realism from a strict postcolonial rubric based on the colonizer/colonized binary, and in this way com-pares to the Third-World Cosmopolitans, even if her grouping differs from theirs in that part of the saliency and popularity of the Third-World Cosmopolitans derives from the (postcolonial) nations of their birth. Read in conjunction with Hegerfeldt’s description of the per-ceived “political incorrectness” of opening magical realism up beyond a postcolonial framework, Faris’s move is polemical, but also innovative. Additionally, by extending the political function of magical realism from exclusively postcolonial to generally counter-hegemonic, she forges “a useful defense of the move towards a transnational perspec-tive” of magical realism, a point that Upstone has noted of Faris’s mono-graph Ordinary Enchantments (1994) but that applies also to her other works (156). Whereas in the past, authentic magical realist storytellers were required to have a particular ethnicity and national background, now authorship is globally, if not universally, feasible. Finally, this point of development moves magical realist criticism toward a more compre-hensive genealogical framework, as seen by Faris’s incorporating key contributions to the mode that do not fit within the previous phases narrated thus far: the “poetics of subversion” found in Milan Kundera (Kniha Smíchu a Zapomnení, or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [1978] and Nesnesitelná lehkost byti, or The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]); Grass (The Tin Drum), an influential predecessor to Rushdie; D. M. Thomas (The White Hotel [1981]); and others (179).




Like Faris, Theo D’haen also contends for the relationship between magical realism and postmodernism: “It is precisely the notion of the ex-centric, in the sense of speaking from the margin, from a place ‘other’ than ‘the’ or ‘a’ center, that seems to me an essential feature of that strain of postmodernism we call magic realism” (“Magical” 194). While in a later published work D’haen distinguishes a modernist strain of magical realism (one that includes Latin American magical realism) from the subsequent postmodern, global development of the mode, he understands the two to share basic “political, social, and eco-nomic” impulses. Namely, he contends that both “operate from the margins,” and that in both cases “magic realism is a literature of resist-ance” (“Postmodernisms” 289).

The linking of magical realism with postmodernism is off-putting to some critics, and their complaints tend to involve bringing magi-cal realism and postmodernism too closely together without a view of how they might also be distinguished. Christopher Warnes cites this obfuscation as the reason why magical realism is mistakenly understood as functioning only as “ludic” and “irreverent” discourse: “So closely aligned with a postmodernist perspective has been so much literary criticism of magical realism, that its recuperative, realist aspects have been neglected” (16). Hegerfeldt affirms Warnes’s position when she describes what she sees as a common critical view whereby “in the hands of First World writers … serious postcolonial critique becomes pure postmodern playfulness, ex-centricity a pose – in short, magic realism deteriorates into a cliché” (2).

Magical realism cannot and need not be equated with, or limited to, postmodernist narrative techniques, however. As Brennan points out, Rushdie’s (as well as other Third-World Cosmopolitans’) use of postmodernism “calls for a distinction between types of postmodern-ism.” These writers are on a different side of the “imperial process” and exhibit concern with issues such as “human tragedy,” “political villains,” “protest,” and “real history,” all topics that are “anomalous” to European and North American postmodernisms (Salman 139–42). In addition, the mode’s flexibility, due to the thinness of its formal fea-tures, furnishes it with a range of functionality.

Magical Realism in Postmemorial Holocaust Literature

An exciting, recent development is the analysis of magical real-ist Holocaust literature by critics such as Jenni Adams and Eugene Arva. This newer phase diverges from its postmodern magical realist




antecedent in a crucial way (thereby warranting its being called new). While critics such as Faris, Zamora, D’Haen, and Hegerfeldt maintain and extend postmodern, international, and/or Anglo magical realism’s postcolonial political function – the two phases linked in their counter-hegemony – here, magical realism is not limited to that kind of usage, even while it does develop from the postcolonial and counter-hegemonic phases and overlaps with them at various points.

Adams’s Magical Realism in Holocaust Literature analyzes narratives from the mid-twentieth through the early twenty-first centuries, highlighting what she refers to as the recent emergence of non-realist techniques employed in twenty-first-century, postmemorial Holocaust writing, or writing about the perpetuation of the memory of the Holocaust by a new generation of authors who did not themselves expe-rience the events and so must collaborate with the testimonies of others. Adams devotes her second chapter to instances when magical realism is employed in conjunction with postmemorial Holocaust texts as a way of both enacting and enabling polyphony and alterity. Here, she is drawing from a key formal feature of magical realism, its dialogism, which has enabled the mode’s alliance with the other. Adams rehearses the critical interpretation of magical realism’s two codes as comprising a structural dialogism whereby the voice of the other (represented by the magical code) is inserted into the dominant framework (the real), resulting in a uniquely polyvocal narrative. It is this feature, she acknowledges, that has contributed to magical realism’s successful postcolonial and femi-nist deployments, yet Adams’s own application of this feature diverges sharply, and refreshingly, from these previous usages.

In her framework, the other is the Holocaust survivor with whom the sympathetic postmemorial figure must collude in order to piece together a conception of the events that preceded him or her. Polyphony here is not comprised of a subaltern, broadly conceived, and hegemonic power, but of two (or more) individuals who are, so to speak, on the same team. While this example serves as one of the numerous ways in which magi-cal realist techniques are employed in the texts she analyzes, what I am trying to draw attention to is that a subversive, counter-hegemonic poli-tics is not a mandatory feature of her hermeneutics, a fact that allows her “to examine … the ways in which magic realism’s key attributes enable its intervention into a number of often culturally-specific issues within Holocaust studies,” to borrow from Adams’s own words (2).

Perhaps it is her view of magical realism’s broad range of functional-ity that informs her formalist definition of magical realism, one cen-tering around Chanady’s concepts. In other words, in order to allow




magical realism the sufficiently expansive space it requires so as to be understood as working in myriad ways – as postcolonial, feminist, and postmemorial – one must treat it first and foremost as a narrative form. Adams’s approach might be faulted for seeming to take for granted earlier constraints in the magical realist authorial circle; she simply begins at a point at which magical realism is international – her texts are situated within “American, Australian, Israeli, English, and French literatures of the Holocaust” (2) – and magic can derive from any source. At the same time, her approach is invigorating, unencumbered by the bulky, unnecessary features that have bogged down criticism in the past. The result is an analysis that moves the critical corpus in fresh directions. Additionally, Adams’s hermeneutics are capable of recog-nizing and engaging twenty-first-century magical realist narratives, texts that postdate postcolonial/postmodern time frames, the periods in which the mode would be limited should the circumscribed critical hermeneutic be the only one that critics applied.

Magical Realism’s Unsavory Stage

The final stage of magical realist authorship proves the most expansive of all and, consequently, also the most polemical. In Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel (2009), Warnes spends time moving backwards in magical realism’s genealogy, focusing on the conceptual links among early, pre-Latin American theorists: Novalis, Roh, Ernst Jünger, and Bontempelli. While not all of these figures are authors of literary narra-tive as the previous ones I have traced have been, but rather discuss the concept of magical realism in an array of genres (fiction as well as philo-sophical and critical essays), I incorporate them now because, through an exploration of this early point in magical realism’s lineage, Warnes makes a significant contribution to magical realist criticism and specifi-cally to this study when he asserts an important, if highly contentious point, one that seems to fly in the face of the developments that have been traced so far. He demonstrates that, at several points, early magical realism buttressed dubious right-wing political agendas.

According to Warnes’s genealogy, the common thread running throughout these early usages is the reconciliation of seemingly con-tradictory concepts: “In each of the cases of Novalis, Roh, Jünger and Bontempelli, the term magical realism carries the burden of resolving the antinomy between two realms that usually exclude one another” (29). This is the same basic idea that resurfaces later in Latin American and global embodiments, he describes, when it is used as a literary




form “in which magical and realistic elements co-exist with equal ontological status” (20). According to Warnes, Jünger employed Roh’s term to “reconcil[e] technology with the traditionalist tendencies in German nationalism” (27). In this context, Jünger mobilized magical realism for the “militant pursuit of cultural definition.” Bontempelli is another “reactionary” who was “attracted by the term magical realism.” Problematically, though, Bontempelli was initially a fascist sympathizer (28) and conceived of magical realism as, in Maggie Bowers’ words, “a means to ‘de-provencialize’ Italian literature and ... contribute to Mussolini’s unification of Italy ...” (61).18

Through these two figures, Warnes widens the authorial circle in such a way that magical realism’s genealogy now includes authors from antithetical political positions.19 He shows that the politics associated with the term need not be, nor have historically been, tied only to lib-erationist, leftist motivations, but might just as easily be deployed from the political far right:

There is no reason why the literary manifestations of these syntheses [of the magical and the real] should automatically be considered innocent of such dangers. Just as the term magical realism can be used for a number of different purposes, so the mode of narration might also be harnessed to the cause of any range of possible politi-cal agendas. (28)

Of course, Warnes does not promote such usages, but argues instead that “it is in its postcolonial incarnations that magical realism fulfills its creative and critical potential to the fullest.”

Still, his historical approach to magical realism, by which he explores magical realism’s diverse usages, leads him to take a formalist approach to the mode, one that sees it as, first and foremost, a concept comprised of a dual structure, and such a concept might be deployed by divergent ideologies, he cautions, which means that “claims about the politics of magical realism should be evaluated on a case by case basis” (28–9).

The expansive terrain that Warnes carves out for magical realism places him on the outskirts of the majority of magical realist criticism, but he is not completely alone there. Preceding Warnes, Keala Jewell had also analyzed Massimo Bontempelli’s use of magical realism to sup-port rising fascism in Italy. Also, Helene Price implicitly affirms Warnes’s argument in her literary analysis entitled “Unsavory Representations in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate.” Here she contends that Esquivel’s magical realist novel embodies a conservative ideology




that goes against the grain of the “revolutionary ethos” of its textual counterparts. “Esquivel’s employment of elements of magic” is neither “transgressive” nor “subversive,” Price argues, but “reinforce[s] the ‘tra-ditional’ boundaries of gender, race, and class.” Moreover, Esquivel’s novel “differs from the majority of other magical-realist narratives in that it is not intrinsically postcolonial” (181–2). This leads Price to con-clude that Like Water for Chocolate is magical realist in “style rather than in substance” (190). Important for the critical sequences traced in this section, though, is that Price does not conclude that Esquivel’s novel is not magical realism because it opposes the predominant politics of many magical realists and their critical counterparts.

Whether or not one agrees with Price’s reading, it is significant that her argument, like those of Warnes and Jewell, is antithetical to the hermeneutic that views the mode as intrinsically counter-hegemonic. The critical position represented by Hegerfeldt and D’haen promotes an a priori hermeneutical lens, approaching magical realist texts with an always already predetermined interpretation. This methodology cannot reconcile, and must therefore disregard, instances that do not conform to a subversive politics, the result being a homogenous criticism that is not able to engage with the full range of texts and textual instances employing this literary form.

As the authorial circle has broadened and authors from ever wider geopolitical and cultural positions have been incorporated, a handful of salient secondary features were frequently (though not always) main-tained, such as the employment of the mode for opposing diverse hegem-onies, while others, previously thought to be mandatory to the mode, were discarded in order to make sense of magical realism’s new, more expansive terrain. Similarly, critics’ hermeneutical expectations of the two codes of magic and realism have shifted drastically regarding the allowable sources of magic and the function of magic in correspondence to realism.

The changes in critical perceptions of authentic magical realist author-ship reprise today, with our long view of magical realist history, the earlier-mentioned debate concerning whether or not magical realism should be defined in formal terms or by its intersection with second-ary features such as political agendas (postcolonial and/or postmodern subversion), thematics, and cultural resources (like indigenous myths).

Today, we may be starting to see consensus developing within this debate, as critics such as Frederick Luis Aldama, Warnes, Upstone, Adams, and the author of the present study position magical realism as, above all, a literary form.20 (Chanady, it should be noted, was beginning to contend for this approach three decades ago.) At the same time, it is clear that full




agreement has not yet been achieved in that other pieces of twenty-first-century criticism (I am thinking here specifically of Hegerfeldt) continue to view magical realism as intrinsically postcolonial. While this usage of the mode and its persistence throughout the timeline just traced speaks to magical realism’s affinity with this usage and the historical significance of this stage of development, to presuppose it as a necessary function is to continue unnecessarily to limit the mode.

What I will contend for next is a formalist delimitation of magi-cal realism, one that offers sufficiently ample parameters to include instances of magical realism as they appear in all their diverse and sometimes unwelcome incarnations and, moreover, to allow the mode the space it needs to continue evolving in the future.

Defining the Mode

When the defining modal characteristics of magical realism are con-fused with specific deployments of it – extratextual factors that may or may not be reflected in a given narrative or historical stage – critical registers are correspondingly restricted. However, the codes of magic and realism can be harnessed for a range of outcomes, some quite “unsavory,” as Jewell, Price, and Warnes have demonstrated. Arriving at this position, though – one that makes a distinction between magi-cal realism’s formal DNA and the ideological and cultural alignment of particular texts/critical paradigms – requires a clear understanding of magical realism’s minimal formal requirements.

Where should we demarcate the mode? Ato Quayson makes equiva-lence the centerpiece of his definition21:

… [M]agical realism is first and foremost a literary mode in which equivalence is established between the code of the real and that of the magical. In this definition the real stands for the pragmatic and ordinary sense of everyday life as most people experience it and the magical is an umbrella term to denote elements drawn from mythology, fantasy, folk tales, and any other discourse that bears a representational code opposed to realism. But the central term of this working definition is the notion of equivalence. Equivalence is dis-cernible in relation to the disposition of various elements such that there is no explicit hierarchy between the main discourses, whether magical or real. (“Magical” 164)

Quayson’s definition lacks certain bulky extrinsic components such as the requirement of indigenous resources for magic, focusing instead




on how magical realism works at the level of its literary components. His demarcation is thereby able to explain how the mode has been employed in diverse circumstances over the course of time, from the West African narratives of Syl Cheney-Coker to the Anglo First-World usage of Angela Carter. However, the language of equivalence still has a tendency unnecessarily to restrict the way we understand the mode to function, and, therefore, a minor change in terminology will enable a sufficiently expansive parameter.

On the one hand, equivalence does explain a couple of crucial features of magical realism. It describes the mode’s dialogic structure, one that encompasses the simultaneous presence of two separate codes, the magical and the real, codes that never resolve into a hierarchy or merge into a single totality, or become a single thing, as would be the case in fantasy or realism. As Robert Wilson explains, magic and realism are “co-present” so that “it seems as if two systems of possibility have enfolded each other: two kinds of cause and effect, two kinds of organism, two kinds of consequence …, and two kinds of time and space” (70–72). Equivalence also describes a hallmark technique of magical realism, the leveling of narrative magic and the mundane, what Chanady describes as a “fusion,” those moments when the supernatural and natural are established as part of the same ontological plane within the storyworld (Magical 36).22 This occurs when fantastical events are described in a deadpan manner or, inversely, when ordinary objects such as ice are described as wondrous, as in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In such reversals, the leveling of magic and the mundane does effect an equivalence of the two codes.

On the other hand, neither these textual moments nor the dialogic structure of magical realism can necessarily be extrapolated to describe the way in which narrative magic functions in relation to the rest of the textual web or to extratextual issues, as Quayson suggests when he describes how “equivalence is discernible in relation to the disposition of various elements” (“Magical” 164). Afro-Cuban voodoo might prove superior to cultural Catholicism and Western rationalism, as it does in the thematics of Carpentier’s “Journey to the Seed” discussed previ-ously. The language of equivalence is, therefore, laden with misleading connotations when employed as the catch-all characteristic defining the mode. The term suggests a specific kind of relationship or interac-tion among the two codes of magic and reality, the natural and the supernatural, one that does not apply in many cases.

Instead of equivalence, I recommend preferable, alternative vocabulary for definition and description, terms that do not limit the relation-ship between the two codes to a particular configuration but merely




express their co-existence: David Young and Keith Hollaman’s “duality” (“Introduction” 2); Wilson’s “dual-worldness” and “plural worldhood” (72); Chanady’s “bidimensionality” (Magical 7); or Pietro Deandrea’s “cohabitation” (32).23 Still, while these terms work well as abbreviated explanations of magical realism’s form, none is sufficient as a complete definition. For this, I (re)turn to Chanady’s three-part definition pub-lished in 1985.24 First, the text must contain two antinomious codes: “Magical realism is thus characterized first of all by two conflicting, but autonomously coherent, perspectives, one based on an ‘enlightened’ and rational view of reality, and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality” (Magical 22). Here we have a description of magical realism’s hybrid literary structure. Second, unlike the fantastic that problematizes the presence of the supernatural, the “resolution of logical antinomy in the description of events and situations is our second criterion for the existence of magical realism” (Magical 25–6). Related to the last two, the third criterion explains that one way in which magical realism arrives at the resolution of anti-mony is through “authorial reticence, or absence of obvious judgments about the veracity of the events and the authenticity of the world view expressed by characters in the text” (Magical 30).

Chanady’s definition (apart from her extrapolation of how this defi-nition works, as I discuss below) is beneficial not only because of its capacity to distinguish magical realism from its literary near relatives – the fantastic, fairy tale, the uncanny, science fiction, the marvelous, the pseudo-fantastic, and popular legend – but also because it demar-cates the mode while allowing it to retain enough room to include an array of texts, and thus offer a useful category.25 For example, one will notice that the two instances mentioned above when equivalence does explain magic and realism’s interaction are encompassed by Chanady’s tripartite definition. The structural equivalence of two codes can be located within her first condition, and the moment of fusion when the supernatural is related as natural evokes her second criterion, resolved antinomy. However, Chanady does not use language that would restrict to equivalence all instances when the codes of magic and the real inter-act, whether that be in a given textual moment or in relation to a nar-rative’s overall thematics. Instead, she simply describes the two codes as “autonomously coherent” (Magical 22). This is vital, for it allows the mode to be transposed into diverse environments. Her formalist defini-tion transcends the requirement of particular usages.

Establishing a framework for an inter-American study of magical realism, Shannin Schroeder praises Chanady’s definition along similar




lines: “Magical realism, as defined by scholars like Amaryll Chanady, proves to be universal, a code that defies limitations of geography, generation, and language” (1). However, her praise of this definition’s universality seems to go a little too far, for Chanady’s understanding of her own definition does bear a troubling limitation, though it need not maintain this affiliation. Reeds (‘Magical’) observes that Chanady’s “separation of the fantastic and magical realism” depends on a “bi-cultural dichotomy”: “For magical realism to function the reader had to see magical events as supernatural and this presupposes his or her vision coming from Western empiricism,” whereas “the text had to come from a position which was alien to the implied reader, contain-ing characters who accepted magical events as part of life” (190). For Chanady, both the distinction between the natural and supernatural as well as the presence of antinomy depend on the “rational” worldview of the implied reader. The reader is presupposed to ally with rational-ism, the worldview seen to be represented by realism, and therefore initially to experience (an eventually resolved) antinomy because he or she does not adhere to a supernatural worldview, that represented by the magical code.

Chanady’s (and other critics’) understanding of her definition is problematic for several reasons. As Maggie Ann Bowers discusses, draw-ing on Liam Connell, the opposition of realism/Westerners/rationalism and magic/colonized peoples/supernaturalism perpetuates a colonial-ist reductionism wherein the colonized persons’ worldview is forever treated as “‘primitive’” and “pre-modern” (122). I will add to this that the binary Chanady has established, and which many other critics have furthered, between competing worldviews suggests two monolithic cat-egories. It supposes on the one hand that all formerly colonized peoples adhere to a supernatural worldview, and, on the other, that people from formerly colonizing nations (Anglo-Europeans) adhere to a rationalist, and conversely antisupernaturalist or rationalist, worldview. The latter does not account for the supernatural worldview underlying Western civilization, one based on Christian (Catholic and Protestant) beliefs in the supernatural, including a divine Creator-God and the divinity, miracles, and resurrection of Christ. Such a fact destabilizes this magical realist binary, as do narratives that draw from a biblical and/or Christian resource base for the narrative magic. García Márquez’s drawing from Catholic beliefs in demonic possession in his Of Love and Other Demons (De amor y otro demonios [1994]) and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), which appropriates the biblical flood narrative in Genesis, offer two instances.




We might resolve the confusion affiliated with Chanady’s definition by making the following key distinction. Instead of viewing realism as being necessarily aligned with the implied reader’s worldview in order for the mode to work as magical realism, we should clarify that magical realism, at least in this book’s reigning framework, is first and foremost a literary mode, a thing that signifies, by use of literary conventions and readers’ recognition of those conventions, or readers’ ability to place magical realism in relation to a wide field of other narrative prac-tices, regardless of the implied (or actual) readers’ adherence to a given worldview. It is the formal conventions of the representational codes of realism as well as magic that signal magical realism to the reader. He or she recognizes realism’s signifying attributes of historical grounding and detail alongside the supernatural’s “brick face” method of narration, as García Márquez refers to this hallmark technique (“Art” 188). A reader who believes in the supernatural still recognizes narrative conventions and is unlikely to mistake the text for the real world or, for that matter, for a religious text to which he or she might adhere in the real world. A conservative Jew, for example, does not read the Torah and Midnight’s Children in the same way, or even as conveying truths about the world in the same way. This logic still holds true in the case of a magical real-ist narrative such as Asturias’s Men of Maize, which draws extensively from the Maya-Quiché Popol Vuh (or Popol Wuj), a text documenting Guatemalan Indians’ religious beliefs, including about the origin of the universe and the Maize Men. While, to state the obvious, Maya would/could not have read Men of Maize (Hombres de Maíz), one can posit that a contemporary reader versed in novel-reading and, simultaneously, adopting the Popol Vuh as a literal explanation of the world would read the latter differently than the former. In sum, readers recognize magical realist literary conventions and thereby distinguish the two codes of magic and realism, and that is what makes the mode work as magical realism. Readers do not need to share a scientific rationalist position (often seen to be represented by realism) to appreciate a narrative as an example of literary magical realism.

Thus far, we have followed how perceptions of magical realism’s necessary formal features change alongside the expanding perception of authentic authorship. This groundwork highlights the way in which magical realism’s successful and significant utilizations have at times been mistaken for the poetics of the mode itself. From this point, the question of a minimalist aesthetic requirement, or definition, for the mode arose. Based on an appropriately flexible explanatory terminol-ogy as well as Chanady’s three-part definition, one can remove magical




realism from underneath any one particular overlay, such as the postcolonial and postmodernist politics of resistance from which the mode seems almost inseparable today, while recognizing the significant role these usages have played in the mode’s history and development. After this distinction is made, it becomes apparent that magical realism’s literary DNA might be employed toward myriad, even conflicting usages.

Three Magical Realist Modi Operandi

After one has assessed that a text meets the minimal modal criteria and might, therefore, usefully be analyzed within a magical realist frame-work, a second layer of meaning is determined through interrogating the way in which the co-existing codes of magic and realism interact with each other and with the other narrative elements in a particular narrative (con)text. Based on my survey of numerous magical realist critics, this might take on any one or a combination of three modus operandi: subversion, suspension, and summation.26 In the first, magic works to subvert realism and its representative worldview. In the sec-ond, magic and realism are suspended between each other disjunctively. In the third, magic functions summationally toward reality/realism: it adds to it. One can determine which one(s) of these are at play in a text by interrogating the narrative with questions such as: How does the magic function in relation to its realist counterpart, and vice versa? How do the two codes correspond with the text’s other narrative elements – aspects such as characterization, narration, and thematics – as well as in relation to the entire narrative web? Concerning the text’s production and reception, how are the narrative and its author and critics respond-ing to their historical milieu? The range of possibilities represented in these (at least) three modes of operation not only offers greater preci-sion when critically positioning a magical realist text, but it also sug-gests the broad potential of the mode, the diverse ways in which the codes of magic and realism might be made to interact.

The first mode of operation includes instances when narrative magic performs the role of the heroic agent of subversion. This does not mean that magic need be embodied in a character, but that, accord-ing to a text’s thematics and extratextual referents, the destabilization accomplished by the irreducible elements, the magic, is interpreted as functioning in a protagonist’s role and/or in cooperation with the protagonist(s). Often this takes on the following schematic: the non- or supra-rational is deployed to destabilize hegemonic Western




epistemology and empire.27 An example of this subversive modus operandi is García Márquez’s short story “Light Is Like Water” (“La luz es como el agua”). This narrative features two boys, Totó and Joel, who have moved with their parents to Spain from Cartagena de Indias. The boys demonstrate a capacity to surpass their Spanish classmates in academic subjects – they win the prestigious Gold Gardenia Prize – and in the ability to navigate through the magical ocean of light with which they fill their apartment. One night, when the boys and their classmates generate too much liquid light in the apartment, all 37 of Totó and Joel’s friends drown, while they themselves remain perfectly intact. The reason for the brothers’ survival in contrast to their Spanish peers is alluded to in the closing sentence: “In Madrid, Spain, a remote city of burning summers and icy winds, with no ocean or river, whose landbound indigenous population had never mastered the science of navigating on light” (Marquez, Strange, 161).

Characteristic of magical realism, several binaries are unsettled here: light becomes water, navigating this magical substance is compared to a science, and the Columbian boys achieve “master[y]” in contrast to their “indigenous” Spanish counterparts. They prove superior to the “indigenous” Spaniards not only in academic subjects but in the magi-cal domain as well. In this story, the code of magic is represented by the liquid light and Totó and Joel’s capacity to navigate it. The code of the real is signaled in the text by the historical city names, the detailed location of the boys’ home (the “fifth floor apartment at 47 Paseo de la Castellana” [157]), and the policemen who arrive at the scene of the tragedy. Moreover, the real(ism) within the narrative involves extrinsic issues related to colonization as signaled by European education, by the words indigenous (aborígenes in the Spanish) and mastery (or masters, maestros), and by the locations of the two cities, Madrid and Cartagena de Indias, the latter of which is a city on the northern, Caribbean coast of Columbia named by a Spanish conquistador after Cartagena, Spain. It is the magical code, however, that engenders the inversion of the historical colonialist binary of indigenous/masters within the narrative. In this short story, then, narrative magic works in conjunction with the protagonists, Colombians Totó and Joel, as well as with the historico-political appeal to postcolonial values encompassed in the subversion of the alleged superiority of the Old World.

“Light Is Like Water” is illustrative of the subversive modus operandi for, in its particular interfacing of the codes of the magical and the real, the former code undermines the latter. Critics extrapolate the textual subversion enacted by the two codes to extratextual circumstances,




namely anticolonialism. As will be clear by now, the subversive modus operandi encompasses the postcolonial and postmodernist magical real-ist frameworks already detailed and is the one for which the mode is most renowned. When this modus operandi is viewed as the only pos-sible configuration for magical realism, though, it confines the mode and fatigues critical hermeneutics.

Ouyang and Warnes have recently objected to this dominant critical rubric because of the way in which it equates the mode with a decon-structive narratology, a framework that lacks the theoretical space for a corresponding understanding of how the mode might also be used to construct. Ouyang asks: “Is magical realism deconstructive only or is it constructive as well?” (“Magical” 18). Warnes has posed a similar point, criticizing “the ways magical realism is so often automatically seen to deconstruct notions of subjectivity, history, nationhood, reality, without any sense of how it can also constructs these notions” (7).

As I have tried to convey, the subversive function is not intrinsic to the mode’s formal DNA; rather, that view derives from popular, but limited critical hermeneutics. Magical realism has been so closely allied with a postcolonialist and/or postmodernist politics of resistance that the two can seem inextricable. This is apparent in Stephen Slemon’s description of magical realism’s social signification, published in 1995: “…[A] structure of perception – if only in literary critical registers – dogs the practice of magi-cal realist writing, that is, the perception that magic realism, as a socially symbolic contract, carries a residuum of resistance toward the imperial center and to its totalizing systems of generic classification” (“Magic” 408). While Slemon is writing this in the context of a postcolonial analysis of the mode, this same perspective concerning the author’s/narrative’s politi-cal orientation is carried into postmodernist analyses, as has been seen.

This destabilizing line of attack has undeniably been a crucial usage of the mode. However, a theoretical confusion sets in when, according to Ouyang, all texts that express “resistance to, subversion and reconfigu-ration of what may be termed ‘modern Western epistemology,’ whether in the form of empiricism or empire, are uncovered, discussed and packaged as magical realism” (“Magical” 16). What Ouyang describes here is a confusion of a specific political thrust with the exclusive func-tionality of a particular narrative mode, a kind of generic determinism in which the literary form of magical realism is perceived as necessarily engaging in a particular political endeavor by virtue of its literary form. An additional issue with this crucial confusion is that the subversive modus operandi, when taken as magical realism’s only one, obscures others, such as the two that will be looked at now, and does not allow




for changes over time in the terms of the postcolonial debate, as seen with the Third-World Cosmopolitans and as will be seen with Okri, who inverts the subversive formula in Famished Road insofar as magic is identified with corrupt Nigerian politicians over and against the novel’s humanist protagonists.

In the second modus operandi, magic and realism are “suspended” in a dialectical relationship. This is the language that Slemon uses to describe the interaction between magical realism’s two codes, or, as he refers to them, two languages of narration or discursive systems. Like Quayson, he sees magical realism as beginning with the foundation of formal equivalence: “Although most works of fiction are generally mixed in mode, the characteristic maneuver of magic realist fiction is that its two separate narrative modes never manage to arrange them-selves into any kind of hierarchy” (“Magic” 410). Slemon’s view diverges from Quayson’s, however, in that he understands formal equivalence to function in a particular way. Namely, he contends that magic and real-ism are “locked in a continuous dialectic”:

In the language of narration in a magic realist text, a battle between two oppositional systems takes place, each working toward the crea-tion of a different kind of fictional world from the other. Since the ground rules of these two worlds are incompatible, neither one can fully come into being, and each remains suspended, locked in a con-tinuous dialectic with the “other,” a situation which creates disjunc-tion within each of the separate discursive systems, rending them with gaps, absences, and silences. (“Magic” 409)

In distinct contrast to critics who view magical realism as “a seam-less interweaving of, or synthesis between the magic and the real” (a view compatible with the final modus operandi, summation), Slemon explains, he himself contends that the two intertwined codes eternally forgo any merging into a single whole since they are essentially incom-patible, one discursive system operating within the laws of generic realism and the other within fantasy (“Magic” 424). As a result of this dialectical relationship, each code bears “gaps, absences, and silences.”

While making concessions to exceptions, Slemon’s theoretical assess-ment of magical realism’s structural/formal condition guides his herme-neutics: it informs his understanding of the kind of work that magical realist narratives perform. For Slemon, the suspension enacted in magi-cal realism at the level of genre due to its incompatible literary codes corresponds with magical realism’s political work and thematics. He




reads magical realism’s formal suspension as a kind of literary structural allegory of postcolonial history and social conditions. Magical realist form parallels the lived experience of postcolonial peoples, specifically their dual systems of language, and, thus, cognition: “…[C]olonization, whatever its precise form, initiates a kind of double vision or ‘metaphys-ical clash’ into colonial culture, a binary opposition within language that has its roots in the process of either transporting a language to a new land or imposing a foreign language on an indigenous population” (“Magic” 411). In Slemon’s hermeneutical matrix, the postcolonial person, caught between his or her inherited language and the imposed language of the colonizer, is the corporeal site that compares to the magical realist literary text. Both bear a suspended dialectic comprising divergent systems.

One may expect Slemon to move from this point of his argument to a comparison of the code of magic to indigenous languages and realism to the colonizers’ languages. Many other critics might conceptualize such a correspondence. However, Slemon complicates these links. For him, the realist code indicates what he refers to as a “future-oriented” realism, a form of realism that, though originally foreign, will at some point be vernacularized and made the people’s own. While he does not specify, one can only assume that the code of magic then correlates with the colonized person’s inherited linguistic/cognitive system. Here is Slemon on this correlation:

In a postcolonial context, then, the magic realist narrative reca-pitulates a dialectical struggle within language, a dialectic between “codes of recognition” inherent within the inherited language and those imagined, utopian, and future-oriented codes that aspire toward a language of expressive, local realism, and a set of “original relations” with the world. (“Magic” 411)

It seems that for Slemon the disjunction resulting from magical real-ism’s two languages of narration, magic and realism, compares to a kind of forward yearning, a not-there-yet, that the colonized experi-ence when living in the midst of two incompatible linguistic/cognitive systems, but, at the same time, striving toward making the foreign lan-guage their own, wanting to localize it.

Slemon’s correlation is provocative, but it seems potentially to open up his structural/historical allegorical reading of magical realism to alternative hermeneutical understandings, for what does one make of magical realism once/if the foreign language does achieve localization?




Can a magical realist text still represent a sustained dialectic of incom-patible linguistic/cognitive systems, one rife with gaps, absences, and silences, in the midst of functioning and proliferating world Englishes? Or, rather, might we now be able to envision a time when the two codes could indicate synthesis rather than suspension, a point when the indigenous language and vernacular English, while clearly different and separated by time, history, politics, and language, might at least be compatible?

Besides correlating magical realism’s disjointed structure and postco-lonial social and historical realities (namely, the incommensurability resulting from dual systems of language and cognition), Slemon details the way in which English Canadian magical realist narratives convey suspension in their thematics. In his words, “the metaphysical clash or double vision inherent in colonial history and language is recapitulated in transmuted form in the text’s oppositional language of narration and mirrored in its thematic level” (“Magic” 420). For example, referring to Jack Hodgins’s The Invention of the World, Slemon compares the disjunc-tion between magic and realism to the novel’s treatment of “the prob-lem of history,” a treatment of the incommensurability among official, imperial versions of history and a kind of “true” history comprised by the “silenced, marginalized, or dispossessed voices within the colonial encounter” (“Magic” 414). Hodgins’s novel and Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said are replete with the effects of a dialectical structure or “metaphysical clash,” according to Slemon; each makes gaps, absences, and silences prominent features of its narrative:

Both The Invention of the World and What the Crow Said … thematize a kind of postcolonial discourse: one involving the recuperation of silenced voices as axial to a “positive imagined reconstruction of real-ity.” Both texts foreground plurality and gaps – those produced by the colonial encounter and those produced by the system of writing itself; and in both texts, marginalized presences press in toward the center. (“Magic” 420)

The narratives Slemon reads both foreground the effects of their dialec-tical thematics and structure while simultaneously working to correct such effects, to recuperate and decenter.

Previously, I suggested that one can ascertain which modus operandi is at play by interrogating the narrative with various questions, one of which deals with how a text and its author and critics are responding to a particular historical moment. The modus operandi of suspension




represented by Slemon responds to the significant temporality during which colonized people experience(d) disjunction as a result of living between divergent languages and cognitive systems, a timeframe that I have suggested may, in some cases, now have been surpassed by the creation of vernacularized variants of imposed languages. Slemon’s con-cern with this particular historical moment comes through in his read-ing of magical realist narratives as well as in his understanding of the mode’s form. It does not, however, comprise the only way in which one can understand magical realist form, as is evident in the third and final modus operandi, summation, a function that, at some points, amounts to the opposite of suspension.

The term summation is meant to evoke the idea of adding. In contrast to the previous modus operandi, suspension, which positions magic and realism as essentially incompatible and unable to synthesize, in the case of summation magic adds to or builds on the realistic world. It is compatible with, or works alongside, reality in some way, while at the same time suggesting that a naturalist worldview is lacking. This is Isabel Allende’s sense of the mode:

Magic realism is a literary device or a way of seeing the world in which there is space for the invisible forces that move the world: dreams, legends, myths, emotion, passion, history. All these forces find a place in the absurd, unexplainable aspects of magic realism.… It is the capacity to see and to write about all the dimen-sions of reality. (“Shaman” 54)

Magical realism suggests that external reality is a domain in which unseen aspects, not only empirically sensed ones, render significant effects. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved exemplifies this when Sethe becomes haunted by her deceased child, a situation made all the worse because entangled with the horrific crimes of slavery. While the haunting is actually occurring in the narrative, on a metaphorical level Beloved’s ghostly reappearance might be seen as representing the way in which this mother continues to experience the trauma of losing her daughter long after her daughter has died.

Resonating with Allende, Scott Simpkins suggests that instead of viewing magical realism as a departure from realism, one could see it as an attempt to get closer to the real.28 Simpkins uses the word supple-ment to refer to how magical realists use narrative magic to provide what is lacking in the linguistic signification of realist texts.29 Thus, magic functions as a “corrective gesture” to the mimetic failures of realism.




While in Simpkins’s estimation this is an impossible reach because “the thing itself always slips away,” a view not universally held, his concept is still crucial in its underscoring of some magical realists’ desire to move closer than realist authors to representing reality (153–4).

The concept of summation is evoked when Wilson points to instances where the magical code comes into contact with the real through “emergence”:

… one world may lie hidden within another. Then the hybrid con-struction emerges from a secret already contained within, forming an occulted and latent aspect of the surface world. … This pat-tern of the one world waiting secretly within the other seems too apparent to miss: the hybrid construction, then, is always already present. (72)

Magic’s always already presentness invites the reader to adopt an amplified view of narrative reality, one in which magic might at any moment “emerge” out of the real. This notion is echoed by Faris: “Very briefly, magical realism combines realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically out of the reality portrayed” (“Scheherazade’s” 163). As magic “emerges” or “grows” out of the real, it is not antithetical or destructive to reality, but compat-ible with it. This does not prevent narrative magic from wreaking a bit of havoc, for often through it “normal notions about time, place, identity, matter and the like are challenged,” as Young and Hollaman warn (“Introduction” 2).

These critical descriptions again make apparent how this third modus operandi of summation contrasts with the category of suspension. While, according to Slemon, suspension produces textual voids, sum-mation generates abundance. It creates and constructs. This application of magical realism in its capacity for construction also clearly contrasts with the use of magic to deconstruct various frameworks, though both utilizations might be present in the same text. In Cristina García’s Dreaming, for example, narrative magic works to undermine trust in paternalistic, official records of history while, in conjunction, sug-gesting an alternative means through which the past might be carried forward, a feminine, familial magic that links women down through succeeding generations.

The summational capacity of magical realism responds in a particu-lar way to Zamora’s enjoinment of critics to consider the role that the




magical object plays in magical realism. She contends that because of magical realism’s history in the visual arts with Roh and his emphasis on the object,

we would do well, … to review the itinerary of the term and recon-sider its visual lineage. I say this because it seems to me that texts accurately referred to as “magical realist” do raise questions about the nature of visual representation, and the nature of objects rep-resented, as realistic texts do not. Of course, all works of literature require that we visualize objects and settings, but objects and settings in realistic works are generally asked to represent only themselves. (“Visualizing” 22)

She moves from this point to compare and contrast the similar interest in “the counterrealistic potential of the realistic representation” shared by Roh and Jorge Luis Borges (“Visualizing” 27). While this is not my task, I recall Zamora’s appeal because it anticipates my concern with the potential functional range of narrative magic. Insofar as the mode is used as summation, the magical object can act as presence: it makes present in the reality of the storyworld some aspect found missing by materializing it, magically, strikingly, within the realist code carefully constructed within the text. Magic as compatible presence is usefully juxtaposed with the way in which magic interacts with the real in the critically popular first modus operandi, as subversive agent, as well as the second, as producing textual voids. While in all cases magic is vis-ible to the readers, and in this way is impossible to ignore, their tasks are different within different narrative nexuses.

Besides cases when the irreducible element enacts presence, another feature of magical realism that works together with the summational modus operandi to add, construct, and create is the one to which I referred earlier as the leveling of the magical and the mundane. Whereas the fantastical and the real are frequently distinguished, due both to reasons of narrative form (realism versus fantasty, for example) and ontological categories (naturalist versus supernatural worldviews), magical realism fixes the magical and the mundane on the same plane. Jenni Adams elucidates how this feature engenders a constructive function. Magical realist narratives copy signifying techniques of realism – its matter-of-fact narration and abundance of details and description – to describe not only the elements of the realist storyworld, but also of the magical domain. Through this tactic, magical realism




interrogates realism’s pretensions of transparency and ironizes its claims to the real, as many critics have noticed, but it also does something else, Adams points out:

Magic realism’s simultaneous participation in and transgression of the conventions of literary realism … problematizes not only real-ist discourse but also the Western rationalist ontological framework such discourse invokes. What should be added to this formulation is that magic realism does not function in an exclusively negative fashion, to dismantle the assumptions of transparency and neutrality in realist discourse; but also functions to foreground the possibility of alternative forms of experience, knowledge, and truth to those privileged within realism. (12)

By narrating the irreducible and realist elements with the same matter-of-fact tone and use of concrete details, magical realist narratives seem to claim of their magic that this is real too! Magical realism’s democratic employment of realist techniques extends realist verisimilitude to the supernatural elements of its narrative, thereby inserting the magical (code and ontological world) into the real.

There are specific elements that narrative magic might build within the real when it is used in this summational way. Magic can construct, or present, within the real any one or combination of the following (not to mention other possible components): spiritual dimensions, cultural aspects, elements of nationhood, and strategies of belonging. Quayson has drawn attention to magical realism’s ability to construct spiritual dimensions, a function he describes as the mode’s “replenishing” of realism’s limited metaphysical register. According to him, this is the result of a specifically African magical realism.30 In the mode’s continu-ation of African genres of orality, which “retain a comfortable relation-ship to magical elements in the constitution of a cognitive response to the world,” African magical realist narratives “establish the essential porousness of what might be taken as reality” (“Magical” 160, 175). As a result, these texts “imbue, reshape, and ignite a sense of enchant-ment in a world that appears to be singularly disenchanted and dull” (“Magical” 175). In his account, then, African magical realism weaves into the fabric of “disenchanted” reality a spirit domain.

Remystification is the word Faris had previously chosen to describe a similar concept, and one referring to a capacity present in all magical realist narratives by virtue of the mode itself. In her Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, Faris




argues that “magical realism would constitute a latent tendency to include a spirit-based element within contemporary literature – a pos-sible remystification of narrative in the West” (65). Her use of the word include signals that the relationship of magic to its realist counterpart is one of adding. In both these senses, Quayson’s “replenishment” and Faris’s “remystification,” magical realism is performing as summation in that it builds a spirit dimension into realism’s mimetic framework. However, for Quayson it is the world that is replenished by narrative – this is a metaphysical change – while for Faris magical realism remysti-fies contemporary Western narrative and, potentially, its criticism.

Faris supports her internationalist argument for magical realism based on the literary mode’s formal features, which do not require specific geographical or thematic parameters. While certain texts may include “thematic treatments of connections to spirit worlds,” Faris contends, “it is the narrative mode of magical realism itself” that creates a space for mystery and spirit “in the way it includes the irreducible elements within realism” (Ordinary 74). The interworking of the mode’s two codes is what enables magical realism to construct a sacred space. Within the realist code, narrative magic “encodes the ineffable.” However, this aspect of magical realism has been excluded from critical treatment, she argues, because of critical bias: “And it is this … that has been the most neglected because it is the most alien to the modern Western critical tradition. … That hostility dictates that if the presence of a realm of the spirit exists in magical realist fictions, it may often go largely unseen by the conscious writing and reading mind” (Ordinary 68–9).

While Faris focuses on magical realism’s form, Warnes underscores magical realism’s construction of spirit domains through its inclusion of alternative, religious worldviews. In this way, his point is similar to Quayson’s, though Warnes contends that magical realism might achieve this function with any alternative worldview, not only an African one. Warnes argues that the construction of specific ontolo-gies is the function of “faith-based” magical realism, which he opposes to “irreverent” magical realism. The former is crafted by authors who appropriate indigenous worldviews in order to “legitimiz[e] alternative, participatory realities” (12). Warnes points to Asturias’s Men of Maize, positioning it as “probably the most developed example of an onto-logical, faith-based magical realism in existence” in its encyclopedic anthropological treatment of Mayan and Aztec resources such as the myths found in the Popol Vuh (48).

Okri can also be seen as representative of this application of magi-cal realism, particularly when he makes the following point about




his novel, studied in a subsequent chapter: “I’m looking at the world in The Famished Road from the inside of the African world view, but without its being codified as such.” Because his narrative imaginatively reconstructs how an African with this worldview would perceive reality, according to Okri, he claims that Famished Road is “a kind of realism, but a realism with many more dimensions” (“Ben” Ross 337–8).31

Like Faris, Warnes notes that critical bias has overlooked or ignored this use of the mode, though he specifically faults the predominant hermeneutical lenses of critics: “So closely aligned with a postmodernist perspective has been so much literary criticism of magical realism, that its recuperative, realist aspects have been neglected” (16). This last point demonstrates why critical parameters need expanding: so the potential range of magical realism’s functionality can come into view.

To incorporate the supernatural worldviews of a diverse group of peo-ples, particularly those of marginalized groups, is also to participate in a kind of cultural (re)construction,32 the next element that we see magi-cal realism producing through the summational modus operandi.33 For this reason, magical realism’s (re)constructions of spiritual and cultural aspects at times intersect. Faris comments on magical realism’s capacity for cultural configuration:

Magical realism has become so important as a mode of expression worldwide, especially in postcolonial cultures, because it has pro-vided the literary ground for significant cultural work; within its texts, marginal voices, submerged traditions, and emergent litera-tures have developed and created masterpieces. (Ordinary 1)

Certainly, postcolonial realist texts have also performed cultural work. Mark Mathuray explains this as a key aspect of both Chinua Achebe’s writing and of African literary realism34:

…[O]ne may note a certain archival tendency in Achebe’s “histori-cal” texts – and in African literary realism in general – to collect, cata-logue, and store within the realm of fiction those aspects of culture that have been obliterated or are under threat of being engulfed by the tides of history. (51)

While this task is not unique to magical realism, then, magical realism executes a cultural function uniquely. Instead of a kind of reportage lim-ited to a recounting of empirical facts, magical realism conveys cultural components that might remain absent from realism’s mimetic field and,




moreover, it does so in a participatory, experiential way. For instance, it might convey supernatural events and beliefs visually and thematically. These must be accepted by the reader as actually occurring. In this way, magical realism presents both material and supra-material cultural fea-tures. Returning to the example of Famished Road, another Nigerian text in addition to Achebe’s, Okri’s depiction of the abikus Azaro and Ade are examples of this expansive form of social representation. Okri does not merely describe this Yoruba myth, but actually dramatizes it in its char-acterization and plot. Conveying aspects of actual belief systems in this way draws into question significant issues concerning magical realism’s complex relationship to mimesis, its representation of reality as well as its realist conventions, an issue that needs to be explored more fully.

Another significant task of cultural recuperation that magical realism seems specially positioned to engage in involves the mode’s ability to convey elements of historical memory that are impossible to represent through realism due to their traumatic nature – African-American slav-ery and the Holocaust, for example. The ineffable, unrelatable nature of traumatic events, including the experience of them as such, makes mag-ical realism an apt narrative outlet for this kind of cultural-historical work due to its ability to depict that which surpasses comprehension. The work of Eugene Arva and Jenni Adams on this topic illuminates this constructive capacity of magical realism.

Cultural recuperation is not the only means by which narrative magic might carry out cultural work. Among other possibilities, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses has made famous the ability of the mode magically to dramatize issues related to the hybridization of culture. In a related sense, Dreaming’s Cuban-American character Pilar Puente represents the adaptation of culture in that, while supernaturally connected with her Abuela Celia in Cuba, she must negotiate her cultural heritage and the mutations that it inevitably undergoes. Again, we see here the way in which postcolonial tasks have changed over time.

One use to which cultural recuperation has been put in magical real-ist narrative history is the construction of national identities. Echoing Chanady’s discussion of Latin American magical realism cited earlier, Ouyang discusses this summational potential of the mode. Drawing from Eric Hobsbawm’s and Benedict Anderson’s nation theory, she sug-gests that the return of postcolonial authors to native traditions is a means of imagining community:

In the process of its decolonization [postcolonial contemporary lit-erature] “invents a tradition” the contours of which are delineated




by the borders of the nation-state. … This “invented tradition” is akin to the “immemorial past” Anderson identifies as the historical dimension in “imaginings of community” within the framework of nationalism. (“Magical” 17–18)

Asturias’s and Carpentier’s excavation of indigenous resources, Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean, is clearly used to buttress regionalism and nationalism, as Chanady’s scholarship has shown. This function also brings to mind the early, pre-Latin American uses of magical real-ism, if dubious instances of it, which Warnes described. Without getting into moral differences involved here, both involve the usage of the mode for constructing nationhood/nationalism.

Finally, magical realism can be used to create a kind of sociological map organized around the issue of belonging. This is an activity that is central to the novels analyzed at length in the subsequent chapters. Each employs magical realism’s formal features to craft representations of belonging, conveying how it is (not) or ought (not) to be forged on both personal and group levels; though, as will be seen, each narrative crafts differing representations and so demonstrates the flexibility of magical realism even within this singular functional subset. To strate-gize belonging is to construct arguments about belonging, albeit narra-tive ones. I make this point to juxtapose this usage of magical realism with the subversive function to which I referred earlier, though, again, both applications might be at work in a given text.

I have developed the term strategies of belonging after coming across a variant of it in Stuart Hall’s work. Concerned specifically with “strat-egies of belongingness and identification” at the local and national levels, Hall says:

… [C]ommunities and societies are increasingly multiple in their nature. … They are composed of communities with different ori-gins, drawing on different traditions, coming from different places, obliged to make a life together within the confines still of a fixed ter-ritorial boundary or space while acknowledging that they are making a common life, not living a form of apartheid or separatism. They want, nevertheless, to retain in some sense the distinctiveness of their historical roots in the place in which they have ended up. (25)

While Hall is using strategies to refer to responses to a particular chal-lenge, the complication of belonging and identity due to cultural mul-tiplicity, I am concerned with how narrative strategies might respond




to challenges to belonging of any kind. Nevertheless, Hall implies a situation in which within a single geographical space we might find an array of ways that people imagine and enact belonging and identity. I want to tease out this idea, to explore how we can see various kinds of sociological maneuvering being depicted in magical realist narrative.

An interrogation of Okri, Rushdie, García, and Oyeyemi’s uses of narrative magic reveals how in each of these novels the codes of magic and realism intimately correspond with the narrative’s depiction of how characters do (not) and should (not) derive senses of belonging in the storyworld. In Okri’s Famished Road (Chapter 3), a novel suffused with the supernatural, there are myriad ways in which narrative magic paradoxically enacts an elevation of the human domain, and thus the code of realism. In its humanist orientation of the natural and super-natural planes, Famished Road extends a strategy of world inhabitation in which the narrative’s protagonists achieve the fullness of being and belonging as they learn to give their first loyalty to their natal attach-ments, while actively opposing any spiritual and/or political beings who are antagonistic to those ties. In Rushdie’s Enchantress (Chapter 4), a dangerous particularism defines the means of belonging exhibited by most of the characters from both the West (Florence) and the East (Sikri). An exception to these figures is the Mughal princess referred to in the novel’s title. Qara Köz is an enchantress who exerts her powers to escape such a narrow-minded existence, illustrating a form of cos-mopolitan exile, though she is almost killed as a result. A crucial use of magic and realism in Enchantress, then, is the depiction of belonging as a polarity comprised and realism of a closed-minded adherence to communities of descent and a hazardous, if liberated, lifestyle wherein one chooses one’s own attachments.35 García’s Dreaming (Chapter 5) dramatizes the inescapable and vital role that the family and other thick relationships play in belonging. In this narrative, magic often empha-sizes the bonds of family, as is seen in Jorge’s ghostly appearance to his daughter Lourdes as well as Celia and Pilar’s telepathic communication with each other. Oyeyemi’s Icarus Girl (Chapter 6) utilizes a haunting, phenomenal figure, TillyTilly, to induce the radically ruptured subjec-tivity of its protagonist, the mixed-race and bi-cultural child Jessamy Harrison. Jessamy’s inability to achieve belonging issues caution about forms of belonging that are all too clearly identified with, on the one hand, particularist attachments such as ethnos and nation and, on the other, grand prescriptions for belonging that suggest one might all too easily locate one’s self within stationary, yet ever-widening, groups such as family, community, and nation.




That magical realism can be used to craft diverse representations of belonging is consistent with the broader history of the mode. For example, Latin American and postcolonial magical realists’ interlacing of the codes of magic and realism to assert regional, national, and cul-tural identities suggests a particular strategy of belonging in the world, one defined by locality and particularity. Also key within this phase, the dramatization of indigenous magic recommends that it is through (often romanticized) “native” roots that one defines one’s place in the world in the present. In contrast to this view, others have combined the magical and the real to depict a type of palimpsestic belonging, one that is multiple. This is the kind on which Aldama focuses in his study of magical realism as a rubric for Anglophone postcolonial and ethnic literature, those filmmakers and authors who have “juxtaposed the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ to imagine the identities formed out of a living-here-belonging-elsewhere phenomenon” (ix). It is this use of magical realism that Rushdie popularized in his novels preceding Enchantress, as I submit in Chapter 4.

Significantly, the spiritual, political, and cultural concerns made manifest in summational magical realist texts might be seen as inter-secting at this single concern: how people develop senses of belonging in the world. The spiritual reaches for affiliations with the transcendent, while the political and the cultural are sources of belonging found in this world. In all of these ways, magical realism uses its magical code in conjunction with reality, making present various elements within the narrative world using the summational modus operandi.

Controversy?

This study’s framework challenges prevalent understandings of magical realism, arguing for a distinction between the mode’s minimal formal requirements and secondary features employed within a single novel or stage in its history. My stance raises several questions. Does it detract from magical realism’s historically postcolonial usages to argue, as this study does, that the mode is capable of exceeding a prescriptive type of interpretation? What do critics forfeit by conceding broader usages to narrative magical realism? What do we forfeit by not conceding this functional space?

By granting a wide range of functionality to the mode, one risks “controversy,” as Hegerfeldt has recognized. Certainly most contro-versial within this expanded constellation are the fascist affiliations involved in the early stages of the term’s geneaology, affiliations that




must remain, if not endorsed, if magical realism is going to be defined through a formalist definition and historical approach, as I propose. The intimation that magical realism might be employed for any reasons additional to postcolonial strategies of resistance seems to threaten to detract from this very important phase in the mode’s historical devel-opment. This need not be the case, though. Critics can simultaneously keep in view both this specific moment and the mode’s broad formal parameters.

Furthermore, insisting on a particular postcolonial usage holds its own risks, as when magical realism degenerates into a mere kitschy for-mula used to sell narratives. In these instances, magical realism is too tired to affect any powerful sense of resistance. Also at stake is the obfus-cation of new directions in which magical realism has been/is already going, in terms of both critical and creative treatments. The herme-neutical approach developed in this study is employed with a focus on identifying the crucial role that strategies of belonging play in a set of magical realist novels and the historical world in which they are situ-ated. However, without a sufficient understanding of the wide ambit of the mode’s functional capabilities, something I have tried to demon-strate in this chapter, this key aspect would likely go undetected, lying as it does outside the bounds of the deconstructive magical realist criti-cal paradigm. To be more precise, the construction of various strategies of belonging would be obscured by a restricted hermeneutic that sees narrative magic as necessarily tied to other agendas.

Not making this concession, then, carries its own consequences. If the deconstructive paradigm is the only one with which critics and writ-ers engage, the mode becomes an all too expected formula, not only fatigued but also dated, as both authors and circumstances (postcolo-nial and otherwise) change. Besides, magical realism is not inherently destabilizing and defiant. This belief expects far too much of any text or narrative mode. Like all works from all literary domains, composition matters – the ways and quality with which language is used and ideas are conveyed.



249

Index

Note: ‘n’ after a page reference denotes a note number on that page.

abikus, 80–3, 189, 212ibeji figure, 189, 212Nigeria as, 84–5

acculturation, 146, 148Achebe, Chinua, 36, 85, 227n34Adams, Jenni, 15–17affiliations

see attachments; identitiesAfrican/African diasporic literature,

73, 181–2, 217abiku/ogbanji, 83critique of postcolonial national

elite, 73masculinity as theme, 72–3novels of formation, 73realism in, 36, 227n34uses of magical realism, 34, 35–6,

73African humanism, 220

see also Appiah, Kwame AnthonyAgathocleous, Tanya, 53, 68, 208–10agency, 72, 79, 85, 152, 159, 162Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 8–9Allende, Isabel, 31alter ego, 196–7Amoko, Apollo, 73Anderson, Amanda, 56, 138–9androcentrism, 72–3, 76, 87–8,

96–7anticolonialism, 5–6, 8

see also Latin Amerian magical realism; resistance

anti-humanism, 72antinomy

contexts for interpretation, 218formal element of magical realism,

17–18, 23, 216–18and the implied reader, 23

antipositivism, 5–6, 12–13antirationalism, 5–6, 12–13, 34Appadurai, Arjun, 214

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 131concept of the cosmopolitan

patriot, 50, 54on cosmopolitan readers, 57ethical universalism, 220humanism, 93on identity formation, 31, 167stages of African postindependence

literature, 73, 90–3, 101universalism and difference, 129

Arana, Victoria, 191, 203Arva, Eugene, 15–17Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 24, 38attachments, 65–6

and belonging, strategies of, 65–6, 76

divergent, 196extrapersonal forces on, 167family influence on, 146–7,

163–8to immaterial entities, 211–12local, 72, 76and mental illness, 151–9, 188, 197narrative analysis of, 65natal, 64, 94, 102, 162, 194national identity, 37–8, 60, 62, 146,

149–50otherworldly, 77small-level, 64, 66, 108, 127, 139,

147–8, 154–5tentative, 206–7thick, 155, 156, 164–5, 172–3

attachments, cartography of, 65–7attachments, circles of, 64, 66, 129,

163, 182cartographic analysis, 65–7centrifugal trajectory through,

66–7, 162, 183–4, 187centripetal trajectory through,

66–7, 72, 79–80, 111, 146–7, 167, 173, 178



250 Index

attachments, circles of – continueddestabilization of, 181, 182–3, 184,

187–8, 196, 204Eurocentrism of, 184–6exclusive identities in, 186, 196incommensurability of, 197–8limitations of the metaphor, 186–7,

188, 206–7as mediations, 184reinterpretation, 183–4reliance on core self, 186, 188,

197–8, 204Stoic metaphor, 60, 66–7, 128, 182

authenticity, 6, 192vs. hybridity, 137, 143through autochthonous sources,

102through origins, 4, 5, 119–20

authors, 62authenticity in, 4determining genre, 4, 9–10global, 14“one-and-a-halfers,” 47–8as secondary feature, 4Third World cosmopolitans, 55transnational, 46, 181–2

autochthonous sources, 3as cultural recuperation, 7–9in Latin American magical realism,

5–7reductionism towards, 23santería, 3, 162as theme, 6–8, 9, 11transformative uses of, 191–2Yoruba culture as, 102, 191–2

belonging, 38, 148, 197, 205as cosmopolitan topos, 48, 62,

67–8, 128, 187–8, 210, 211strategies of, 38–40, 62–4, 72–3,

211–12, 220–1Beloved (Morrison), 31Berman, Jessica, 56, 186Bhabha, Homi, 8

on blasphemy, 143on doubling, 119–20on Rushdie, 133–4

bicultural/biracial identities, 180, 181, 182, 197, 206

as dislocation, 182, 195, 203as dissonance, 187–8, 193–4possibility of hybridity, 195–6

bidimensionality, 210–11bildungshelds

see The Famished Road (Okri); maturation

blasphemy, 143Bok, Sissela, 183Bontempelli, Massimo, 4, 7, 17, 18el boom, 1, 5–6

see also Latin Amerian magical realism

Brennan, Timothy, 8, 9–10, 139critique of cosmopolitanism, 142on Rushdie, 133Third World cosmopolitans, 55–6

Bresnick, Adam, 49, 200Brockmeier, Kevin, 212–13Bryce, Jane, 191, 194

Calhoun, Craig, 130–2Camayd-Freixas, Erik, 1, 3, 7Carpentier, Alejo, 1, 2–3, 170

authenticity, 6autochthonous sources, 38see also Latin Amerian magical

realism; lo real maravillosoCarter, Angela, 11–12cartography of attachments, concept

of, 65–7Chanady, Amaryll, 5, 37, 211, 216

definition of magical realism, 22–4, 142–3

on fusion, 21circulation, 45, 48, 56, 214–15

see also migrationClifford, James, 205Cohen, Robin, 49, 52, 62, 185–6communities of descent, 62, 64, 110,

112concentric circles of attachment, 64,

66, 129, 163, 182cartographic analysis, 65–7centrifugal trajectory through,

66–7, 162, 183–4, 187centripetal trajectory through,

66–7, 72, 79–80, 111, 146–7, 167, 173, 178



Index 251

destabilization of, 181, 182–3, 184, 187–8, 196, 204

Eurocentrism of, 184–6exclusive identities in, 186, 196incommensurability of, 197–8limitations of the metaphor, 186–7,

188, 206–7as mediations, 184reinterpretation, 183–4reliance on core self, 186, 188,

197–8, 204Stoic metaphor, 60, 66–7, 128, 182

Conrad, JoAnn, 137Cooper, Brenda, 75–6, 78

classifying African diasporic authors, 181

cosmopolitan detachment, 100on hybridity, 141magical realism and socioeconomic

difference, 217on mental illness in Icarus Girl, 203

cosmodernity, 44, 215cosmopolitanism, discourse of

colonialist, 184–5, 235n2core concepts, 48–51, 60–1critique of, 49, 130–1, 132, 142,

205as elitism, 49–50ethics, 50–1, 69, 72, 110historical breadth, 69–70interdisciplinarity, 51–2, 70Stoic origins, 60, 66–7, 128, 182,

204topos of belonging, 48, 67–8,

187–8, 210, 211universal, 57, 64, 108–9, 126–31see also cosmopolitanisms, forms of;

literary cosmopolitanismscosmopolitanisms, types defined, 49,

50–1, 67cultural, 132Eastern, 186extreme, 132–3postcolonial, 10–11rooted, 50, 235n2universal, 53

cosmopolitan literary criticism, 52–4authors as critical focus, 9–10,

55–6

as critical methodology, 59reader as critical focus, 57–8texts as critical focus, 56–7tools of analysis, 65–7

cosmopolitan magical realismsee literary cosmopolitanisms

critical methodology, 65–9Cuba, 145, 170, 176, 220

see also Carpentier, Alejo; García, Cristina

Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar, 194cultural cosmopolitanism, 133–6

Deandrea, Pietro, 83DeFalco, Amelia, 201descriptive cosmopolitanism, 50–1detachment, 65, 100D’haen, Theo, 15dialogism, 16–8, 21–2, 32, 57diaspora

African diasporic writers, 181and multiple identities, 182–3, 194treatment in cosmopolitanism, 205see also migration

displacement, 181, 192domestic-political dialectic, 98–9,

147–9, 150–2, 179doppelgänger, 198–9, 201doubling

destabilizing effects, 114–16, 118–20, 122, 189–90

as narrative technique, 39, 108, 109, 114–19, 120, 192, 198–203

in postcolonial theory, 119–20in The Satanic Verses, 117and the self, 196–202in Shame, 117–18and similitude, 114, 116, 118see also twinning; unstable self/

identitiesDreaming in Cuban (García), 32, 39

Alejo Carpentier and, 170belonging: patriotism as, 164–6;

through personal relationships, 148, 154–5, 172, 178–9; thwarted, 159–61, 162, 165–6, 182

domestic/political dialectic, 146–8, 150–2, 155, 165–6, 179



252 Index

Dreaming in Cuban (García) – continuedexile, 147, 153–5experience as theme, 149, 153, 155,

157–62, 175family nexus, 147–8, 157–8, 163–7,

168–9, 172–5, 178–9Latin Amerian magical realism,

169–70levels of exile, 162loss, 149, 153, 155, 159–60,

166–7magical affiliation with Cuba,

176–7, 178magical communication: and

relational bonds, 171–2, 174, 177, 178; and trauma, 173–7

mental illness, 159–60, 162mothering, 165–6, 168, 176–8narrative layering, 148–50, 168–9,

172, 177place and wellbeing, 153–5, 158–9,

165–6politicization of the family, 147,

152–3, 155santería, 160–2, 176schizogenesis, 158–9, 160–1sexual assault, 167, 171–2,

174–6strategies of belonging, 168, 172–3surrogate family, 160–2trajectories of attachment, 146–7,

167travel, 152–3uses of history, 150, 166–7, 176–7

Eastern cosmopolitanism, 186The Enchantress of Florence (Rushdie)

blurring of East/West difference, 109–10, 112, 114–16, 118–19, 120, 122, 137

critique of particularism, 108, 126–7deployment of magical realism,

139–43doubling in, 114–20embodying universal cosmopolitan-

ism, 109–10, 129–30, 132, 138–9, 187

ethics of identity, 110, 113–14, 131–2

exile, 109, 156; as anti-belonging, 110, 131, 138; psychological, 121–3; as universalist choice, 113, 125, 129–30; unsustainability, 126, 131–2

extreme cosmopolitanism, 108, 138–9

humanism, 116, 120, 138–9hybridity: departure from, 108,

119–20; literary aspects used, 133, 137–8, 142

intertextuality, 115, 135, 142layering as narrative technique, 110particularism in, 108–14, 116, 121,

124–6, 128, 131place, 111purity/impurity, 108, 124, 134, 141,

143shift to universal cosmopolitanism,

126–7, 129–30, 132–6, 139, 143–4

similitude, 108, 219small-level attachments, 121–2,

123–4, 127, 133, 138, 139strategies of belonging, 113–14, 122,

126–7, 131; exile, 121–6, 156; particularism, 111–13, 116, 123–6; universalism, 138–9

travel, 110, 111–12, 114English Canadian magical realism,

11, 30Enlightenment cosmopolitanism,

128equivalence, 20–1, 28Esquivel, Laura, 18Esterson, A., 147, 157ethics of identity, 72, 108, 127, 183–4,

185exile, 109, 130, 131

as anti-belonging, 110, 125–6ethics of, 131etymology, 153–4failed, 125, 131, 187within family nexus, 147, 153psychological, 121–3, 153–4unsustainability, 126

extreme cosmopolitanism, 108, 132–3

see also universal cosmopolitanism



Index 253

The Family Code (Código de Familia), 150–1

family nexus, 147, 179defined, 157mental illness, 147politicization, 151–2power, 147, 152–3role in attachment formation,

165–7role of political affiliations, 149–50as social system, 157, 158source of belonging, 155, 157–62strategies of belonging, 158–60

The Famished Road (Okri), 39abiku, 75, 80–5abikus, Nigera as, 84–5androcentrism, 72–3, 76, 87–8,

96–7animism, 82Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 88–9as Bildungsroman, 73, 74–5centrifugal trajectory of attach-

ment, 79–80, 187–8human agency, 79, 85humanism, 77, 80–1, 84, 87–9, 91;

supported by narrative magic, 77–8, 80–2; vernacular (hu)manism, 72–4, 76, 86–7; West African, 72, 88–9

magic/real, interplay of, 73–4, 77–80

masculine subjectivity, 73, 78maturation, 74–6, 78–81, 82,

83–6natal attachments, 76, 81, 83–4,

85, 168nation and gender, 76, 85–6Nigerian national project, 73, 75–6,

84particular/universal binary, 71political opposition in, 76, 78, 79realism in, 73, 74, 77–8spirituality in, 82, 91–3, 98, 105strategies of belonging, 73, 76–7,

216summation as modus operandi, 77use of Nigerian history, 71

Faris, Wendyformal elements, 34–5

on hybridity, 141magical details, 171magical realism as postmodern,

13–15on realism, 77–8secondary features, 3verbal magic, 111

fascism, 4, 7, 17–18, 40Findley, Timothy, 23formal elements, 2–3, 22–5, 35, 40–1,

212–17Freud, Sigmund, 198, 200, 201

García, Cristina, 152, 217, 220family as theme, 163interrelatedness, 168–9“one-and-a-halfers,” 47as public intellectual, 62

García Márquez, Gabriel, 5, 7, 23, 24

influence on Rushdie, 139–40spectacality, 219–20use of subversion, 26

geographical identity formation, 47, 154, 155

German magical realism, 3, 4–5Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 141–2global citizenship, 209–10globalization, 70, 219

concepts of, 43–5public intellectuals, 48shift to late globalization, 44see also late globalization

global publishing industry, 48, 56global studies, 69–70Grass, Günter, 5Guenther, Irene, 1, 4Guillén, Nicolás, 154

Haiti, 8–9Hall, Stuart, 38–9Halliwell, Martin, 72Hegerfeldt, Anne, 11–13, 15, 20,

40Hobsbawm, Eric, 164Hodgins, Jack, 11, 30Hollaman, Keith, 32, 140Hollinger, David, 42–3, 128, 221Holocaust literature, 15–17, 37



254 Index

humanism, 93, 116, 120, 126–7, 138–9

colonial, 72local solidarities, 76postcolonial, 72and realism, 74small-level attachments, 148supported by narrative magic, 77–8,

80–2vernacular (hu)manism, 72–4, 76,

86–7West African, 72, 88–9see also maturation

hybridity, 10, 37, 46, 133, 219vs. authenticity, 120as blasphemy, 143critique of, 205doubling, 119–20vs. extreme cosmopolitanism,

135–6and global English, 140–1as political strategy, 142vs. similitude, 108as transgression, 136vs. universalism, 135, 143as writing style, 134, 136see also Rushdie, Salman

ibeji, 189, 190, 197, 202, 212Icarus Girl (Oyeymi), 39, 191, 198–9,

203–4abikus, 189, 190–2alter ego, 196–7, 202belonging: crisis in, 188;

impossibility of, 192, 194–6, 205; provisional, 197; thwarted, 182, 192, 193–4, 205, 206

cautionary cosmopolitanism, 204–7, 206

circles of attachment, 181, 184, 187, 188, 196–7

diaspora, 194dis/embodiment, 190, 195, 201–2displacement, 190, 192, 194, 195,

202divergent epistemologies in, 197–8doubling, 192, 198–203dual readings, 189, 203–4haunting, 190, 194, 197

ibeji, 189, 190–6, 202impossible identities, 192–3, 194–5,

206incommensurability, 190, 193–5,

197–8interdiscursivity, 191–2loss, 200–1mental illness, 182, 196–7, 202–3,

206mother figures, 193, 195–6Nigerian nation, 191particularism, 192, 193, 194psychology as realist code, 189,

196, 202–3subversion as modus operandi,

182–3summation as modus operandi,

182–3, 205transformation of myth, 191–2twinning, 190, 193, 194, 197, 202uncanny self, 188, 198–201,

203–6unstable self, 182, 188, 189, 195,

197, 198–201, 202–3, 205Yoruba magical code, 189, 190–6,

197identities, 195

bicultural/biracial, 188, 194deficient, 194–5detachment as, 65diasporic, 194, 206–7dual, 180–1excessive, 194–5heterogeneous, 47hyphenated, 146, 156, 170, 179,

202impossible, 192, 194–6, 205incommensurable, 190, 192in late globalization, 43migrant, 165national, decline of, 43“one-and-a-halfers,” 47–8the other within, 202, 203, 204–5restrictive, 192–5unclassifiable, 181

identity construction, 40context needed, 131, 167within cultural multiplicity, 40essentialist concept, 167



Index 255

within the family, 149–50reinvention, 154

The Illumination (Brockmeier), 212–13, 214, 219–20

imagined communities, 37–8, 62, 63, 79

incommensurability, 217, 218see also antinomy

interdiscursivity, 191–2intertextuality, 134invented traditions, 164The Invention of the World (Hodgins),

11, 30Irizarry, Ylice, 146, 148

Jani, Pranav, 107Jewell, Keala, 18Jünger, Ernst, 17–18

Kant, Emmanuel, 49King, Bruce, 191The Kingdom of This World (El reino de

este mundo) (Carpentier), 2Kohn, Hans, 42–3Kristeva, Julia, 204–5, 206Kroetsch, Robert, 11, 30

Laing, R. D., 147, 156–8late globalization

circulation in, 45emergence, 44–5metropolitan cities, 48spectacality, 214–16technology, 45technology in, 45, 215see also globalization

Latin Amerian magical realismAfrican influences, 5antirationalism, 5–6, 12–13authenticity, 5autochthonous sources, 5, 6–9geographical identity formation, 3,

7, 37–8indigenous thematics, 3, 6–7nation-building, 7, 10, 37–8as political strategy, 5strategies of belonging, 40subversion as modus operandi,

26–7

territorialization, 5, 170, 219–20layering as narrative technique,

148–50“Light is Like Water” (“La luz es como

el agua”) (García Márquez), 26literary cosmopolitanisms, 52–4,

181–2, 208–9contributions to theoretical

discourse, 61–2, 70, 181–2, 187, 208–9, 211

cosmopolitan imaginary, 209, 215, 216, 219–20

embodiment of theory, 67–9, 109, 209–10

focus on authors, 55–6as genre, 56–7pedagogical practice, 58–9readers and reading practices, 57–8tools of analysis, 65–7

magic, code of, 32access to the spiritual, 40constructive function, 31–9, 41deconstructive function, 13, 25–8depicting belonging, 39de-territorialized, 220magical objects, 32–3mass culture sources, 13as the Other’s voice, 16panopticity, 215plural sources, 13, 23, 170as resistance to Western rational-

ism, 5–6, 9as transnational force, 220see also autochthonous sources;

magic/real, interplay ofmagical realism, 2–3, 16, 20–40

adaptability of the form, 1–3, 10–12, 216–17, 219–21

bidimensionality, 210–11definition of secondary features, 2–3formal elements, 2–3, 22–5, 35,

40–1, 212–17functionality, 2, 40–1, 217origins, 1, 4

magical realism, historic variations, 8–11, 73, 211

early forms, 38metropolitan, 11–13



256 Index

magical realism, historic variations – continued

postcolonial, 5–8postmemorial, 15–17postmodern, 13–15renewal, 219–21right-wing, 17–19Second World, 11transnational, 181–2universalist, 144

magic/real, interplay ofbidimensionality, 210–11building sacred space, 34–5as colonized vs. colonizer, 9, 23–4,

29depicting hybridity, 37equivalence, 20as formal feature, 4incommensurability, 216reflecting hybridity, 140strategies of belonging, 72–3, 211–12subversion, 25–8, 74, 215, 220summation, 31–4, 212, 215–16suspension, 28–31

Magischer realismus, 1Manning, Susan, 60–1Mathuray, Mark, 36, 227n34maturation, 32–3, 74–6, 78–9, 80–1,

82, 83–6see also vernacular (hu)manism

McCulloch, Fiona, 56–7mediascapes, 45, 214Men of Maize (Hombres de Maíz)

(Asturias), 24mental illness, 180, 182, 188, 206

and disrupted relations, 197as exile, 162and family nexus, 158as metaphor, 203and the politics of the family,

156–7, 158–9metropolitan magical realism, 11–13migration

and belonging, 46–8and place, 47, 154reinvention through, 154Third World cosmopolitans, 9–10

Mills, Melinda, 218minimalist magical realism, 171

Mitchell, David, 149–50, 152, 166modernism, 15, 56mongrelization, 46–8, 141–2Monkey Hunting (García), 145, 178–9Moraru, Christian, 43–5, 184–6,

214–15Morrison, Toni, 31mothers

of abikus, 83and hybridity, 195–6and identity, 165–6, 168, 193representing the nation, 85, 92,

98–9Mousley, Andy, 72multinarrative form, 168–9multiple belongings, 38, 46–8, 62,

182–3, 205

narrativedual structure, 16as embodiment of theory, 65–9,

109, 209–10function of enfleshment, 67–9, 187multinarrative form, 168–9polyvocal, 16, 30, 168–9strategizing belonging, 48, 62, 64

narrative magicminimalist, 171and relational bonds, 172–4spectacality, 201–2, 212–16strategizing belonging, 173–4

natal attachments, 67, 81, 83–4accidental affiliations, 127as accidents of birth, 168and place, 168source of meaning, 112universalist critique, 68see also attachments; attachments,

circles ofnational identity, 37–8

and family, 149–50purity, 192

nationalism, 18, 38, 51, 73, 109, 120, 127

nation-buildingas cultural recuperation, 7and gender, 85–6Latin Amerian magical realism, 7,

10, 37–8



Index 257

nation as human domain, 73uses of African orality, 191–2

nation-state, 43, 62Neuman, Justin, 114Not Wanted on the Voyage (Findley), 23Novalis, 1, 4, 17Nussbaum, Martha, 182

concentric circles of attachment, 183–4

cosmopolitanism as worldview, 49cosmopolitan readers, 58critique of, 68on exile, 130extreme cosmopolitanism, 132literary pedagogy, 58–9on particularisms, 67, 112, 168universal cosmopolitanism, 67,

126–9

Oboler, Suzanne, 146Of Love and Other Demons (De amor y

otro demonios) (García Márquez), 23

Okri, Ben, 35–6African humanism, 72humanist position, 139hybrid identity, 48as public intellectual, 62

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (García Márquez), 5–7

orality, African, 191–2O’Reilly Herrera, Andrea, 148–9Ouyang, Wen-Chin, 27, 37–8Oyeymi, Helen

biography, 180irreverence for tradition, 191“one-and-a-halfers,” 47–8, 192as public intellectual, 62

particularisms, 40, 73, 125–6, 192, 205–6

see also universal cosmopolitanismPérez, Jr., Louis A., 151, 166–7Perez, Richard, 171Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 47, 192place, 47, 50, 128, 154

and meaning, 159–60and multiplicity, 46–7

and wellbeing, 154–5, 158–60, 181

poetics of subversion, 14polyvocal narrative, 16, 30, 168–9postcolonial cosmopolitanism

see Third World cosmopolitanspostcoloniality, 5–6, 44–8, 140–1postcolonial magical realism, 5, 8–11,

30, 59, 72–4as resistance, 8, 11, 13, 15, 25, 41strategies of belonging, 40subversion as modus operandi, 14,

19, 27–8suspension as modus operandi, 29see also Latin Amerian magical

realismpostcolonial studies, 70postmemorial magical realism, 15–16postmodernism, forms of, 15–17postmodern magical realism, 13–15

as counterhegemonic, 13–14irreverence, 15, 35mass culture sources, 13plurality, 14shared fictional strategies, 13

prescriptive cosmopolitanism, 50–1, 60–1, 113

Price, Helene, 18–19psychiatry, 147

see also Laing, R. D.psychoanalysis, 204

see also Freud, Sigmund; Kristeva, Julia

public intellectuals, 48, 62purity/impurity, 32–3, 108, 124, 134,

141, 143

Quayson, Ato, 20–1literary uses of Yoruba culture,

191–2political opposition, 79–80

Randall, Margaret, 150–1Raschid, Salman, 157readers and reading practices

engendering cosmopolitans, 57–9and literary conventions, 24location of reader, 23–4, 48and multinarrative form, 169



258 Index

readers and reading practices – continuednarrative imagination, 58reading as dialogue, 57

realism, code of, 34–6in African/African diaspora

literature, 36, 73, 227n34cosmopolitan realism, 209–10critical neglect of, 36as dominant framework, 16as human plane, 77–8psychology as, 189, 196, 202–3visibility, 212, 214see also magic/real, interplay of

lo real maravilloso, 73Baroque attributes, 2, 170identity construction, 7see also Latin Amerian magical

realismReeds, Kenneth, 23, 171regional identity formation, 3, 7relationality, 44, 60, 220

identities in late globalization, 43–4panopticity, 214–15

relational literary fields, 60remystification, 34–5repetition, trope of

see doublingresistance

Latin Amerian magical realism as, 5–6, 7, 8

magic as, 25–6in postcolonial magical realism, 8,

11, 13, 15, 25, 41use of autochthonous sources as,

5–6, 9restrictive belonging, 192–4Robbins, Bruce

cosmopolitanisms, 50–1detachment, 65prescriptive cosmopolitanism,

50–1, 185Roh, Franz, 1, 3, 5, 17–18, 214rooted cosmopolitanism, 129, 163,

184, 185Ross, Jean W., 84Royle, Nicholas, 200, 203Rushdie, Salman

adaptations of magical realism, 219–21

on blasphemy, 143–4in the cosmopolitan canon, 140–1fatwa, 134hybridity, 47, 108, 132–5, 139,

140–3, 219on migration, 46–7mongrelization, 140–1as public intellectual, 62shift to universal cosmopolitanism,

107–8, 126–7, 129–30, 132–6, 139, 143–4

as Third World cosmopolitan, 133uses of magical realism, 132–6, 139,

142, 143–4, 219

Sandín, Lyn Di Iorio, 171Sanga, Jaina, 132–6

hybridity as writing style, 134Rushdie, Salman, 134

santería, 3, 160–2, 170The Satanic Verses, 107, 141–2The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 37, 107,

117, 117–18, 120, 134, 141–3schizogenesis, 158–9Schoene, Berthold, 53–4, 57Schroeder, Shannin, 22–3, 170–1Second World magical realism, 8, 11selfhood, 158

and the circles of attachment, 186, 188, 197–200

effects of doubling, 196–202within the family nexus, 158foreignness within, 204–5and the uncanny, 198–201, 203–6see also uncanny self

Seyhan, Azade, 44Shame, 117–18similitude, 114–16, 118Simpkins, Scott, 31–2Slemon, Stephen, 11, 27, 28–30small-level attachments, 64, 66–7,

108, 148, 154–5, 172belonging, 148, 154–5, 172, 178–9dangers of, 127, 139, 182, 183, 185identity construction through, 148,

154–5links to the national, 147–8as mediations, 184, 185see also family nexus; particularisms



Index 259

Socolovsky, Maya, 146, 147solidarities, 130–1, 220

challenge of late globalization, 42–3levels of, 64, 129local, 76and outsiders, 112–13production of, 166–7universal, 64see also attachments

Soliman, Mounira, 82–4space, 155spectacality

relationality and, 214–15through narrative magic, 33,

212–16and the visible in realism, 214

Spencer, Robert, 56, 58, 59, 107spirituality, 40, 161

see also abikusStanton, Domna C., 58–9Stoics, 204strategies of belonging, 38, 40, 220–1

attachments, 65–6, 76definition, 72directionality, 66–7incommensurability, 190transnational, 181–2of transnational authors, 181–2vernacular humanism, 76

subjectivity, 64diasporan, 194masculine, 72, 73, 78multiplicity of, 201, 206unstable, 198–201, 205

subversion as modus operandi, 25–7, 141, 215, 220

see also Latin Amerian magical realism

Suleri, Sara, 143summation as modus operandi, 25,

31–3, 36, 40, 141, 148, 215–16supernatural, 5–7, 9, 102Surrealism, 6, 140suspension as modus operandi, 25,

28–31, 32syncretic culture, 145

Taylor, Andrew, 60–1territorialization, 5, 170, 219–20

Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 85Third World cosmopolitanism, 9–10,

55–6see also hybridity; Rushdie, Salman

thwarted belonging, 62, 159–61, 162, 165–6, 182

The Tin Drum (Grass), 5transatlantic literary critique, 60translation studies, 60translocation, 148

see also exile; migrationtransnational authors, 181–2transnationalism, 61, 69–70, 220travelers

and multiple identities, 182–3and particularism, 110–12, 114treatment in cosmopolitanism, 205

twinning, 181, 189, 197, 199and diaspora, 194in Yoruba mythology, 191see also doubling

uncanny cosmopolitanism, 204–5uncanny self, 198–201, 203–6

see also selfhooduniversal cosmopolitanism, 67–8,

126–32, 137abdication of the local, 141definition, 108figure of the exile, 130vs.particularism, 40, 73, 125–6, 192,

205–6prescriptive, 110, 127Rushdie’s move to, 107–8, 126–7,

129–30, 132–6, 139, 143–4universalism, 53, 126–9

false, 72–3revived, 138–9

unstable self/identities, 195, 205and belonging, 182, 188, 189,

198–201, 202–3, 205and circles of attachment, 182,

188, 198doubling, 198–9magic/real, interplay of, 189, 202–3psychoanalytic approach, 200–1

Upstone, Sara, 8urban cosmopolitan fiction, 56,

208–10



260 Index

US Latino/as, 145US Latinos/as, 145–7

vernacular (hu)manism, 72–4, 76, 86–7Vertovec, Steven, 49, 52, 62, 185–6Victorian cosmopolitanism, 56, 185,

208–9visibility, 210, 214

Walzer, Michael, 184, 185Warnes, Christopher, 15, 17–19, 27,

38

Werbner, Pnina, 136What the Crow Said (Kroetsch), 11,

30Wilson, Robert, 21, 32world citizenship, 60

Yoruba mythology, 189, 191Young, David, 32, 140Yu, Su-lin, 152

Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 2–3, 32–3, 77, 141



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