1 For examples of the former tendency see Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977, p. 108 and Liam Connell, “Discarding Magic Realism: Modernism, Anthropology, and Critical Practice”, ARIEL 29, 2 (1998), 95-110; in the case of the latter, see Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, London, Routledge: 1990, p. 6: “‘Magical realism’, after the Latin American Boom, becomes the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world”.

2 Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004, p. 1.

3 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander, London: Merlin Press, 1972, p. 19.

4 See Novalis (Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), Schriften,4 vols., Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960, Vol III, pp. 384-5.

5 I derive this phrase from Irlemar Chiampi who describes modes of fiction that perform a “denaturalisation of the real and a naturalisation of the marvellous”. See Irlemar Chiampi, El realismo maravilloso: forma e ideología en la novela hispanoamericana, trans. (from Portuguese) by Agustin Martiniez and Márgara Russotto, Caracas: Monte Avila, 1983, p. 205.

6 Magical realism is not always postcolonial. Writers like Bulgakov, Grass, Suskind and D.M.Thomas show clearly that other cultural trajectories can be established for the existence of magical realism in different contexts. I do not believe that these alternative genealogies contradict the argument being put forward here. Rather, they confirm the need to engage with the specificities of historical context. The paucity of obvious connections between these European writers suggests, though, that to the extent that magical realism is anything more than merely a set of formal techniques, it is predominantly a postcolonial phenomenon. Erik Camayd-Freixas, for example, outlines contiguities between Asturias, Carpentier, Rulfo and García Márquez, suggesting that magical realism in Latin America might be thought of as something approaching a movement. These writers, especially García Márquez, have, in turn, provided powerful illustrations of magical realism’s capacity to negotiate issues of identity, influence, and cultural difference. See Erik Camayd-Freixas, Realismo mágico y primitivismo: Relecturas de Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo y García Márquez, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998.

7 Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction”, in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995, pp. 497-550 (p. 520).

8 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957, p. 50.

9 Jameson has himself turned his attention to magical realism, though in the context of cinema. Unfortunately, he never makes clear exactly what he understands the term to mean, and his description of magical realism as based on “a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society” seems to be inadequate for similar reasons to those identified by Aijaz Ahmad in his critique of Jameson’s examination of “Third World” literature. Ahmad concedes that Jameson’s plea for syllabus reform is noteworthy, and his readings of Lu Xun and Ousmane are “marvellously erudite”; it is the “suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries on the one hand and the imperialized formations on the other” that are troubling. See Fredric Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film”, Critical Inquiry, 12, 2 (1986), 301-25 (302); Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London and New York: Verso, 1992, p. 95.

10 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Routledge Classics, 2002, p. 123.

11 Michael Valdez Moses, “Magical Realism at World’s End”, Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, 3,1 (2001), 105-33 (p. 104). Further citations are included in the text.

12 Umberto Eco, “In Praise of St. Thomas”, Faith in Fakes, trans. William Weaver, London: Vintage, 1998, pp. 257-68 (p. 261).

13 Jameson, Political Unconscious, p. 138.

14 Jameson specifically links a valorization of romance (“the place of narrative heterogeneity and of freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage”) with a defence of Marxism: “The association of Marxism and romance does not discredit the former so much as it explains the persistence and vitality of the latter”. See The Political Unconscious, p. 91.

15 Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, 1814; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 55.

16 Jerome Mitchell, Scott, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance: A Study in Sir Walter Scott’s Indebtedness to the Literature of the Middle Ages, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987, pp. 120-21.

17 Alejo Carpentier, Tientos y differencias, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1964, p. 132; “On the Marvellous Real in America”, trans. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Tanya Huntington, in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds, Magical Realism, pp. 75-88.

18 Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, p. 167.

19 Paul Heelas, New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

20 See Camayd-Freixas, Realismo mágico, p. 89.

21 Alejo Carpentier,“Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso”, La novela latinoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo, y otros ensayos, by Alejo Carpentier, Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1980, pp. 111-35 (p. 130).

22 Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvellous Real”, trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Zamora and Faris, eds, Magical Realism, pp. 89-108 (p. 104).

23 Mario Vargas Llosa, “Amadis in America”, in Robin Fiddian, ed., García Márquez, London: Longman, 1995, pp. 56-62 (pp. 56-7).

24 ibid., p. 59.

25 Quoted in Michael Palencia-Roth, “Prisms of consciousness in the ‘new worlds’ of Columbus and García Márquez”, in Robin Fiddian, ed., García Márquez, pp. 144-60 (p. 152).

26 For an article that explores medieval elements in García Márquez as a form of allegory, see Christopher Little, “Eréndira in the Middle Ages: The Medievalness of García Márquez” in Robin Fiddian, ed., García Márquez, pp. 204-213.

27 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992, p. 181.

28 See John McClure, Late Imperial Romance, London and New York: Verso, 1994.

29 The Rhetoric of English India, p. 181.

30 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, New York: Columbia UP, 2003, pp. 2-3.

Avatars of Amadis: Magical Realism as Postcolonial Romance

Abstract