Beside Magic Realism: a Worldly Approach

Didier Coste
Universit de Sfax/Universit Bordeaux 3

I was always prone to question the exalted role, the inspirational and quasi-divine
monopoly assigned by many postcolonial (and postmodern) critics and theorists to
"magic(al) realism" or "real maravilloso" in the construction of a counterculture of
resistance and progress and of a politically appropriate modern identity/difference for
postcolonial subjects. This evaluation based on a body of primary literature and critical
readings dating back mainly to the 1950s, 60s and 70s remains largely unchallenged
some thirty years later. On the contrary, it has led Homi Bhabha to consider it as the
literary language of the emergent postcolonial world1. If we are to believe Wendy B.
Faris in her latest book, magical realism would even pass for the most important trend in
international fiction2 nowadays. I have thus become even more wary of its validity than I
was when I translated several Hispanic novelists of the Boom between 1969 and 1976.
In this respect, after working on modern and contemporary Indian literature and teaching
it for a fair number of years, it was a shock to find One Hundred Years of Solitude
classified as "Indian Fiction" by several major bookshops in Delhi and Calcutta. Since
magic realism has become the label of origin and exclusive trade mark () of the
authentic, ecological, biologically certified postcolonial produce, this certification should
be delivered to hords of writers from varied colonial or diasporic horizons who, as far as I
know, never intended any magic but brilliantly wrought together allegory and irony.
Others, who did not comply in advance to the new regulations, rejecting or merely
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1 Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 6-7, quoted in Hart and Ouyang, p.1.
2 quoted from the publishers book description.

Didier Coste
ignoring them, are now paying the high cost of their lack of concern for the ideological
needs of present and future canon-makers (whether overtly expressed or disguised as
"taste", aesthetic judgment). In the course of this paper, I could mention quite a few
authors and titles of works from the early 1900s to the present that barely survive in
shameful clandestinity, are relegated to an obsolete historical past or yet appear to be
utterly forgotten, just because they bear no obvious trace of myth, magic or the
marvelous.
But my goal at present is certainly not to rescue them from oblivion or contempt
(they deserve better and a better champion). It is firstly to track (logically rather than
historically) the presuppositions, motivations and processes of canonization of magical
realism by postcolonial institutional critics and others; secondly to show that this initial
choice and its deviant consequences should be considered as an increasingly severe
"limit of postcolonialism" both detrimental to the scientific credibility of its method
and damaging to its political trustworthiness; and finally to propose some truly
comparative (i.e. equitable) remedies to unfair cultural trade practices of the sort in our
globalized world of exchange.
Critical literature on this topic is immense, especially in Spanish and English, but
I must linit myself to drawing on a small number of samples of recent
critical/theoreticaldiscourse: one of them is a rather short comparative essay by a French
specialist of the so-called New Literatures in English ; the second a broadly
comparative and theoretical French essay on magic realism and marvelous realism; the
third one a global Companion to Magical Realism co-edited for a specialized
academic press by a well-known Professor of Hispanic Studies ; and the fourth a
Readers Companion to Midnights Children published in India and edited by a
relatively junior Indian scholar. Ill dwell somewhat unequally on these three books, for
reasons that will soon become obvious.
Jean-Pierre Durixs work is significantly if fashionably subtitled Deconstructing
Magic Realism, indicating both an analytical attitude and a measure of discontent with
the key term of his study. In fact, three quarters of the way through, he states that the
term 'magic realism' has many acceptations, in fact so many that various authors include a

Beside Magic Realism

spectrum of radically different works under a name whose mere evocation has at times
'magic' value too3. One of the reasons of such disenchantment, beside the definitional
vagueness and incoherence of the oxymoric syntagm and its resultingly limited heuristic
and hermeneutic power, is, according to Durix, that it may have other more commercial
connotations which have to do with the desirability of certain literary labels at particular
moments in the history of publishing.4 It is certainly correct to suggest that
considerations of marketability are not alien to the forging and popularization of critical
and generic categories, but it would be more enlightening to observe that a category such
as magic realism reflects the relatively new demands of a globalized ideological market
for universal brand names, wherever they come from. Imperial appropriation has become
clever enough to disregard the Western origin of the labels it uses to maximize profit;
magic realism may be one more aspect of outsourcing. It remains nevertheless risky to
assess its relevance without a clear view of the chronology of its successive definitions
and textual embodiments, not failing, for example, to take into account the indigenist
beginnings of magic realism in the 1930s. On the other hand, beyond Durixs deficient
information in fields with which he is not familiar or his hasty conflation between New
Literatures in English, new literatures in general and revolutionary modernization of ageold literatures, his work strikes me as a victim of the frequent and easy confusion
between imagination and imaginary. Imagination is dynamic and inscribed in history,
it is the action of producing images (material or mental figures) or its immediate result,
while imaginary is a property of representations that have no close respondents in
actuality. In other terms, the collective imaginary another, wider word for myth is a
set of shared representations largely impervious to the test of experience and that, as a
result, can be handed down in bulk or in chunks to later generations. The notion of magic
realism will not lead us anywhere if we do not seek to know what business its
imagination has with the imaginary.
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3 Durix, 147
4 Ibid.

Didier Coste
This is exactly what Charles W. Scheel seems to attempt in his latest piece of
research. His main avowed concern is at first with problems of definition and method:
according to him, errors of appreciation and low critical productivity are to be blamed on
an old and persistent confusion between various uses of magic realism and Carpentiers
real maravilloso, not to mention unfair readings of Franz Rohs original concept of
magischer Realismus and uncertain boundaries with fantasy and similar literary modes.
Following Amaryll Chanadys three definitional criteria (the presence in the text of two
different levels of reality, natural and supernatural; an antinomy between these two levels
unsolved in narration; authorial reticence or retention of information5) the author
proposes what he calls a formal narratological definition of marvelous realism.
Whatever the fuzziness of the purportedly distinct criteria of the latter (fusion of the socalled levels of reality instead of the mere resolution of their antinomy, and authorial
exaltation instead of authorial reticence) Dr Scheels contribution remains revealing in
that it clearly aims at reclaiming the universal character of modes of fiction akin to
magic realism and reasserting their actual practice in Europe, including France (Marcel
Aym, Jean Giono), against their militant new-worldist or third-worldist use by
Caribbean and Latin American writers such as Asturias, Carpentier or Jacques-Stephen
Alexis. Although I can in no way share this position which tends to de-legitimize the
appropriation of a vitalist force of imagination and that of anthropological archetypes
by the oppressed periphery, Dr Scheels study has the merit of exposing the not always
conscious but certainly strategic connivence between anti-colonial struggles and magical
or marvelous realism, at least in its first, pre-1980 phases. 6 Erik Camayd-Freixas, in his
1984 study Realismo mgico y primitivismo, that is before academic postcolonialism
began to adopt magic realism as its preferred style of fiction, could explain very
convincingly how a primitivist reaction responded radically to the 19th century
colonialist and scientist contempt of the primitive and how it became entangled with the
______________________________
5 summarized from Scheel, p. 88, my translation.
6

Beside Magic Realism

European avant-gardes aesthetic and formal primitivism. Dr Scheel, on the contrary,
blinded by his Eurocentric postulates and dismissing the problematics inspired by what
he calls cultural studies, does not even try to investigate the why and how of this
conjunction, or its huge success in the West, well beyond the narrow circle of a leftist
intelligentsia.
In their general introduction, Hart and Ouyang try to summarize the extraordinary
destiny, the metamorphic continuities of the notion of magical realism by outlining, on
the one hand, the similarities between Rohs initial formulation of post-expressionist
representation and Carpentiers or Garca Mrquezs dual vision of a wondrous reality
and, on the other hand, the global extension of the phenomenon in the wake, they believe,
of Garca Mrquezs own success. Even though it may not be the only way of expressing
the rift of postcolonial cultures and restoring the dignity of the subaltern archive, the
authors state that magical realism still shows no sign that it has run out of steam (p. 7)
and enjoys an enthusiastic reception, as it is now produced by Indian, Japanese or
Scandinavian fictionists; it has not lost its aesthetic power of denouncing the cultural and
political domination and disruption brought about by modern imperialism. The
representation of fissured worlds marked by heterogeneity and conflictiveness, and
not stuck back together by the cement of mestizaje would be its true function and the
secret of its youth in an age of powerful imperialism. If Westerners as well as
postcolonial readers want ever more magical realism, is it then, I ask, because the former
delight in the suffering of the second or because the latter delight in their own suffering?
Especially when the (af)filiation of Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and many others with their
native tradition and modernity is glaringly ignored to stress their reworking of
Marquezian materials, I am not convinced by their paradoxical depiction as bringing
oppositional magic realism one step further since they do away with teleological time
altogether.
Finally Tapan K. Ghosh and several contributors to the volume edited by him
limit themselves to underscoring a technique of blending as the fundamental process of
composition in Midnights Children. Mixing undoubtedly applies here to an
exceptionally wide range of discourses (from History to medical science through
psychoanalysis and the fairy tale) and fictional modes (from myth to Victorian and

Didier Coste
Balzacian realism, from metafiction to plain family yarn), but one would appreciate a
more precise description of the process, whether mere juxtaposition, multilayered
embedding, intertwining or fusion of streams, if not metamorphic crystallization, rather
than a listing of the elements comprised in this inclusive, encyclopedic fiction. With
regards to the magical and the real, T. K. Ghosh observes that
Rushdies narrative technique [] resembles the magic realism of Marquez []. [He]
models his story-telling on oral narration and deploys fantasy elements in his novel to talk
about the reality of a country where incredible things happen constantly and quite plausibly
and where the fantastic and the supernatural form an inextricable part of human lived
experience.(p. 34)

Nandini Bhattacharya also insists that like the Latin-American novelists who employ
magic realism as a mode, Rushdie believes that the fantastic and the bizarre are often a
more accurate mirror of truth. (p. 225) while Rushdie himself confidently declares in
Imaginary Homelands: Unreality is the weapon with which reality can be smashed, so
that it may subsequently be reconstructed7. He is nevertheless careful, we shall note, not
to include magic or myth in the ingredients of such a literature of imagination and to
classify it in the very general category of the other great tradition in art8, grossly
assimilable to the comic, i.e. the very source of modern realism.
If we try to draw a summary portrait of magical realism through all these critical
and uncritical visions, we are struck by at least four converging facts: 1) while the field of
application of the notion is clearly becoming global, its key characteristics are still
determined by the Latin American and Caribbean models of the 50s and 60s; 2) in
absence of a solid semiotic framework and a minimally systematic poetics, confusion
prevails between thematization and rhetorical devices, as well as between authorial
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7 p. 122, qtd. Bhat, p. 227.
8 Ibid.

Beside Magic Realism

intentions, structural and formal textual features and readerly semiosis (often cast as
radical uncertainty), or yet between abstract and situational, socio-cultural models of
literary communication; 3) textual and interpretive universes of reference are not
clarified; logical, cognitive and pragmatic categories are sadly neglected; the improbable
and the empirically impossible, the doubtful and the unacceptable, the supernatural and
the (yet) unexplained, etc., are bundled together ; 4) magical realism is often vaguely
compared with the marvelous, the fantastic, surrealism, the menippean satire, and so on,
but hardly at all with social melodrama, positivist realism or the documentary, so that
only the magic component is given relevance. Magical realism is placed on the side of
romance and its flight from reality, it is a variegated excursus looking toward a
forgotten past and a mystified future rather than a hard reflection on/of the present.
It is not my purpose to try and disprove this vision whose only interest is to
underscore the heightened duality, discrepancy and overlapping of temporal reference in
certain pieces of fiction. But we should now be able to list at least a non-exhaustive series
of indexical data that will go some way towards explaining the claims of magical realism.
Firstly, in the historical long term, many of the conditions that presided over the birth of
the fantastic in the late Enlightenment period and its subsequent development in
Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism, or even those of the rise of pastoral and
baroque metaphoricity in the Renaissance are still prevalent in the West and, due to its
world-wide domination, newly dominant elsewhere: the inertia and/or active resistance of
the sacred (fear of the Gods) to a rationality that cancelled afterlife and stripped our lives
of much wishful thinking; panoptic, exoticist cultural plundering and encyclopedic
cataloging, from the worlds cultures, both past and present, a plundering imitated by the
colonized people in their retaliative quest of identity and nation-building, often involving
a syncretic arrangement of myths and beliefs. Secondly, the continued aesthetic and
ideological prestige of modernism at large, including the added value of innovation and
revolution per se (iconoclast avant-gardes break up the organic unity of representations to
mix their elements or fragments in new, unusual ways, they dismantle genres and
languages, freely borrowing from their own and other peoples past, helped by the crisis
of representation, nostalgia, the supposed decline of the West and the creative
associative structure of dreams described by psychoanalysis). Thirdly, late capitalist and

Didier Coste
late imperialist political economy, closely related to the exponential development of
information and imaging technologies has introduced the dimension of the virtual (as
opposed to actuality) into an already crowded system of universes of reference,
dismantling concepts of reality and casting more equivocal shadows on our sense of the
empirically true and the scientifically verifiable; artistic production and the cultural
market have become dependent on these new illusionistic media; art (installations,
pastiche, recycling and rewriting) prospers or survives on accumulated capital and dead
work; extreme neo-liberalism encourages cultural relativism and the end of ideologies, so
that the strongest, the aptest, marketwise, can win and maximize profit. As a result of all
these concurrent, if sometimes contradictory factors, magical realism originally
associated with freedom movements and cultural insurgency both in Western minority
cultures and in non-Western subjugated or subaltern cultures, has been commodified and
uniformly emptied of its progressive claims, has ceased to be a weapon to become a
mere mass-produced fetish. Its history, written by contemporary critics and theorists such
as Durix, Scheel, Hart and many others, conveniently stresses its European origin in the
artistic avant-gardes of the 1920s (post-expressionism) and a relay through the American
South (Faulkner) and Latin America, that is ancient and more acculturated former
European colonies, also those where mestizaje has reached its peak. Should we write the
same history from an Indian or an African focus, for example, it could look very different
indeed: local sources, both popular and exoteric, or sacred and esoteric, would appear
more determinant and combined with 19th century European social melodrama or the
historical novel, within or without their structures, rather than inspired by later avantgardes. In India, for example, the encounter of Kalidasa with Shakespeare, of the
Mahabharata with Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, not the meeting of a sadhu with Joyce,
generated the prototypes of future magic realism.
If postcolonial cultural and literary theory is not to serve the immediate interests
of savage globalization, it must de- or excenter its historical purview, multiply histories
so as to show the varieties of emergence, without which the adaptability of imperialism
and local conditions of resistance will remain hidden. The near coincidence of the
appearance of magical realism in several unconnected colonial/postcolonial areas,
including Mauritius and the Maghreb, but also its precocity in certain places, its

Beside Magic Realism

belatedness in others, its very different regional or even individual modalities are equally
significant of global trends and responses to them. So are the very poorly treated
phenomena of politically indifferent, if not reactionary uses of the thematic, narrational
and figural devices of magical realism by novelists such as Jos Lezama Lima, Jos
Donoso or Ernesto Sbato. Moreover we should certainly question the privileged
attention granted to the works of writers who appear to be bi-cultural and exhibit riven
selves because they are diasporic, not because they live or lived in a split
colonial/postcolonial culture and on a schizophrenic planet: Carpentier is preferred to
Lezama, Rushdie and his followers to Anantha Murthy or Sethu; others, such as Peter
Carey, who have migrated from one Anglophone area to another, are also ignored in the
perspective of magic realism
But, as already mentioned, worst of all is the obscurity to which the study of
realist realism has been generally relegated by postcolonial criticism. This occultation of
realism is not only unfair to many postcolonial literatures which have produced elaborate
and specific works in this fictional genre, it bars any proper comprehension of the
seduction of magical realism, of the ways in which it makes sense to various kinds of
readers and can be in its turn subverted when it enters, as it often does, in composition
with dominant forms of realism (for a typical example, see The Saga of Dharmapuri by
O.V. Vijayan, originally written in 1972, in which mythical motifs and magic are
invested by satire in a very rabelaisian way). In other cases, the intrusion of faith, the
irruption of miracle or the impossible can seriously disturb the mainstream realist regime
of a novel such as Narayans The Guide, while deepening its realist resonance by raising
the emotional intensity of an objective account. A sophisticated grid of fictional modes
taking into account the universes of reference relevant to the producer of the text, its
mediators and its receivers in diverse settings, would help to decide whether a work of
fiction is or is not a good candidate to citizenship of the magical realist moon where
black sheep speak white and vice versa. It would reveal other continuities and symmetries
than those exposed by a hierarchical and linear literary history dictated by the subalternist

Didier Coste
idea that colonized populations were deprived of their imagination, as Durix strikingly
puts it9. Unless they were wiped out or systematically reduced to the infra-human
condition of fringe dwellers, those populations were, on the contrary, through their very
suffering, their resilience and resistance, forced to imagine themselves in new ways, one
of which is materialist realism; the works of Premchand, Mulk Raj Anand, Ciro Alegra
or Ousmane Sembene bear witness to the creativity of a realist language that was less
imposed on them than an exotic vision and drew on the conversational as much as on
imported models of narration.
In conclusion, postcolonial criticism badly needs to demystify magical realism.
Its largely uncritical acceptance of it as the arch-representative of the voice of suppressed
and split cultural identities has the double defect of bordering on condescency and
reducing the specificity of the aforesaid cultures to their slow or reluctant adaptability
and irrational aspects instead of valuing their own logos, the evolutionary result of their
own practical experience of their environment and historical social organization.
Postcolonial studies, far from evolving towards a literary-centred discipline, has
increasingly lost sight of the political and ethical involvement of the literary. The
example of magical realism vs realist realism makes us fear that this discipline's
growing presentism or inscription in contemporary short-term history, teaching for
the market, has the unfortunate side-effect of fostering the world view and interests of
late global capitalism it was purportedly invented to fight. These two characteristics,
among others, make it favor a globalized canon of literary works that are amenable to
irrational and archetypal readings, thus both cultural rather than literary and faithful to a
persistent exoticist prejudice. A semiotically rigorous study of all the manners
postcolonial cultures have of dealing with the real, both as experience and as concept, in
their local and global settings is thus one of the most urgent tasks of Comparative
Literature, neither new nor old, but in the making. What is at stake, also through a critical
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9 p. 187

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and responsible practice of translatio(n), is the artistic communicability of human
experience.

11