4 Juxtaposed Realities: Magical Realism and/as Postcolonial Experience

Now then if surrealism pursued the marvelous, one would have to say that it very rarely looked for it in reality. The marvelous real that I defend and that is our own marvelous real is encountered in its raw state, latent and omnipresent, in all that is Latin American. Here the strange is commonplace and always was commonplace. —Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real”

I. From Paris to the Postcolonial World: Juxtaposed Realities

During his stay in Paris in the 1920s, Alejo Carpentier participated in the early stages of surrealism, a cultural movement whose declared intention was to produce fully new aesthetic effects and to generate a new reality, a reality over and above the real. This new reality was, as Breton postulates in the Surrealist Manifesto, following Pierre Reverdry, the direct result of “a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.” The juxtaposition, however, is “spontaneous,” “despotic,” the product of a thinking completely unfettered insomuch as it reaches beyond the limiting function of reason and of moral and aesthetic preoccupations. To the young Carpentier, the surrealists’ emphasis on the connection between the beautiful and the marvelous—“Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful,” claimed Breton—would work as a catalyst for his own fiction beyond the surrealist poetics. After his early participation in the movement, Carpentier moved out, only to initiate a cultural counterpoint to the marvelous effects fellow European artists were 106 Uncertain Mirrors trying to produce. He proposed to translate those attempts to generate the marvelous effect onto what he regarded as an always already marvelous Latin American reality. This effort would lead both to a critique of the emptiness and artificiality of the European marvelous and to a new valorization of the aesthetic potential of Latin American folklore, ontology, and reality. In “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso,” Carpentier concludes, “Aquí lo insólito es cotidiano, siempre fue cotidiano” (2004: 67). Gabriel García Márquez follows Carpentier in his attention to the marvelous nature of the Latin American everyday reality: “Creo que si uno sabe mirar, lo cotidiano puede ser de veras extraordinario. La realidad cotidiana es mágica pero la gente ha perdido su ingenuidad y ya no le presta atención. Yo encuentro correlaciones increíbles en todas partes” (Menton 1998: 56) (“I believe that if one knows how to look, the everyday can be truly extraordinary. Everyday reality is magical, but people have lost their ingenuity and do not pay attention anymore. I find incredible connections everywhere”—our translation). In contrast to what they deemed the aesthetic exhaustion revealed by the European avant- garde’s failure to produce a feeling of the fantastic and marvelous, Carpentier and (perhaps to a lesser extent) García Márquez championed the full potential of American reality as a source of magical (aesthetic) effects.1 This significant critical move opened a gap between the formal or experimental transgression of realist aesthetics, which involved Western writers looking for new artistic effects, and the representation of realities always perceived as magical, which engaged mostly non-Western and postcolonial writers. As many critics have pointed out, Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso is, at most, only a particular strand of magical realism. However, even if taken as distinctive narrative modes, both magical realism and lo real maravilloso can be grouped together in their championing of indigenous and postcolonial cultural perceptions and in their rejection of the playful literary experimentation associated with the West. Following Carpentier’s thesis, magical realism—incorporating lo real maravilloso as a basic, almost indistinct component—was first critically acclaimed as a unique Latin American phenomenon. It was in the 1990s, with the internationalization of this mode of writing, that such reductive spatial ascription would be discredited as a “territorialization of the imaginary” (Chanady 1995: 131), if not as a downright “geographical fallacy” (Wilson 1995: 223). And it is only