ABSTRACT
The concept of magic realism raises many problems, both theoretical and historical. I first encountered it in the context of North American painting in the mid-1950s; at about the same time, Angel Flores published an influential article (in English) in which the term was applied to the work of Borges; I but Alejo Carpentier's conception of the real maravilloso at once seemed to offer a related or alternative conception, while his own work and that of Miguel Angel Asturias seemed to demand an enlargement of its application.' Finally, with the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the 1960s, a whole new realm of "magic realism" opened up whose exact relations to preceding theory and novelistic practice remained undetermined. These conceptual problems emerge most clearly when one juxtaposes the notion of "magic realism" with competing or overlapping terms: in the beginning, for instance, it was not clear how it was to be distinguished from that vaster category generally simply called fantastic literature: at this point, what is presumably at issue is a certain type of narrative or representation to be distinguished from "realism." Carpentier, however, explicitly staged his version in a more authentic Latin American realization of what in the more reified European context took the form of surrealism: here the emphasis would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the object world itself-not so much a fantastic narrative, then, as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived (my own discussion, below, will retain some affiliations with this acceptation) . In Garcia Marquez, finally, these two tendencies seemed to achieve a new kind of synthesis-a transfigured object world in which fantastic events are also narrated. But at this point, the focus of the conception of "magic realism" would appear to have shifted to what must be called an anthropological perspective: magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society, and drawing in sophisti-
cated ways on the world of village or even tribal myth (at which point, the stronger affiliations of the mode would be with texts like those of Tutuola in Nigeria, or the Macunafma of the Brazilian writer Mario de Andrade, 1928). Recent debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different kind of issue: namely, the problem of the political or mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts , many of which we owe to overtly left-wing or revolutionary writers (Asturias, Carpentier, Garcia Marquez).' In spite of these terminological complexities-which might be grounds for abandoning the concept altogether-it retains a strange seductiveness, which I will try to explore further, adding to the confusion with reference points drawn from Lacan and from Freud's notion of the "uncanny," and compounding it by an argument that "magic realism" (now transferred to the realm of film) is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.'
