Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies

After the publication of my 1985 monograph on magic realism and the fantastic, I quickly abandoned the formalist-idealist quest for generic certainty. There were several reasons for this. The first was the continuing proliferation of definitions of magic realism. Another was my increasing interest in critical and theoretical studies on metafiction and narratives usually described as such (Earth, Calvino), in which the literary imagination, unfettered by the constraints of realism, was accompanied by self-reflexive comments on various aspects of the text, as well as on the production and reception of literature and the role of the author and reader. The impossible, improbable or supernatural events were thus explicidy presented as fictitious. My subsequent interest in the postmodernism debate, and then postcolonialism, made me relinquish all attempts at arriving at a satisfactory definition of magic realism, since the same books and literary techniques were variously termed magic realist, metafictional, postmodern or even postcolonial — and each of these concepts was equally vague and controversial in itself. Most of Linda Hutcheon's observations in her various studies on the poetics of postmodernism, for example, would apply to narratives considered as magic realist. Finally, postmodern theory had made me increasingly suspicious of taxonomic fervor in literary criticism. The Foucauldian emphasis on the constructed nature of the object of knowledge removed the foundations of any strict generic typology. Studying a certain number of narratives intuitively considered magic realist, determining their defining characteristics, sufficient and essential, and then using this construct to include or exclude other texts, appeared to me as a pleasant, but somewhat idle, enterprise, far less useful and exciting than the emerging interdisciplinary debates on postcolonialism, subalternity, identity, alterity and cultural studies. Magic realism had thus

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