Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar 'Zeta' Acosta, Anna Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

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Frederick Luis Aldama

Postethnic Narrative Criticism                    ‘‘    ’’    ,         ,         ,  ,             

                     Austin

Copyright ©  by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition,  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box , Austin, TX -.  The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of / .- () (Permanence of Paper).                       -   -            Aldama, Frederick Luis, date Postethnic narrative criticism : magicorealism in Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie / Frederick Luis Aldama.—st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.  --- (alk. paper) . American fiction—th century—History and criticism. . Magic realism (Literature) . American fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism. . English fiction—Minority authors—History and criticism. . English fiction—th century—History and criticism. . Ethnic groups in literature. . Minorities in literature. . Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. .  '.—dc 

In the memory of friend and mentor Barbara Christian, the burningly vital spirit of Mathew Adams, and my much loved madrina Linda Van Camp . . . all of whom died of cancer

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Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments 

xiii

Rethreading the Magical Realist Debate



 

Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

 

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels 

        



Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta’s De-formed Auto-bio-graphé



Ana Castillo’s (En)Gendered Magicorealism  Salman Rushdie’s Fourthspace Narrative Re-conquistas Mapping the Postethnic Critical Method Notes



Works Cited Index 







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Preface

This study of contemporary U.S. multiethnic and British writers and movie directors who employ magicorealism to tell stories is more than a study of how language, style, and form—in novels, autobiographies, and film— work to represent the unrepresentable. It is a celebration of the coming of age of certain writers and directors who revitalized and reformed a storytelling mode by playfully inventing worlds populated with racially mixed up and culturally hybrid characters that spoke deeply to the experiences and identities of people like myself. However, coming into contact with contemporary magicorealist works by Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie, to name only those I study in the following pages, did not constitute just a reflection on and an affirmation of my personal ‘‘impure’’ identity, but more deeply, it was an enduring acquaintance with a variety of postdiasporic identities and experiences. In the early s when such postdiasporic writers and directors juxtaposed the ‘‘real’’ with the ‘‘unreal’’ to imagine the identities formed out of a living-here-belonging-elsewhere phenomenon, I was sent away from my home in California’s north-central valley to live with my Anglo madrina in London. The story of my dislocation is complicated, involving most of those ‘‘isms’’ (racism, sexism, and so on) that control and/or erase the ethnoracial subject. My mother, having lost her job and gone on Social Security, felt she had no choice but to reduce her household. I arrived in an inner-city London filled to the brim with Marmite-eating xenophobes. Journeying far from my Mexican/Guatemalan-American family, I carried with me a suitcase of narratives of U.S. ethnosocial dynamics. Already at our California elementary school, my older, lighter-skinned brother (whose blond locks had made him especially popular among our casta-

invested relatives in Los Angeles and Mexico City) had been regularly the target of racial epithets because his English didn’t fit; being darker, I didn’t look ‘‘right,’’ and, anyway, my lunch box was full of food other than Wonder Bread and Oscar Mayer. Life turned even more confusing in London. I identified strongly with my Mexicano roots but found no one on the school grounds or off who shared a sense of my culture, language, and worldview. Most Brits derived their sense of Mexican culture from Hollywood’s stereotyping narratives where Mexicans appear as poncho- and sombrero-wearing objectspecimens slouching in the shadows cast by white figures. I was identified as ‘‘different,’’ phenotypically aligned with the British-black Other. On my way home on the underground, kids sporting National Front emblems would regularly notify me of my ‘‘impure,’’ noncitizen status by roughing me up. Six thousand miles away from home, nothing much had changed other than the shift in ethnosocial identifying nomenclature: ‘‘spic’’/‘‘greaser’’ to ‘‘darky’’/‘‘paki.’’ My body, language, and worldview were forced to occupy an ethnoracial space coded as degenerate, impure—nonwhite British. Incidentally, my extended sojourn in London’s inner city coincided with Mrs. Thatcher’s reign of terror. I arrived just when British troops were being deployed for the Falklands/Malvinas and when Mrs. Thatcher announced the ‘‘tidying’’ up of the inner city and, more generally, the beginning of an era of political, economic, and cultural ‘‘permanent revolution’’ at home. She began to sweep up Britain’s ‘‘impure’’ Others—tightening immigration controls and instituting ‘‘incarcerate, don’t educate’’ public policy. Her goal was to revive an image of Britain as empire, infusing a rah-rah Britannia rhetoric into foreign and domestic policy. This led not just to union busting, but also to the massive privatization of traditionally public services such as railroads, hospitals, and schools. The working class and racialized urban Other were to cease being beneficiaries of such services. Also, as council flats were leveled and the urban poor displaced, U.S.-styled megaplex stores and newly built Victorian–styled architectures mushroomed overnight. If my South Asian and Afro-Caribbean British friends and I wandered too deeply into and stayed too long in London’s moneyed West End, police would inform us of a city curfew, quickly ‘‘escort’’ us to the nearest underground station, and shuffle us onto trains leaving the city’s center. In the traditionally Other-zoned neighborhoods—Nottinghill Gate, Clapham, and Brixton—BMW sports cars appeared in front of newly refurbished houses belonging to a cadre of twenty-something white male professionals. x

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

London in the s was bursting at the seams with contradiction. There was the wave of powerful conservatism and the seemingly sudden overflowing of novels and films that spoke of ‘‘being British, almost’’ as Kureishi would say. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Amitav Ghosh’s Circle of Reason, Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, to name a few, provided alternative imaginative contact zones for audiences like myself and my transdiasporic compadres to understand more about one another and to provide a sense of home. Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie is a study that seeks to more formally identify the means by which ethnic- and postcolonialidentified writers and directors represent the layered and oft-contradictory reality of the spectacularly topsy-turvy late-capitalist, globalizing world— all while creating magicorealist narratives peopled by a host of displaced, subaltern characters.

xi

Preface

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Acknowledgments

This book grows out of deep discussions on, and a long-standing scholarly interest in, developing a conceptual framework for reading U.S. ethnic and British postcolonial literatures, fictionalized autobiographies, and films. The sometimes heated and always layered conversations and debates that inform this book took place in a variety of venues. Over food and drink, author Hanif Kureishi’s words resonated loud and kept me going through publishing humps: ‘‘There’s all kinds of mixtures coming out. Like you. It’s your time. You know, you write your books and they’ll make a new category for you. I’m in the postcolonial category now, but I wasn’t in that category before. If you’re annoying a lot of people, you’re probably doing something right.’’ I would also like to acknowledge the many other conversations I have had with other writers (Lucha Corpi, Denise Chávez, Chitra Divakaruni, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Nava, Cecile Pineda, Ntozake Shange, Piri Thomas, Alfredo Véa, Jr., and Victor Villaseñor, to name a few) whose words confirmed what was at first only an intuitive feeling that later, after formal study, proved right: certain authors rework genre and language to articulate the unrepresentable, such as the trauma of dislocation and colonialism. Magicorealism is one such refiguration. Of course, scholarly conversations that helped sharpen the critical purview of this book on magicorealism also took place at conferences: the South Central Modern Language Association meeting (), the British Annual Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies Conference (), and the Chicano Cultural Production conference at the University of California at Irvine (). And discussions unfolded across office tables with colleagues whose crucial critical feedback proved vital to the shaping of this book. Much thanks and admiration to: Robert Alter, Alfred Arteaga, Barbara Christian, Carl Gutierrez-

Jones, Shirley Brice Heath, Abdul JanMohamed, Herbie Lindenberger, Don McQuade, José David Saldívar, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ramón Saldívar, Alix Schwartz, and Robert Warrior. Comments and critiques from readers for the Journal of Narrative Life and History () and LIT: Literature Interpretation and Theory (), where versions of chapters appeared, helped solidify the arguments set forth in the book. Similarly, the keen critical insights of the University of Texas Press’s readers helped shape Postethnic Narrative Criticism into the book it is today. Special thanks to editor Theresa May for her unflagging enthusiasm and support. Gratitude to John Stevenson, chair of the Department of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for his acknowledgment of the project’s importance and for granting time off so that I could revise the book. Funding from the Ford and Mellon Foundations proved a necessary complement to the time off granted. Thank you to my brother Professor Arturo Aldama of Arizona State University, who continues to be a great influence and pillar of support for this project and others. Thank you to my dear friend and author of magicorealist novels, Susann Cokal, whose critical and editorial feedback helped me over writerly and conceptual hurdles in the early phases of the book. Finally, I send big abrazos to all my friends and family members—especially my father, Luis Aldama, with his razor-sharp editorial eye and his overflowing optimism—for their cheer and care.

xiv

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism

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Introduction

RETHREADING TH E MAGICAL REALIST DEBATE

M

agical realism’’: Does the term identify a subtype of basic prose epic genre, a storytelling style, or an ethnopolitics of representation? Furthermore, if identified as a subtype, is magical realism to be located within a particular cultural and historical period such as the postcolonial or postmodern, or does it transcend periodization? If magical realism differs from its next of kin—realism and the fantastic—then how does it differ and why? As more postcolonial and multiethnic writers and directors gravitate toward magical realism as a form for telling stories, does this trend allow for an identification of it as an ethnopoetics? Is there something about magical realism as a storytelling mode that allows an author or director to do a ‘‘better’’ job at destabilizing colonial and Western knowledge paradigms than, say, realism or the fantastic? Why do practitioners of magical realism commonly invent storyworlds where Firstworlds (traditionally coded as Western, metropolitan, pure, civilized, and ‘‘real’’) and Thirdworlds (traditionally coded as non-Western, rural, impure, and ‘‘unreal’’) fuse; why are the protagonists of those narratives usually identified as an ethnic hybrid and/or diasporic postcolonial subject? What might be the problematic relationship between an author or director representing his or her worldview through this kind of narrative and the narrators and characters depicted in them? Are magical realist authors and directors using the privilege of a cosmopolitan erudition to candy-coat the ‘‘real’’ experiences of peoples violently dislocated and/or submitted to brutal acts of genocide to turn a profit? What is at stake when a mainstream comes to identify ethnic American and postcolonial writers and directors as capable only of producing magical realist worlds? Who is given, as Said discusses more generally of Orientalism and the East, ‘‘the power to narrate, or to block

other narratives from forming and emerging’’ (Culture and Imperialism, xiii). Finally, is magical realism dead, as some would suggest? These questions and more make up the hugely confusing tapestry that scholarship on magical realism has become. Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie aims to unthread the different strands that make the discussion of magical realism such a vital, oft-contradictory, and heated area in today’s European postcolonial and ethnic American (U.S., Latino/Chicano, and Caribbean) scholarship. One of the reasons why magical realism remains a heated subject for scholarly study and debate is the long history (especially through the last half of the twentieth century) of confusing its literary and ethnographic components. Since the mid-twentieth-century writings of Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Asturias, there has been a conflation of the literary form with ethnographic content: a confusion of narrative with ontology. More recent scholarship has tended to focus on identifying magical realism as ethnographic artifact. Of course, since magical realist narratives— novels, autobiographies, and films—gravitate around the ethnic and/or postcolonial subject’s identity formation and experience within larger hegemonic structures, it is not surprising that the anthropological has subsumed the literary. Pick any number of magical realist novels—for example, Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things—and they have been either celebrated as the local voice of resistance to imperial domination or damned for their leveling out of the violence of colonialism to pander to a cosmopolitan audience hungry for the exotic. In Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye, Brenda Cooper rescues magical realism as a postcolonial scholarly rubric not so much by focusing on its literary-ness, but by emphasizing its ontological status. Her magical realist authors—Syl Cheney-Coker (Sierra Leone and the United States), Ben Okri (Nigeria and Britain), and Kojo Laing (Ghana and Scotland)—represent the ‘‘real’’ of their postcolonial reality as a seamlessly real and magical entity. Following an ethnographic model— anchored in the facts of her authors’ various dislocations—Cooper seeks to demonstrate that magical realism in the African novel reflects these authors’ vision by means of ‘‘a third eye’’ (). According to her, the particular experiences of these authors who grew up in Africa and abroad allow them to see with a third eye and to make visible both the culture and history that make their respective nations unique, as well as to affirm the formation of culturally hybrid subjects. Cooper conflates storytelling theme and 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

biographical fact to develop a strategic essentialist concept. Here, magical realism can both acknowledge the materialist conditions of enunciation— the author’s biography and his or her racially constituted character’s experiences—and affirm the in-flux, hybrid identity at the site where Self (coded as West and civilized) and Other (coded as African and primitive) dissolve. Taking her cue from Frederic Jameson’s essay ‘‘On Magical Realism in Film,’’ Cooper reads magical realism not only as ethnographic marker, but also as the narrative structure that reveals the political unconscious of a historical period in African postcolonial nation-state formation where capitalist and precapitalist features coexist. (See Jameson’s ‘‘On Magic Realism in Film.’’) So, for Cooper, magical realism is the creolizing of preand postcolonial capitalist knowledge systems that grows out of ‘‘transition,’’ ‘‘change,’’ ‘‘borders,’’ and ‘‘ambiguity’’ (). Hence Cooper’s move to locate her magical realist ‘‘third eye’’ vision within both a global capitalist and a colonialist paradigm and also within local forms of enunciation: folklore and regional African belief systems. Her authors, as she writes, ‘‘are as at home in London or Paris as any of their cosmopolitan counterparts, and have also selectively appropriated global intellectual and aesthetic traditions, along with the local’’ (). For Cooper, then, African authors who employ magical realism come to occupy a third position in the geographical and social present informed by local (underdeveloped) and global cultures. Convincing as Brenda Cooper’s argument is at first glance, it is flawed by her reading of magical realism as an ethnopoetics. Her African authors possess a third-eye vision because they are identified as ontologically different. And Cooper can celebrate the power of magical realism as a mode of political change because for her fictional narrative is the same as the real out there. Indeed, Cooper’s locating magical realism within the interstices of a colonial and postcolonial, precapitalist and late-capitalist Africa falls back on a poststructuralist paradigm. The formal structures of magical realism are not just about the use of a novel language to represent transitions between a precolonial and postcolonial moment: ‘‘like language, narrative structure is not neutral’’ (). So if the author concerned changes the language (grammar, point of view, various narrative techniques) of representation in the novel, then that novel will not only reflect on the asymmetries of power in the world, it will also provide a critical intervention into it that will effect change. Ultimately, Cooper’s magical realism is a language (‘‘its strange relationships, weird linkages and multidimensional spaces’’ []) that comes to represent a dislocated, hybrid African essence and that can enact political change. 

Introduction

Taking the ethnographic line on magical realism does not necessarily lead to an uncritical affirmation of localized epistemological and ontological resistances to hegemonic forces (imperial and capitalist). In The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies, Alberto Moreiras follows the magical-realism-as-ethnopoetics to an apocalyptic end. Moreiras positions his death of magical realism within a more general clarion call directed at Latin American scholars to cultivate a ‘‘locational’’ thinking that anchors what he identifies as ‘‘translative digging’’ within the specific contours of localized history and culture (). Such scholarly diggers or localized thinkers (their efforts are also variously labeled ‘‘critical regionalism,’’ ‘‘second-order Latin Americanism,’’ ‘‘savage atopics,’’ and ‘‘restitutional excess’’) would also be aware of working within dominant colonial paradigms and would ultimately negate the presence of the subaltern. Within this tautological space—localized thinking makes visible the local conditions experienced and represented by the subaltern and at the same time participates in its erasure—Moreiras recommends the use of ‘‘modes of destructive critique’’ that would make for a ‘‘reflective space that would open Latin Americanist thought to nonknowledge and that would transform it into a nonholder of the nontruth of the (Latin American) real’’ (). So, where does magical realism fit into this house of mirrors—this postructuralist paradox? For Moreiras, magical realism represents a localized knowledge system or regional enunciation that has been caught up and tamed by capitalist forces of globalization. According to the logic of his argument, magical realism would be caught up in and mobilized ‘‘within new social regimes of rule’’ (). Magical realism, then, acts to homogenize the local textures of Latin American culture and, in a global reading economy, reduces the Latin American Other to exotic sameness. Moreiras concludes more generally, ‘‘Within accomplished globalization there is only room for repetition and the production of simulacra: even so-called difference is nothing more than homogenized difference’’ (). Of course, this is true. But it is also incomplete. Capitalism works through a simultaneous impulse to diversify and homogenize. Magical realism in film and literature is no exception to this rule (I will go into this in more detail later). However, Moreiras’s notion of a localized, resistant knowledge (or as he calls it on another occasion, ‘‘nonconsumptive singularity’’ []) within a globalizing capitalist economy presumes that something like a magical realist novel, or more generally the politics of difference that magical realism has come to represent—or any Latin Americanist cultural artifact— could at some earlier precontact moment function as a form of resistance to dominant, reifying systems. Moreiras considers Michael Taussig’s brand 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

of magical realism just such a revolutionary, antistate ‘‘counterrepresentational instance of Latin Americanism’’ ().1 However, Moreiras’s position depends on a blurring of lines between magical realism as aesthetic practice and magical realism as a putative politically resistant, localized knowledge and form of being. Moreiras conflates the two categories and thus renders them ineffective. Indeed, the flip side of Moreiras’s identification of magical realism as episteme reflective of a localized ontology is that it unintentionally reproduces an Us/Them paradigm, where any localized knowledge resists dominant paradigms until swept up into a global capitalist marketplace that transforms a ‘‘savage atopics’’ into the ‘‘latest avatar of melodramatic consciousness at the global level’’ (). Moreiras wants to complicate the theorization of ‘‘difference’’ and ‘‘hybridity’’ as de facto resistant knowledges articulated in postcolonial theory, and he identifies magical realism—and other forms of localized knowledge—with a Latin American way of being in the world. This argument betrays a primitivist bent. For magical realism to either reify racial difference or to present a concrete political act, it must exist as other than a narrative strategy linked to an aesthetic. In a chapter titled ‘‘The End of Magical Realism: José María Arguedas’s Passionate Signifier,’’ Moreiras reads the death of magical realism in the literal death of the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas. Text-act and being conflate once again. Moreiras closes the gap between reading magical realism as narrative and as ontological trace marker when he identifies magical realism as a transculturative process: where the juxtaposition of opposites in magical realism is analogous with the syncretism seen in regionalist and criollista writing that hybridizes cultural forms—Euro-Spanish with indigenous—but, in so doing, covers over ideologies of the casta system. For Moreiras, transculturation is that ‘‘war machine’’ that feeds ‘‘on cultural difference whose principal function is the reduction of the possibility of radical cultural heterogeneity’’ (–). The juxtaposition and hybridization of form seen in magical realism serves an analogous function to this transculturative ‘‘war machine’’ that pretends to diversify but in actuality homogenizes. According to Moreiras, magical realism is that same smooth veneer that covers over (much like Roland Barthes’s l’effet du reel) age-old colonialist ideologies that seek to ‘‘whiten’’ bodies and texts. Because magical realism reproduces ideologies of whiteness, it ultimately fails to capture a more localized ‘‘mestizo space of incoherence’’ ().2 The second step Moreiras takes after blurring the line between Latin American transculturative epistemes and magical realism is to blur the line between episteme and ontology. More than the novel El zorro de arriba y el 

Introduction

zorro de abajo (written between  and ), which Moreiras says ‘‘reveals that its conditions of possibility are also at the same time its conditions of its impossibility’’ (), it is the biographical author José María Arguedas that becomes the site for this (con)fusion. According to Moreiras, Arguedas kills magical realism not just at this moment in his writing that signals the awareness of its inability to signify, but also and as definitely when Arguedas commits suicide. Moreiras concludes: Arguedas shows that the magical-real moment is tendentially a moment in which the national allegory, on the other side of its utopian directives, opens onto its colonizing substratum. Magical realism comes with Arguedas to its theoretical impossibility because Arguedas shows how magical realism is an impossible scene of emancipatory representation staged from a colonizing perspective. (  ) So, more than El zorro itself representing its own failure to represent localized knowledge, it is Arguedas’s suicide that acts as a ‘‘denarrativization’’ of the subject and language of magical realism and that marks the end of ‘‘any utopian impulse’’ (). Moreiras ends with identifying a post-Arguedas’s magical realist nonexistence that ultimately proves a site of atopic savagism and, paradoxically, opens up to the ‘‘possibility of an actual critique of empire’’ (). In ‘‘Magical Realism and Postmodernism,’’ Theo L. D’haen celebrates magical realism as a postmodern voice that destabilizes epistemic and ontological centers.3 He takes as his cue, he writes, the ‘‘magic realism in the sense of Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso: indigenous magic’’ () to demonstrate how magical realism, like postmodernism generally, destabilizes centers of power.4 Much like Linda Hutcheon in her understanding of postmodern narrative, D’haen identifies how magical realism first appropriates the techniques of dominant discourse (the ‘‘centr-al line’’ [sic] as he calls it) to ‘‘duplicate existing reality as perceived by the theoretical or philosophical tenets’’ only to turn this on its head by creating an ‘‘alternative world’’ that can ‘‘right the wrongs’’ of reality out there ().5 Like quite a few other critics, D’haen believes that magical realism is not only a discourse that can alter a reader’s lived reality, but that it also offers the selfreflexive means for postcolonial writers to reflect critically on their own position of privilege—narrating subject—all while speaking ‘‘on behalf of 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

the ex-centric and un-privileged’’ (). D’haen reads Rushdie’s novels as a localized knowledge that reverses the West’s colonial gaze, allowing the reader to see the ‘‘exotic’’ as a construct projected onto the Indian subaltern. In the postcolonial novel, according to D’haen, the magical functions as a local, everyday site of resistance that allows the Indian subject to deflect and redirect the imperial gaze back at the West. So what is at stake when a Brenda Cooper, an Alberto Moreiras, or a Theo L. D’haen confuses and conflates magical realism-as-aesthetic with magical realism-as-localized-knowledge and/or magical realism-asontology? Clearly, there is a referential component to magical realism as aesthetic. The language used is mostly our everyday language, and the objects and characters (for the most part) can be measured against the reader’s sense of reality beyond the text. However, the most basic property of a literary text is that it performs within society (the consuming public, the reviewers, the critics, and so on) as a literary text. That is, a text is a piece of literature when and only when the community of readers does not regard it primarily as a source of information or as a conveyor of truth or falsity, but, instead, reads it as a narrative with its own kind of rationale. The error of confusing the contents (dialogues, plot, theme, etc.) of literary texts with such and such aspects of the empirical world is the same error as confusing realism with an ‘‘objective’’ report of events taking place outside of literary texts. A literary text is the result of a specific social convention or act; a nonliterary text is the result of a different convention, one where the referential content is paramount. This is not to say that the literary text does not ‘‘refer’’ to the extratextual world; it only means that the ‘‘reference’’ possesses its own rationale. When a narrator gives an account of such and such events using such and such narrative techniques and conventions (realism, magical realism, the fantastic, etc.), those events stand on their own; they are not considered by the reader as a report of anything happening or having really happened in the empirical world of some empirical people’s lives. For the reader, there is the account furnished by the narrator, and there is nothing out there to show that the account is true or false; there is no event in the empirical world to compare the narrator’s account to. As John M. Ellis once put it, ‘‘that account is the event in itself. All of what the narrator tells us is a composition, and the very scene itself is his creation as he reports it’’ (–). The fundamental issue in the discussion of magical realism as seen by the theorists so far discussed is that they all reify in one way or another the literary text and then conflate it in this reified form with an empirical world they equate with the fictional world by considering that the em

Introduction

pirical world is a narrative and as such could be changed by merely rewriting it. It is the confusion of aesthetic categories with social, ethnological, and psychological categories that results in this double reification. To doubly reify magical realism and identify it as an ethnographic trace marker of Latin American or Thirdworld knowledge and being is finally to reproduce the type of primitivism practiced by early-twentieth-century modernist painters and writer/intellectuals (for example, Sigmund Freud, André Breton, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot) who excavated knowledge and identity from an invented, primitivist Africa.6 This double reification is not unique to Brenda Cooper, Alberto Moreiras, or Theo L. D’haen. Generally, the proclaimed aim of postructurally informed postcolonial theory (I think here generally of the Asian and Latin American Subaltern Studies Groups 7) is to identify localized texts and knowledges that are considered to resist hegemonic paradigms—colonial and capitalist. As Moreiras proposes, tracing the localized subalternenunciated knowledges that act as ruptures in the antinomies of power and the identification of the power of the subaltern to strike back is important. However, placing such responsibility in a given magical realist narrative fiction leads, as we have already begun to see, to a theoretical dead end. If magical realism is to function as ontological repository when in fact it is categorically not, then it can only lead to the kind of paradoxical death that Moreiras identifies. Its death is its only way out for those who have fashioned it as an aesthetic/ontological Gordian knot.

                      - Cooper, Moreiras, and D’haen are not alone in their categorical fusion of aesthetic and ethnographic artifact. Most contemporary theorists of magical realism—María-Elena Angulo, Jaime Alazraki, Erik Camayd-Freixas, Roberto González Echevarría, Gloria Bautista Gutiérrez, and Alicia Llarena, along with the Euro-Anglo and postcolonial essayists collected in the anthology Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community—participate to varying degrees in this confusion.8 This is partly the result of the strong poststructuralist impulse to have the ex-centric text-act mean in ways that it has the potential to alter reality. It also predates the poststructuralist wave. To understand better the two threads— aesthetic and ethnographic—that are confused in today’s scholarship on magical realism, it bears reviewing swiftly the history of the debate as it 

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falls into the aesthetic versus socioanthropological camp. When German art critic Franz Roh first introduced the term magical realism in his book Nach Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europätscher Malerie in , the concept was used primarily to identify a painterly style and mode of visual communication. Before Roh’s aesthetic-based definition would appear in essays by Angel Flores in the s or more recently in Seymour Menton’s book-length studies, it was reshaped by the hands of Venezuelan Arturo Uslar Pietri, Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias, and Cuban Alejo Carpentier in the late s. Newly identified as lo real maravilloso, magical realism now came to identify a unique Latin American knowledge system and way of being. Asturias, Uslar Pietri, and Carpentier shared a strong anti-imperialist (identified as modernist) stance mostly associated with laissez faire capitalism and the consequent exploitation of the Amerindian subject. Such writers and pensadores celebrated an oralbased, folkloric mestizo spirit that would resist the modernist machines of progress. Lo real maravilloso was just such a spirit and worldview. For Uslar Pietri, Asturias, and Carpentier, lo real maravilloso spoke to the Latin American subject’s (Amerindian and other) simultaneous inhabiting of a real and unreal reality; it identified a stereoscopic vision that would see the layers of pre-columbian, colonial, and postcolonial histories simultaneously. For example, in a  essay, Uslar Pietri asserted that lo real maravilloso portrayed ‘‘the view of man as mystery in the midst of realist detail’’ (–, my trans.). And in  Alejo Carpentier prefaced his novel El Reino de este mundo with a how-to-read guide of sorts, describing lo real maravilloso as that unique Amerindian subjectivity that could see an ‘‘amplification of the measures and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity due to an exaltation of the spirit that elevates it to a kind of ‘limit state’ ’’ (, my trans.). Though the definition was debated at various conferences throughout the s, it was lo real maravilloso and its celebration of the emotionalism of regional resistance to dominant forces of capitalism that prevailed. In  Angel Flores presented a paper titled ‘‘Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction’’ at the Modern Language Association meeting in New York. Here he tried to wrench the discussion away from its identity politics and to promote an analysis of its transnational aesthetic characteristics. And in  writer Jacques Stephen Alexis took up lo real maravilloso to describe how Haitians ‘‘express their own consciousness of reality by the use of the Marvelous’’ ().9 In the summer of , Luis Leal’s essay ‘‘El realismo mágico en la literatura hispanomericana’’ had firmly established magical realism as a pan-Latinidad way of being wherein the magical realist writer 

Introduction

simply ‘‘captures the mystery that palpitates in things’’ (, my trans.). And in December of that same year, Asturias in his essay ‘‘Hearing the Scream’’ solidified his stance regarding magical realism: I will try to tell you as simply as possible what magical realism means to me. You can know an indian who describes to you how he has seen a huge rock change into a person or a cloud change into a rock. This situation is a tangible reality that for the indian encloses a comprehension of supernatural forces. When I have to give a literary name to this supernatural phenomenon, I call it ‘‘magical realism.’’ There are also other kinds of similar phenomena on account of an unfortunate accident when a woman falls into a crevice or a horseback rider is thrown off his horse and he falls on a rock. These accidents as they could be called could also be transformed into a magical event. Suddenly the woman did not fall into a crevice, rather it is the crevice that called the woman in and the horseback rider did not fall from the horse, rather it is the stone that called him. (                        ’              ,                  [  ] ,      . ) Both Asturias and Carpentier, we discover, were extremely invested in promoting the idea of a magical realist consciousness in the Americas. This was more than just an anti-imperialist, antimodernist standpoint. Asturias published his novel Hombres de maíz in  but already had become known for being the first to translate the Popul Vuh into Spanish from the French; also, he wanted to believe in the idea of a Latin American consciousness foreign to Western master narratives and existing within some mystical, mythical space that was prerational, childlike, and primitive. Asturias and Carpentier not so coincidentally were living in Paris during the height of French philosopher, psychologist, and arm-chair anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s fame. In his study of the so-called primitive mentality entitled How Natives Think (), he suggested that ‘‘primitive’’ thought and perceptions are pervaded by mysticism and that ‘‘primitive mentality’’ is not governed exclusively by the laws of logic and is therefore mainly prelogical and analogous to the mentality of a child. This formulation and stance by a scholar in academia was also that of colonial administrators, who considered the 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

people they administered to be children and their job to act in loco parentis, as it were. The link between lo real maravilloso and Levy-Bruhl’s influential book is readily apparent: it had a clear though unintended role in fixing and justifying the political propaganda of colonialist and neocolonialists everywhere. So, as Jean-Pierre Durix informs, while Carpentier articulated a lo maravilloso Latin American ontology, he also developed a particular form of ethnocentrism: ‘‘In typical colonial fashion, Europe is reality, whereas America is the materialization of dreams. One is not very far from conceptions of the Noble Savage, with the New Continent being endowed with all the qualities which Europe does not possess. Europe is the reference, unlike America which becomes the object to man’s desires’’ (). Presumably, Carpentier needed a manifesto to promote his book. In it, magical realism defined a Latin American ontological essence that existed in the same way that the novel was structured. For the novel to have practical effects, Carpentier asserted a one-to-one correspondence between its storytelling mode and reality. The success of Carpentier’s novel and its prologue (especially among the urban-dwelling Latino male elite) solidified its presence as the authoritative definition of magical realism. This brings us to the contemporary scholarship on magical realism in Latin America. A quick review serves several purposes. First to drive home the point of Asturias and Carpentier’s strong influence on the study of magical realism today. Second, to make visible the contemporary Latin American scholarship on the subject that is crucially left out of Wendy Faris and Lois Parkinson Zamora’s anthology, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community.10 Two scholars in particular begin to complicate the ethnographic identification of magical realism.11 Alicia Llarena, in her essay ‘‘Claves para una discusión: El ‘realismo mágico’ y ‘lo real maravilloso americano,’ ’’ adds ‘‘americano’’ to ‘‘lo real maravilloso’’ in order to firmly locate her analysis within the contexts of the Americas.12 While Llarena is a little more self-reflexive of her conflation of the narrative form with the anthropological/ethnosocial/historical category, she ultimately opts for the later definition to describe a poetics—narrators and characters must not differentiate between the magical and the real within the storyworld—that speaks to how a continent of people (North and South America) see the world through a magical realist lens. Though Llarena continues to uphold the ethnopoetic model of interpretation, she makes the more radical shift away from Carpentier and Asturias (both of whom implicitly identified their fictions as being written for a white readership, hence the various 

Introduction

manifestos 13): she centrally positions a reader of the Americas. For such American-oriented novels, the narrative structures supply the codes for understanding that the point of view is magical realist. How-to guides are not necessary for Llarena’s real maravilloso americano where, as she writes, the ‘‘characters collectivize the magical perception and establish its continuity’’ (, my trans.). For Llarena, it is Gabriel García Márquez who achieved this to its perfection. In Cien años de soledad, García Márquez invents characters who all participate in the magical realist verisimilitude and where, she writes, ‘‘Macondo is the place in which all the possibilities of narrative space as an a priori form of the fantastic are developed’’ (, my trans.). In García Márquez’s novel, characters and narrators do not distinguish between the unreal and the real, and the space of Macondo is more and more open to the world: inhabitants travel outside of Macondo and travelers arrive; Macondo rubs against and is changed by the world just as the world is changed by Macondo. Llarena provides an interesting counterpoint when analyzing the more narratologically simple novel by Asturias, Hombres de maíz. According to Llarena, Asturias’s reliance on the mythical and fantastical excuses it from having to develop more sophisticated narrative bridges with its readership. Here the Mayan cosmology depicts the Amerindian as primitive and beyond any reader’s reality, to the point that it does not have to account for a disbelieving reader. While Llarena does not go too deeply into the García Márquez versus Asturias brand of magical realism, her analysis marks the first important distinction between what we identify as magical realism—a vital and sophisticated use of language and storytelling device—and what has been termed lo real maravilloso—a more commercially oriented, lazy, and clumsy storytelling form—that as we will see, plays out in more contemporary cases. What Alicia Llarena lacks in transnational literary comparative work, Seymour Menton begins to make up. In his book Historia verdadera del realismo mágico (mostly based on a series of published articles), Menton not only develops a comparative method, he also begins to unravel the long history of confusion between the narrative genre he calls el realismo mágico and the ontologically identified lo real maravilloso.14 To sidestep the problematic metaphysics of the latter category, he simply applies Franz Roh’s original typology (in reduced form) of magical realism to analyze Simone Schwartz-Bart, Ana Castillo, Truman Capote, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Juan José Arreola—he even includes a discussion of Icelandic visual arts.15 For example, his analysis of Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (a novel he finds less interesting than Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban because of its realistic ‘‘human’’ depiction) reveals how 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

her novel combines magical realism—‘‘the mysterious power of characters to cure, to speak with the dead, and to see the future’’ (, my trans.)— with lo real maravilloso—her representation of ‘‘social protest’’ (). Seymour Menton’s approach benefits from its broad comparative brush strokes and also from his deft move away from a paradigm that sets lo real maravilloso and magical realism into a simple binary opposition. He measures how different chirographic and visual texts contain varying degrees of lo real maravilloso (ideologically identified) and/or magical realism (narrative technique). However, while he is critical of others who stretch the concept too wide, his critical purview is finally overstretched. His seven identified characteristics are too vague a typology and make for a specious analysis between radically different genres and modes of representation.

                             If this aforementioned categorical confusion remains at the heart of the problem not just with Latin American, but also with postcolonial criticism generally, then why return to magical realism as a possible concept for comparative U.S. ethnic and postcolonial literary and film studies? Why not simply follow another path, that of comparing resonant thematics (homelessness and hybridity, for example) to weave together a variety of ethnic and postcolonial texts? For example, in Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions, Roger Bromley develops a cogent comparative study of ex-centric writers by identifying authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Gloria Anzaldúa, Amy Tan, Ghish Jen, Hanif Kureishi, and Chang-Rae Lee as ‘‘border writers.’’ However, what we soon discover is that such a comparative study based only on thematics loses itself in its plunge toward large, baggy, ideological paradigms: in Bromley’s case, novels from U.S. ethnic, Indian diaspora, Africa, Caribbean, Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, and Ireland all share common ground in their thematic representation of ‘‘incomplete signification and hybridity’’ (). And though Bromley makes a special effort to move away from misreading novels as only allegories of nation and to connect with ‘‘concerns which are properly literary’’ (), he ultimately ends up in a poststructural Nowhere: an analytic space where the postcolonial and the literary meet and deliver what he calls ‘‘an archeology of identity’’ () that grows from an ‘‘unyieldingness,’’ a sense of postcolonial ‘‘intransigence,’’ and finally a nebulous resistance (). Though David Punter avoids the trappings of a comparative exoticism 

Introduction

—Bromley reads Kureishi’s work as an example of the ‘‘rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural’’ ()—in his Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order, he too organizes his study around clusters of themes such as trauma of loss/wound, dislocation, globalization, storytelling, transformation. A critical purview limited to points of contact between stories (theme, character, and event, for example)—and not to those intersections at the level of discourse (genre, mode, technique, and language, for example), leads to studies that are difficult to build on and/or productively retheorize. When points of contact are identified only as the appearance of new cultural strategies inflected by dimensions of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, readings are more likely to miss the very nuance and complexity that its multilingual, multicultural, and racially hybrid subjects require. As a last example of potential rubrics for a comparative ethnic/ postcolonial literary study, I turn briefly to Karen Christian’s Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction and Ellen McCracken’s New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. First, Christian and McCracken read (for the most part) with an understanding of the tripartite system—reference/story/discourse—that makes up narrative fiction. This allows for a discussion of a variety of texts as they intersect along referential, narratological, and thematic points of contact. For Christian, this helps her to develop an analytic rubric to affirmatively answer her own question, ‘‘Is it possible to formulate a global approach to U.S. Latina/o writing that does not perpetuate a reductive, totalizing view of the literature?’’ (). McCracken’s nuanced reading of parody in Latina fiction moves from a dismissal of an Ana Castillo and a Cristina García as seeming peddlers in the exotic, and exhibits their craft as novelists who create a ‘‘feminine ruptural space’’ that shatters a romanticized multiculturalism (). This is not to say that Christian’s and McCracken’s analyses do not slip occasionally into a strategic essentialist paradigm, but that their close looks at narrative structure—whether paratextual codes like dust-jacket blurbs and author-photo mise en scènes or the double-valenced parodic narrative act—render the nuances of the textual analysis that is necessary for comparative studies. Unlike ostensibly antiessentialist critics who finally resort to clearly delineating an essential Chicano/Latino experience, Christian and McCracken pay careful attention to how literature performs: this, I believe, is a respectful response to the complexity of ethnic, postcolonial— human—identity and experience.



Postethnic Narrative Criticism

                     Again, then, why develop a magical realist analytic matrix for studying Chicano/a, Afro-Caribbean, British postcolonial narratives? First, magical realism as an analytic concept for approaching U.S. ethnic and British postcolonial film, autobiography, and literature has the potential—if broken down into its reference/discourse/story constituent parts—to reveal both the uniqueness of these texts and their dialogic relationship to networks of world fictions. Second, precisely because it is at the center of the more general two-pronged debate about the status of excentric fiction—aesthetic or ethnographic—this analytic concept has the potential to radically redefine how we study U.S. ethnic and British postcolonial film and literature. Last, at the heart of the magical realist text is its delight in play; a study of magical realism has the potential to point out the seriousness of colonialism and capitalism that continue to exploit and oppress, and also to put us back in the sandbox of narrative play where the discovery of new toys and reconfigured spaces can bring deep pleasure and hope for humanity’s future. Have we witnessed the death of magical realism? Certainly not. After all, for every magical realist text that is formulaic and out to peddle an exotic to the mainstream, there is the one that challenges readers, self-reflexively deforms convention, and opens eyes. For every House of the Spirits there is a Midnight’s Children; for every film like A Walk in the Clouds or film adaptation such as Like Water for Chocolate, there is an El Norte or a Daughters of the Dust. What is needed here is a careful balancing between a structural and a hermeneutic approach that will not confuse narrative fiction for anthropological artifact. The purpose of this study is to redeem and refine the concept by developing, testing, and revising a theory of magical realism in U.S. multiethnic and British postcolonial literature, autobiography, and film. This includes, but is not limited to, a discussion of magical realism as a storytelling mode and as a specific worldview emerging from this kind of narrative. It includes, but is not limited to, an analysis of its storyworld—theme, characterization, plot, event. It includes, but is not limited to, an analysis of discourse—genre, mode, point of view, technique, and language. To this end, the study rechristens ‘‘magic realism’’ as magicorealism—a term that not only does away with any linguistic lean toward binary oppositionality, but identifies a new study that is careful not to confuse the transcription of the real world, where the criteria of truth and falsity apply, with the narrative mode governed by other criteria. To reiterate: a study of magico

Introduction

realism articulates both the how and the why of the subgenre by identifying the storytelling mode’s specific storytelling contours—both at the level of the narrator’s ‘‘slant’’ within the discourse and at the level of the character’s ‘‘filter’’ and the thematic content within the story. This is not to say that I neglect the sociopolitical and historical positioning of the text, but that such identifications of local knowledge remain firmly linked to a discussion of a given text’s storyworld. This is not to say either that I neglect the materiality of the text, but that this remains firmly linked to discussions of, for example, a given text’s paratextual components. By investigating the following magicorealist novels, autobiographies, and films, I explore the ‘‘how’’ and ‘‘why’’ of contemporary Chicano/a, African American, and Indo-British magicorealist narratives: Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (); Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (); Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (), Shame (), The Satanic Verses (), and The Moor’s Last Sigh (); Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust (); and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid ().



Postethnic Narrative Criticism

One

REBELLIOUS AESTH ETIC AC TS

W

hen Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad was first published in Spanish in , it flew off bookstore shelves at a rate never before imagined. Gregory Rabassa’s scrupulously careful translation hit worldwide Anglophone book markets hard three years later—leading to the overnight global success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez was hailed as el rey of realismo mágico, or what I call magicorealism.1 García Márquez not only formally situated Latin America on the world literary map (a task already begun by Borges and Rulfo, and solidified by his contemporaries Cortázar and Fuentes), he introduced a global readership to the epic tale of six generations of the Buendía family who inhabit a world where it can rain for ‘‘four years, eleven months, and two days’’ () and where after a character commits suicide his blood runs thick through doors, across living rooms, into streets, across terraces, and finally home to a mother cracking eggs in a kitchen (). García Márquez used language and storytelling technique to introduce a magicorealist world to his readers and to texture the effects of colonialism, Latin American dictatorship and civil war, U.S. imperialism, and a modernizing late-capitalism as encountered variously by Euro-Latino and Afrohispanic criollos, Turkish and Asiatic gypsies, and Amerindians that populate the Americas. One Hundred Years of Solitude uses magicorealism to emplot such characters, but not to romanticize the Latin American subject as primitive Other passively victimized by oppressive regimes. When the gringo Mr. Herberts arrives in Macondo and tries to enchant the ‘‘natives’’ and capitalize on the ‘‘novelty’’ of Western (European-originated) progress—charging for rides in his hot-air balloon—he fails. The Macondians ‘‘considered that inven-

tion backward after having seen and tried the gypsies’ flying carpets,’’ the narrator informs (). And when the Euro-Italian character Pietro Crespi first introduces the Macondians to a pianola at the cutting edge of hightech playback of spooled music, José Arcadio Buendía takes ‘‘the pianola apart in order to decipher its magical secret,’’ only then to rebuild it and hear it play in ‘‘a burst and then in a flow of mixed-up notes’’ (). Mr. Herberts’s backwater Macondian is not stupefied by the magic of European technology. He is puzzled and then bored with an object that symbolizes more the staid, repetitive nature of Western progress and the arts. Only after José Arcadio rebuilds the pianola is a vitality born of machine. The imperfect, cacophonous blasts powerfully expose and destabilize the forces of Euro-Anglo-identified capital-driven progress for what it is: a machine that gives the illusion of democratizing the availability of different cultures, but that ends up pawning a European, high-brow-gazed ideology. José Arcadio would rather remix cultural forms to invent new sounds and shapes (recall his deep alchemical impulse) than buy into a capitalist culture that covers over ideologies of difference and that stagnates in rote reproduction of sameness. One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, does not simply present a Latin American subject as a de facto resistant ontology. First, while José Arcadio is clearly identified as Latino, he is also identified as belonging to the criollo plantation class. The novel makes this clear right from the beginning. In other words, this is not an Asturias novel that focuses on a primitivized peasant. One Hundred Years of Solitude, rather, opens readers eyes to the Latin American casta system where social class (you can be phenotypically identifiable as dark but socially identified as ‘‘white’’ if you have money) determines whether one is rebuilding pianolas or barely surviving a day’s work in the gringo-owned Banana Company’s plantation. And when the narrative invests the Macondians in toto with the power to resist the hegemonic presence of Western technology and capitalism, the reader is reminded that this is fiction, and not reality. Not only does the magicorealist narrator open the novel in epic, storytelling style, but the foregrounding of the manipulation of the chronology—the novel’s beginning with a reference to a future death-by-firing-squad of Aureliano Buendía and its ending with a collapsing of the time it takes both the reader of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Aureliano Babilonia’s deciphering of Melquíades’s Sanskrit version of One Hundred Years of Solitude—reinforces the novel’s metafictional, self-reflexive reminder to readers that the inhabitants’ real/unreal fused vision is a fictional construct. Melquíades’s story is the Buendías’s story penned ‘‘one hundred years ahead of his time,’’ and 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

that emphasizes the distortion of chronological order as a ‘‘century of daily episodes’’ condensed into ‘‘one instant’’ (). Certainly, this does not take away from the Macondians’ ability to deftly defy—to a degree—capitalist and dictatorial hegemonies; they exist within a ‘‘permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation’’ () that allows them to see beyond the limits of an increasingly restricted reality. However, the novel’s magicorealism ultimately reminds us not just of the fictionality of this epistemology; the apocalyptic end deflates any readerly impulse to idealize such a resistant space. We are reminded of the categorical difference between the invention of limitless possibility within the novel’s pages and the reality outside these pages. So while José Arcadio and the other Macondians can see beyond the limits of reality and embody the magicorealist worldview, the self-reflexive, metafictional structures that inform magicorealism remind us that this worldview and sense of being is a carefully crafted and conceived narrative construct.2 Magicorealism is a storytelling mode that represents characters who variously inhabit invented spaces. This does not mean that One Hundred Years of Solitude exists for and in itself. Certain characters, events, and architextured spaces present a resistant magicorealist epistemology and ontology—but as fictions filtered through a third-person (typically) narrative point of view. As author, García Márquez creates a narrator that chooses to privilege characters who are vehemently dismissive to the instruments of capitalism and modernity. In his employment of magicorealism, García Márquez chooses to invent a narrator who shares a similar resistant attitude to monologic ideologies generally. In a narrative tour de force, as One Hundred Years of Solitude reaches its denouement, García Márquez reveals to the reader that the third-person narrator’s texturing of the Macondians has been filtered through Melquíades’s point of view. Namely, the narrative makes plain not only its inventedness, but that the fiction itself has to be reimagined with Melquíades’s worldview—the world traveler with the ‘‘Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things’’ ()—identified as the container and center of the novel’s meaning and message.3 The narrator is third-person, but the filtering consciousness the reader is to identify is that of the Asian outsider—the postcolonial subject who is invested with the power to ‘‘see the reality of things beyond any formalism’’ (). As a brief reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude already elucidates, it is the vibrant interplay of discourse and story that make magicorealism a powerfully rebellious aesthetic. It is a rebellious aesthetic that can simultaneously invent racially and culturally hybrid, real/unreal-fused visioning 

Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

narrators and characters and hold at bay the readerly impulse to exoticize Thirdworld subjectivity. Not surprisingly, writers and directors from across the globe who share common ethnosocial and political histories of marginalization and violent oppression gravitate toward this storytelling mode. I think of certain novels by American Indians Leslie Marmon Silko and Nathan Scott Momaday, by African Americans Ntozake Shange and Toni Morrison, by South Asians Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Arundhati Roy, as well as by Chicanos/as Ron Arias, Christina Mena, Denise Chávez, and Ana Castillo. I think of certain films by directors such as Mexican Alfonso Arau, Chilean/Mexican Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chicano Gregory Nava, Iranian Mohsedn Makhmalbaf, South Asian Hanif Kureishi, and Afro-Caribbean Julie Dash. At various moments in their artistic careers, authors and directors have employed magicorealism to emplace otherwise marginalized and/or silenced histories and subjects. They have chosen to use the magicorealist storytelling mode not as manifesto of the oppressed nor as document for social intervention, but as a rebellious aesthetic that allows for a multiple-layered re-visioning of a world that increasingly threatens to annihilate our Macondos—the plenitude of the human imagination. This is to stress that magicorealism is not a de facto site of resistance and emancipation; its blurring of generic boundaries is not, as Wendy Faris and Lois Parkinson Zamora would have us believe, a radical refashioning of ‘‘the boundaries between mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female’’ (). While the magicorealist author or director depicts a reality existing outside of the text, his or her raw material is not unfiltered reality, but language, imagination, and storytelling forms. Of course, language does not exist in a void. It is conditioned socially and historically—and it is embodied in the spirit and flesh of the writing/reading subject. In Castillo’s So Far from God and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, both authors clearly use the language and form of magicorealism to represent the unrepresentable: the trauma of U.S. internal colonialism on the Chicana psyche and the violent splitting up of a post-Independence India. Magicorealist authors and directors do not live in a void. The impulse to write about internal colonization comes from reality. So Castillo’s and Rushdie’s impulse to write imaginatively about real experiences has a basis in reality. However, what leads the writer to write in one way or another is the language he or she chooses to use and the literary conventions he or she decides to apply to invent storyworlds. Language is a social tool and as such is part of reality, but the writer has to turn language into a personally customized tool to represent what he 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

or she wants to represent or to say. I want to maintain a clear distinction between language—a social tool—and ontological fact, between composition and subject matter, between report of facts and literary narration. Here I also remind that magicorealism does not change the course of history; it is hundreds of thousands and even millions of people fighting for a common cause and moving in a single direction—for the common good or bad of humanity—that gives rise to revolutions and counter-revolutions and that radically alters ways of living in the present world. This is not to say that literature and film are not part of the baggage of experience that we acquire and use in life. And in this sense, magicorealism does affect a certain number of people. The post–Madame Bovary formulaic romance fad in publishing (Bovarism) and the success of the Harlequin romance conclusively show that literature, even in its most devalued form, has this mimetic draw that vicariously informs subjectivity.

                                 Asturias and Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso, as I have already mentioned, grew out of an African primitivism that fed European modernism. This primitivist ethnopoetics ultimately serves to freeze the Amerindian as a prereasoning, childlike Other. Certain contemporary magicorealist writers like Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Sandra Benítez, María Amparo Escandón, Rosario Ferré, Angeles Mastretta, Laura Restrepo, and Flor Romero participate in this use of magicorealism to primitivize the Latin American Other. (Helena Araújo, in her article ‘‘¿Imitadoras de García Márquez? Un mimetismo lucrativo,’’ pejoratively labels such writers ‘‘macondianas,’’ and she adds that their comic relief is not ‘‘enough to wash away the great degree of kitsch in the novels,’’ [].) These novelists have no use for a Carpentierean primitivist manifesto as such to sell their novels massively. However, their use of magicorealism can be a spiced-up and watered-down version of its storytelling form to serve up a consumable exotic. Emilio Bejel, in his essay ‘‘Como agua para chocolate o las estrategias ideológicas del arte culinario,’’ identifies this as a tired, used up ‘‘magical realist style’’ (, my trans.). He critiques Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate, where magicorealism serves to spice up a story of the plight of a middle-class Mexican family at the turn of the twentieth century. Not only does the story understate the casta-politics and sociohistorical context in which it takes place (the Mexican Revolution), but, as Bejel identifies, 

Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

the novel paints an idealized, utopic U.S. nation-state space. This, as Bejel concludes, ‘‘presents a great irony, since it is known that the U.S. and President Wilson tried to oppose and contain the Mexican Revolution. When the U.S. didn’t obtain this goal, it did what it could to benefit from the Revolution. The outcome: the continued oppression of the poor’’ (, my trans.). Esquivel is filled with political paradoxes: on the one hand, a feminist emancipatory rhetoric is championed and on the other, a workingclass peasant identity is repressed. For Bejel, then, the novel is representative of magicorealism’s pandering to a gringo consumer at the expense of erasing real class struggle and moments of real sociohistorical oppression in Mexico. With Esquivel, Bejel rings the death knell to magicorealism, but one could do the same with Mexican-born, Los Angeles–inhabiting writer María Amparo Escandón, whose novel Esperanza’s Box of Saints () includes in its final pages a ‘‘Reader’s Group Guide’’ to interpreting the novel. Here the extratextual information is as follows: ‘‘Esperanza’s Box of Saints is a magical, humorous, and passion-filled odyssey about a beautiful young widow’s search for her missing child’’ (). After a series of ‘‘discussion questions,’’ Escandón describes why she wrote Esperanza’s Box of Saints. Here she writes, And so Esperanza embarks on this magical amusing yet enlightening, serious yet irreverent journey of selfdiscovery. I wanted to write a painful comedy in a quirky, whimsical, bold, sensuous, agile, way that could make the reader laugh to tears in the midst of the tragedy. I also wanted to keep this story outside the margins of magic realism. Why keep magic within the parameters of extraordinary worlds when it abounds in real life? Esperanza’s story is magical reality, the kind that people who live in Mexico encounter every day. (  ) For Escandón, the novel is an anthropological artifact that simply reflects a preexisting magical reality in contemporary Mexico. Adding to the primitivism, Escandón’s story ultimately offers for easy consumption the shell of magicorealism to serve up a melodrama of Esperanza Díaz and her meaningless quest. With trivializing salesmanship, the paratextual blurbs identify this novel as a ‘‘new landmark in Latin American literature.’’ Conforming mágicorealistas—as this group of novelists could be called—are not only 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

peddling exotic images of South of the Border life, they are perfunctorily using the storytelling form and language of magicorealism to write neglectfully about the history and sociopolitical events that contextualize their storyworlds. Isabel Allende’s constant slippage into soap-operatics, for example, deadens the complex and contradictory political era in Chile in which her most famous novel, House of the Spirits, is set. This group of writers uses language as mere ornament and reproduces ad infinitum the tried-and-true formula of the family saga as inscribed (carelessly) within a spiced-up sociohistorical moment. This use of magicorealism as a gadget for telling formulaic stories is not unique to certain contemporary Latina fiction writers. A like aftereffect occurred with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and his winning of the Booker prize. Many clumsy magicorealist offshoots appeared in bookstores in Britain and the United States. This ‘‘Rushdietis,’’ as critic Pankaj Mishra playfully identifies it, has ‘‘infected’’ well-known writers to the West such as Bharati Mukherjee and Kiran Desai, and, also according to Mishra, writers Alan Sealy, Firdaus Kanga, Mukul Kesaban, Shashi Tharoor, and Ardeshir Vakil, to name a few (cited in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, xiii). In his essay ‘‘A Spirit of Their Own,’’ Pankaj Mishra goes on to declare, magic realism’s vocabulary of exotica and stylized literary devices was a special boon to young writers whose initial success in the West has partly depended on assuming the voice of a well-known older author [like Rushdie]. The intrinsic strangeness of India provides easy fodder for colorful tall tales; and these novels, along with much other writing in English, abound in freaks and in freakish incidents. They play up the most exotic imaginings of India in the West, and they work, for their predominantly Western readership, at a simple level of escapist fantasy. ( ) And for Mishra, Rushdie himself suffers from Rushdietis. In a review of Rushdie’s Ground Beneath Her Feet () for the New Statesman, Mishra says, ‘‘Rushdie has produced much of this kind of writing, which is easy to do but hard to read, and has spawned among Indian writers in English several facile imitations, novels blithely liberated from such considerations as economy, structure, suspense, irony, plausibility of events, coherence of character, psychological motivation, narrative transitions: in short, everything that makes the novel an art form’’ (‘‘The Emperor’s New 

Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

Clothes,’’ ). Mishra concludes, ‘‘As with Rushdie’s other novels, set in the sub-continent, the politics remains merely the pretext for exotic stories about crime and corruption, with shrill slogans masquerading as analysis and insight’’ (). And many postcolonial scholars follow suit, critiquing Rushdie’s use of magicorealism—or his comical-epic sensibility—as ‘‘chutney-fying’’ or erasing the unpalatable truths of India’s past. However, while many critics might judge Rushdie for his erasing and/or distortion of ‘‘fact,’’ his brand of magicorealism is hardly formulaic. His magicorealist novels speak to general audiences doubly—Indian and Western, Latin American and British, and U.S. ethnic—but not as empty containers that simply peddle a spiced-up exotic. His use of self-reflexivity, parody (even of the magicorealist mode itself ) and pastiche, and his complexly evolving, oft-contradictory characterizations sidestep the dilution process seen in the Rushdietis aftermath. His novels continue to prove foundational in the constant evolution of contemporary South Asian English-language novels. Where critic Pankaj Mishra judges negatively any South Asian writing that is not of the social-realist mold (Amit Chaudhuri and Rohinton Mistry would be contemporary examples for Mishra), critic Adib Khan celebrates Rushdie’s magicorealism and its positive impact on literature in India and Sri Lanka, which, as a result of contact with Rushdie, has begun to ‘‘breathe more easily and has even learned to chuckle at the flaws in its own indigenous cultures’’ (‘‘Shadows of Imperfection,’’ ). Yasmine Gooneratne’s magicorealist novel The Pleasures of Conquest () is a positive example of Rushdietis in its modeling after Rushdie’s use of the comical epic form that both allows readers to, as Khan writes, ‘‘laugh at those crucial moments when the principal characters are at their most vulnerable’’ () and allows the novel to convey a serious critique of the subaltern’s colonial heritage. Magicorealism exists within a world where both heterogenizing and homogenizing forces are at work. Indeed, its very appearance as a postcolonial- and ethnic-identified writerly mode takes place during a historical period of simultaneous national diversification (and even implosion, as in Yugoslavia) and homogenization. I think here first of the decolonization of Thirdworld nation-spaces (the overturning of colonial powers during the mid- to late-s in Asia, and a s that witnessed the liberation of most African and Caribbean countries) followed by the collapse of nation-states since the late s (the implosions of the former USSR, the former Yugoslavia, and the majority of African nations, and so on), and the simultaneous hegemonic spread of cultural, political, and economic



Postethnic Narrative Criticism

patterns imposed by capitalist superpowers—Japan, Germany, Great Britain, France, and, above all, the United States. Of course, on a completely different level, this heterogenizing/homogenizing capitalist dynamic also informs the contradictory cultural production/consumption of the book and film marketplace today. Rushdie, Kureishi, Castillo, and Dash certainly work within such a discordant world. This is most apparent, of late, in publishing-house and Hollywood-film-producer trends. Today, unlike any other period, ethnic- and postcolonial-identified novels and films are reaching worldwide audiences. This allows more readers and audiences to come into contact with other cultural histories. This is partly due to the slight shift in ethno-economic demographics in Firstworlds. Since the s in the United States and Great Britain, there has been an expansion of racial minorities entering the middle class, a phenomenon powerful enough to make visible to publishers and producers the existence of a market for ethnic- and postcolonial-identified novels and films. However, it is not just about shifting demographics. It is also about an increasingly sophisticated, late-capitalist mass cultural industry that is not only able to predict what will sell and what will not through carefully determined links between commodity and consumer, but can also create, as Steven Connor argues, ‘‘desires and markets with sufficient accuracy to reduce storage and turnover time and thus to increase profit’’ (–). This is to say that, while a side effect of late capitalism might be the tangible diversification of our cultural reality—the teaching, studying, and reading of Acosta, Rushdie, Kureishi, Castillo, and Dash, for example—there is at the same time a careful control and manipulation of ‘‘desires and markets’’ in the production of a consumable Otherness.4 In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie uses magicorealism to convey a heteroglossic worldview that conveys various critiques of colonial, religious, and imperialist monologisms in India’s past. However, once the novel is caught up in a capitalist bookproducing/consuming marketplace, it becomes the novel of India—and all others published in languages different from English and outside of metropolitan centers cease counting.5 Rudolfo A. Anaya used a mythopoetic, indigenous storytelling form and an Aztlan-identified quest theme to shape Bless Me, Última () as a form of imaginative reterritorializing of the American Southwest. However, in his following three novels, he ‘‘applied’’ the same formula; and in the following decades more generally, there was a cultivated mainstream hunger for Chicano/a stories of the mythopoetic variety. So while bookstores in the United States such as Barnes and Noble and Borders stock shelves with novels by Isabel Allende and Bharati Mukh-



Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

erjee who write stories to comfort readers, fictions that both give aesthetic pleasure and provide a playful and critical representation of conventional experience are scarce. The drive, then, to put more ethnic and postcolonial writers on bookstore shelves and in classrooms is clearly not an act of undoing a long history of gate-keeping the non-Euro-Anglo-male culture and aesthetics. However, within this production/consumption dialectic there is the undeniable side effect of diversifying cultural landscapes. In Consuming Fictions, Richard Todd celebrates the positive side effects of the otherwise moneygenerating, colonial-inscribed institution of the Booker Prize: The unprecedented exposure of fiction from Englishspeaking countries other than the United Kingdom or the United States led to an increasingly global picture of fiction in Britain during the course of the s. It is now the case that the line-up of half or more of a typical late s or s Booker shortlist is not centered on Britain. This reflects a new public awareness of Britain as a pluralist society, and has transformed the view that prevailed in the s, that English-language fiction from ‘‘abroad’’ meant fiction from the United States. (  ) When Rushdie took home the prize for Midnight’s Children in , the Booker did effect a radical shift not just in the British public’s awareness of Other writing, but also in that of metropolitan centers across Europe, India, and the Americas. Rushdie altered the reading tastes of his day, and he opened the door wide to talented new writers to follow. In my interview with Hanif Kureishi, he remarked, ‘‘You go to Germany, France, or Italy and ask them, ‘Who are you reading?’ They say, ‘We’re reading Rohinton Mistry. We’re reading Zadie Smith’ ’’ (‘‘The Pound and the Fury,’’ ). The Booker also helped, as Kureishi identifies of Rushdie, this ‘‘Indian stroke British stroke Pakistani stroke International-South-American-influenced writer’’ to shift the traditional gravitational pull in British letters away from ‘‘the white guys’’ (‘‘The Pound and the Fury,’’ ). In the United States, the Book of the Month Club and Oprah’s Book Club, as well as nationally recognized awarding bodies like the National Book Award, American Book Award, and Pulitzer, all affect the visibility of ethnic authors in the mainstream.



Postethnic Narrative Criticism

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx predicted that a side effect of the development of capitalism and its worldwide spread would be a transformation of modes of cultural production and consumption: In place of old and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature. (  ,             ) Though we have yet to see the global collectivization of the proletariat as Marx predicted, we have seen examples of the increased permeability of cultural boundaries. Worldwide production and circulation of magicorealist novels and films are paradigmatic of Marx’s prediction of the rise of a ‘‘world literature.’’ 6 Capitalism, then, works through its contradictions; when the book market emancipates voices from the margins, a commodification ensues and those voices are properly controlled. Yes, more British postcolonial and U.S. multiethnic fictions, autobiographies, and films are more visible. Yes, exclusionary practices continue to exist. Yes, the magicorealist text contains elements that allow it both to easily participate and to resist easy consumption. Yes, like any knowledge system that is substantialized as mechanically reproducible discourse, magicorealist fictions are commodifiable. In sum, when magicorealism is theorized or even used as ethnopoetics of Otherness, it is easily turned into an ideological weapon in the hands of those who control global capitalist production. As such, theorists can identify it as an exotic packaged Otherness that covers over real political and social processes that exploit, oppress, and suppress Thirdworld ethnic and/or minority Others. Magicorealism as rebellious aesthetics, on the other hand, poses in imaginative terms such political questions as, Whose history gets told? In whose name? For what purpose?



Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

    While magicorealism insists on its fictionality, it contains a rebellious mimetics that reaches into and out of its textured worlds. The ‘‘real’’ in magicorealism refers to the creative use of language, the formal arrangements selected for telling the story, and the required transformation of the genre based on recognizable conventions: rules of composition and formally identified intertextual networks such as the epic and the picaresque, for example. Its realism also refers to those descriptions of objects, characters, and landscapes that fill out storyworlds, both in a referential manner (as objects pertaining to the ‘‘real’’ world) and in the guise of illusion, improbability, and fantasy. The real in magicorealism, then, is the reader’s bridge into the storyworld and the reader’s bridge back out of the storyworld. This bridge purports to transform the magicorealist reader’s imagination and to push him or her to question the traditional and often limiting categorization of his or her experiences of reality. In other words, while magicorealist literature and film are not to be confused with a simply direct or ‘‘objective’’ transcription of reality—the ethnopoetic, essentialist, or reifying fallacy that conflates fiction with ontological fact—its narratorial bridges can establish connections between the authors’ and directors’ imagining and the readers’ and viewers’ direct or vicarious experiences. Rebellious mimetics is also the understanding that while magicorealist films, autobiographies, and novels are not an ethnopoetic artifact that speaks to the uniqueness of a Thirdworld ontology, they can have the power to influence and sometimes shape aspects of cultural reality. When García Márquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude, he affected literary history; when Salman Rushdie won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children, he reshaped the contours of a late-twentieth-century British canon. (Derek Walcott, Keri Hulme, Ben Okri, Kazuo Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy, and Michael Ondaatje, to name a few, followed Rushdie in the Booker lineup.) And reforming canons alters what is read in schools and studied in college. It can also bring empathy with people from different age groups, social classes, nationalities, races, genders, and sexual or religious persuasions. Conversely, novels and films can shape to a certain extent the way people misunderstand one another. From D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to more contemporary films like Mira Nair’s The Perez Family, and from novels such as Kipling’s Kim and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Tortilla Cur

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

tain, we see how literature and film have the power to uncritically reproduce racial and gendered stereotypes that freeze Othered subjects within a primitivist frame. Edward Said appropriately warns of how a variety of discourses and texts circulating during British colonialism perversely fixed the ‘‘Oriental’’ subjects in imaginative and metaphysical spaces. He writes, Philosophically, then, the kind of language, thought, and vision that I have been calling Orientalism very generally is a form of radical realism; anyone employing Orientalism, which is the habit of dealing with questions, objects, qualities and regions deemed Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which is then considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality. (          , ) Of course, Said’s identification of a ‘‘radical realism’’ that Orientalizes the colonized subject is not limited to those texts identified with greater densities of realism. It is a rule that can be applied to any narrative, including the magicorealist. This is to say that texts—especially, I would add, when they aggregate and tend to suppress narrative and character polyphony—do affect a more or less large number of people. Christopher Columbus might have been naively searching for a new language and form to narrate his experiences within New World landscapes and with New World peoples (he employed the Orientalist language and form he had read in Marco Polo’s fabulous accounts of the East in his Libro de las maravillas del mundo), but the net effect was to primitivize the Amerindian subject: Columbus’s fantastical Orientalism identified the Amerindian as a savage ethnosexual-objectspecimen—bestias grandísimas—who felt pain like ‘‘animals’’ and so could be justifiably obliterated by the Euro-Spanish ‘‘humans.’’ The Amerindian women were re-figured as mermaids, that, he wrote, ‘‘were not as beautiful as they are painted, because to some extent they have the face of a man’’ ( January , ).7 Like Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci used fabulation to describe the New World. In Letter V, he wrote how ‘‘the people live to be  years old’’ (); again, in Letter VI, he describes seeing the indigenous Americans ‘‘roasting a certain animal which seemed to be a dragon, except that it had no wings, and was so hideous in aspect that we marveled greatly at its fierceness’’ (). And in his Nobel address, García Márquez refers to 

Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

yet another chronicler of the New World, Antonio Pigafetta, who wrote a ‘‘strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy’’ (‘‘The Solitude of Latin America,’’ ). According to García Márquez, Pigafetta’s recording of the New World fauna detailed his sightings of ‘‘hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens had laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel’s body, the legs of a deer, and the whinny of a horse’’ (). Not so unlike the nineteenth-century British Orientalism Said identifies, the fabulous tales of Columbus, Vespucci, Antonio Pigafetta, and other chroniclers of the New World repeat identifications of the Other as primitive and beastly, solidifying a discourse that was used to justify the genocides perpetrated by the Euro-colonial conquest and expansion.

    Many poststructuralists argue that no aesthetic act or epistemological labor can offer a counter-hegemonic resistance to an all-powerful capitalism; because even a so-identified localized knowledge exists within the ‘‘grand recits’’ (cf. Lyotard) of capitalist production/ consumption, there are no sites of resistance. Thus, Frederic Jameson in his essay ‘‘Cognitive Mapping’’ asserts that all subjects exist within the bourgeois-controlled social structure with no chance of stepping outside the ‘‘multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities’’ (). Postcolonial critics disagree with such assumptions, proposing that the poststructuralists fail to identify localized knowledges of resistance (see works by Dorris Sommer, Román de la Campa, Alberto Moreiras, for example). Vijay Mishra, in his essay ‘‘Postmodern Racism,’’ complicates Lyotard’s reading of reality as a discursive construct by taking heed of cultural convention, identifying how one group’s reading of a ‘‘certain reality is different from another’s even though they live within the same nation-state’’ (). Mishra distinguishes, for example, between the British Muslims and British liberal intellectuals and their different readings of The Satanic Verses: the former politicizes and the latter aestheticizes the reading. He writes, ‘‘When it came to the ‘reality’ of the Rushdie text, these groups were clearly using different procedures or protocols of interpretation’’ (). In such a case, Mishra proposed that we not fall back into the language of postructuralism —the nonresolvable heterogeneity of Lyotard’s ‘‘differend’’—that does not 

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so much allow the critic to better understand the different readings of the text, but that contains racial difference ‘‘without addressing the question of racism itself ’’ (). Perhaps, however, the very assumptions that lie beneath all of these suppositions are specious. As I have written elsewhere, the actual and effective sites of resistance and revolution are to be found in the very real and concrete actions of massive bodies of people, not in academic theories, novels, and films. Certain poststructuralist/postcolonialist proclamations such as ‘‘resistant local knowledge,’’ ‘‘atopic savagism,’’ ‘‘the text’s political unconscious,’’ and so on rely on some esoteric belief that academic theory or fictional narrative can be a substitute for actual political activism.8 Within such a paradigm that supposes the leveling of literature with social reality, magicorealism can only stand in for an emptied out sign of a text that critiques and/or buys into neo-colonial discourse. Perhaps, then, to acknowledge magicorealism as aesthetic act is to identify the way in which it could be read as a locus of resistance to dominant paradigms. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said reminds us, after all, that a ‘‘novel is neither a frigate nor a bank draft. A novel exists first as a novelist’s effort and second as an object read by an audience’’ (). He concludes, ‘‘For all their social presence, novels are not reducible to a sociological current and cannot be done justice to aesthetically, culturally, and politically as subsidiary forms of class, ideology, or interest’’ (). Contestation of hegemonic structures takes place in literary representations, but always as observed within the author’s use of specific narrative devices and styles as well as within the themes a given fictional world conveys. Authors and directors who employ the magicorealist mode to construct texts and characters that question and resist do not or should not pretend that the ‘‘reality’’ represented in their texts and films has the same ontological status and consequences as a political pamphlet or a legislative text, for instance. Seen from this perspective, Castillo’s So Far from God is a novel where narrative and characters are meant to imaginatively destabilize and critique a capitalist machine that turns the reality of oppression into a consumable, Disney-fied unreality. Magicorealist authors like Acosta, Castillo, Rushdie, Dash, and Kureishi do not invent characters or narrators who exist in a mystical never-never land; they inhabit mainstream and metropolitan centers. In form and content, magicorealism has the potential to tell stories that question the ‘‘pure’’ divisions set up between metropolis and country, mestizo and pure blood, Western and indigenous, revealing such divisions to be artificial constructs used to control and/or erase the subaltern subject. And that potential is situ

Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

ated within the frame of fictional narrative and the subject matter selected by the author or director, not anywhere else. In Fictional Worlds, Thomas Pavel asserts, By virtue of the convention of fictionality, literary utterances are perceived as representations of linguistic structures, representations that generate their own semantic context. This convention regulates the behavior of the readers by requiring from them a maximal participation oriented toward the optimal exploitation of textual resources. The convention of fictionality warns the readers that usual referential mechanisms are for the most part suspended and that, for the understanding of the literary text, outside data mean less than in everyday situations; so every bit of textual information must be carefully examined and stored. () I entirely concur with this point of view. I would only add that each fictional mode—magicorealism, social realism, fantastic, gothic, romance, epic, to name a few—differs in its degree and manner of referentiality and therefore differs in the degree to which it demands that the reader should possess certain data in his or her reconstructing of its storyworld. For example, the hyper-real and at the same time highly subjectivized narratives of Juan Rulfo, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Elena Garro, Franz Kafka, and Aristeo Brito combine a strong referentiality and an equally strong unrealization. However, if the super-detailing of storyworlds passes through an ultra-objective narrative lens—Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, María Ruiz de Burton, and Américo Paredes, for example—then the element of unrealization is weak or absent. In the case of magicorealism where there is a combination of both techniques, the reader is expected to pay as much attention to the fictional representations as to the narrative procedures and strategies. To put it otherwise, in the economy of narratives, authors and directors rely on the audience’s ability to fill in the blanks. The difference lies in how much work a narrative requires to fill in the gap between textworld and reference to real-world. A given text’s ‘‘referential density’’ (sodefined by Thomas Pavel) determines how much the text asks of its reader (). Self-reflexive narratives often play with the referential density that narrative realism preconditions readers for. Some self-reflexive texts do

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this more than others. Magicorealism, for example, does this as much as it promotes verisimilitude. Of course, authors and directors can include signposts and specific entities to guide and teach the audience how to navigate new cartographies. When Spain expelled the Moors and exiled the gypsies and the Jews during its ‘‘discovery’’ of the New World and its transition from feudalism to a more modern society, the pícaro appeared in narrative fictions, in New World chronicles, and in diaries (see Ulrich Wicks’s Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions). The pícaro functioned as a guide into a new world.9 Present-day avatars of the pícaro continue to function as reader-guides into new worlds. For instance, García Márquez’s pícaro spirit appears as Melquíades—the racial outsider and wandering figure who can see beyond the reality of things and who, the reader discovers, is the teller of the story, One Hundred Years of Solitude. More generally, it is the magicorealist text as a whole that works to teach the reader how to negotiate its referential density; it teaches the reader how to negotiate the new way the characters, narrators, and events present new fictions and new frames of reference. Magicorealism uses the referential to bring readers in, then reveals how the text can delightfully play in the manipulation of referential fact. Its innovation highlights the fact of its radical altering of the ‘‘out there’’ in its re-creative process.

 As with authors, directors, and artists generally, ethnic- and postcolonial-identified practitioners of magicorealism recreate language and form to represent the unrepresentable by drawing from a globe-spanning reservoir of styles, images, and techniques. This might include, for instance, the fictionality of a more locally identified oral narration (thus, García Márquez finally figured out how to tell One Hundred Years of Solitude after he remembered the naive stance his grandmother used when she told him stories 10) and, say, the more transnationally identified chirographic narrative mode (Rushdie, Acosta, Kureishi, and Castillo especially use the picaresque as their narrative framing device). More often than not, however, when practitioners of magicorealism use transnationally identified genres, modes, and techniques, they choose ones that are, so to speak, at the margins of the institutionally sanctioned critical eye. The magicorealism of Rushdie, Acosta, Kureishi, Castillo, and Dash, for

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example, comes out of ‘‘degraded’’ genres such as the episodic, antirealist picaresque. These authors and directors invent character/protagonists that are antithetical to those of the classic nineteenth-century European novel that often functioned as a stand-in for a ‘‘universal’’ human essence. Their trickster/pícaro figure theatricalizes identity to disrupt and de-center the traditionally centered (European and white) subject of ‘‘serious’’ realism.11 This figure is the product of imaginations working within the context of an ever-expanding, chaotic world: The first pícaro appeared in Europe during its early expansion and conquest of New Worlds; the contemporary pícaro appeared in the deeply disturbing circumstances of global changes and crises in the economic, political, social, and cultural spheres. Not surprisingly, Rushdie invented a series of narrator/protagonists who set out on episodic adventures not to achieve a disembodied enlightenment, but to come into an awareness of an embodied self within a collective Indian culture and history. Furthermore, Rushdie, like most other magicorealist authors, invents stories that are non-linear, episodic, and often parodic. The use of the mimesis-as-play (as opposed to a mimesis-as-seriousness, say) mode to frame their stories firmly situates such artists not just in the improvisational playful realm that we might associate with the oral narratives, but also within a transnationally identified generic space filled with what Northrop Frye has characterized as the ‘‘other forms of fiction’’ ().12 In The Anatomy of Criticism, Frye identifies these ‘‘other forms’’ as employing a ‘‘digressive narrative style, excessive use of catalogues, and the stylizing of character along ‘humor’ lines to deal less with people as such than with mental attitudes’’ (). In other words, magicorealism shares its generic and technical boundaries with the West’s other tradition, that tradition of mimesis-as-play seen in writings by Miguel de Cervantes, the anonymous author of the Lazarillo de Tormes, François Rabelais, Joseph Fielding, William Thackeray, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, William Burroughs, William Gass, Ishmael Reed, and many others.13 This international affiliation with the comic is often formally announced in contemporary magicorealist novels, autobiographies, and films. For example, in One Hundred Years of Solitude just before the apocalyptic denouement, when the character Gabriel packs for Paris he includes in his bags, ‘‘two changes of clothing, a pair of shoes, and the complete works of Rabelais’’ (). In So Far from God, Ana Castillo announces her text’s affiliation with ‘‘these other forms’’ by investing her narrator with a hypotactic style of narrating: chapter titles such as ‘‘The Final Farewell of Don Domingo, sin a Big mitote; and an Encounter with un Doctor Invisible, 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

or better Known in These parts as a Psychic Surgeon, Who, in Any Case, Has No Cure for Death’’ () create intertextual bridges with such writers as Cervantes, Fielding, and Swift. And as Linda Hutcheon writes of Midnight’s Children: ‘‘The search for unity (narrative, historical, subjective) is constantly frustrated. Saleem Sinai would like to reduce history to autobiography, to reduce India to his own consciousness, but the fact that he never can or will is underlined by the constant presence of Tristram Shandy as a parodic intertext: contingency shall rule’’ (). Contemporary ethnic- and postcolonial-authored magicorealist texts also play with traditional boundaries that generically segregate narratives (high tragedy versus low comedy, the fact of autobiography versus the fiction of the novel, classical realism versus the self-reflexive antirealism). There is the conscious interplay between the mimesis-as-play formal affiliation and the characters and themes that texture the traditionally suppressed histories and the oppressed subjects. Thus, Rushdie identifies his first-person narrator/protagonist Moraes Zogoiby as a figure ‘‘ill-at-ease with domesticity as Quixote’’ (), affiliating the story with the ‘‘other forms of fiction’’; however, The Moor’s Last Sigh ultimately means differently than a Don Quixote, a Tristram Shandy, or a Tropic of Cancer. And Castillo’s brand of mimesis-as-play also differs from the parodic style employed by her Western-identified predecessors. Castillo’s construction of a narrating entity that uses the devices of narrative hyperbole and periphrasis functions as a metaparody of the Western satires (Cervantes, Fielding, and Swift); her mimesis-as-play together with her Chicana-inflected language (caló ) functions as a culturally specific ‘‘space clearing gesture’’ (cf. Appiah) for Chicana self-representation. Such racialized and feminist brands of mimesis-as-play allow magicorealist authors such as Castillo to speak within and through the conventions of this genre. Castillo’s magicorealism uses techniques of parody, but self-reflexively, not only to denaturalize those parodic fictions that normalize the subaltern subject as a marvelously real Other—as we might encounter in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, for example—but to critique its own use of magicorealism as a narrative frame that allows a mainstream reader an ‘‘easy’’ consumption of the subaltern-as-exotic. In the continual interplay of reference, discourse, and story, in contemporary ethnic and postcolonial magicorealism, there is the promotion of an ethnic and postcolonial heteroglossia that celebrates biological, cultural, and identitarian impurities and critiques, as Bakhtin identifies generally, ‘‘the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word’’ (Rabelais and His World, ). In its reference/discourse/story tripartite modality, magicorealism cri

Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

tiques those discourses that represent rigid racial, social, and sexual identifications and derides the authoritative discourses of religion and nationalism that ultimately shut down experiential possibility. Central to this heteroglossia as jubilatory mimetics is the magicorealist text’s use of parody—a powerful technique used to hybridize genre and language and to convey the heteroglossic worldview that Bakhtin characterizes as ‘‘conflictual’’ and that carries a ‘‘certain elemental, organic energy and openhandedness’’ (Dialogic Imagination, –). Not surprisingly, although José David Saldívar is ultimately critical of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, he does identify it as playful, linking its ‘‘exaggerated quality . . . to the carnival themes of popular culture’’ (Dialectics of Our America, ). He also analyzes the generic mixture of realism with the magical and of folktale with legalese in García Márquez’s story ‘‘Big Mama’s Funeral,’’ viewing it as a promotion of a heteroglossic worldview that is critical of the monologic narratives of legal and economic propagandistic discourse that promoted the postconquest subjugation of the Amerindian.

- Magicorealism tells its stories through realism; realism in the sense that I mentioned earlier in the discussion of its use of verisimilar conventions of language, paratextual codes, form, characterization, event, and plot. It invents new worlds, but in ways that the reader can apprehend as being filled with impurities. Once the reader enters this world, the magicorealist text includes signposts and, as I have identified, a trickster/pícaro character and/or narrative spirit to guide the reader as she or he encounters different systems of belief, knowledge, and being. To this end, magicorealist texts usually build into their narrative a preface-like entry at its beginning. These differently identified and informal prefaces ‘‘spell out’’ at the outset the rules that will govern the reading of the narrative, the way the reader/viewer should enter the textual world. These prologues appear in different guises: some as paratextual markers and others tucked into the beginning of the story. Thus, in Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, even before the reader enters the story proper, the dust-jacket cover of the current Vintage edition juxtaposes the ‘‘Chicano Autobiography’’ with unreal painterly images: angels and anthropomorphic animal figures smoking cigars and plowing the land. The paratextual codes lay out a magicorealist reading approach to what the book’s title identifies as a ‘‘Chicano autobiography.’’ 14 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

Different magicorealist texts use different approaches and materials to build their reader-text bridges. For example, there are those authors and directors who use the form of the epic to introduce its text as magicorealism. I will analyze this in more detail in my discussion of Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust, but for now let me outline this briefly with Charles Johnson’s Faith and the Good Thing (). Johnson invents a narrator who begins the novel in grand epic tone: It is time to tell you of Faith and the Good Thing. People tell her tale in many ways—conjure men and old gimped grandmothers whisper it to make you smile—but always Faith Cross is a beauty, a brown-sugared soul sister seeking the Good Thing in the dark days when the Good Thing was lost or, if the bog-dwelling Swamp Woman did not lie, was hidden by the gods to torment mankind for sins long forgotten. Listen. The devil was beaten [sic] his wife on the day Faith’s mother, Lavidia, died her second death. () The narrator’s tone tells the reader that Faith is legendary. More importantly, it anchors the story in a third-person narration that gives the impression of an objective frame of reference, so that the reader, when encountering the ‘‘unreal’’ event—the mother Lavidia dying twice, for example—is told not to hesitate in the face of the ‘‘unreal’’ and ‘‘real.’’ With this procedure, when the story’s events become more and more ‘‘unreal’’ (for example, when a burned-to-crisp Faith rises ‘‘from her bed sheets—minus a lot of skin’’ [], leaves Chicago, and arrives at the Swamp Woman’s abode), the reader has been prepared and is willing to suspend disbelief. Other narratives take longer to set up their magicorealist readerly codes. Some, like García Márquez, empresence either a trickster/pícaro or a curandera figure who represents the matter-of-factness of the magical events as they unfold. Much like the introduction of Melquíades as the rational, worldly narrator/character who is the ultimate container of the magicorealist worldview in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in his story ‘‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’’ (), García Márquez introduces readers to a curandera. The curandera is that bridge figure who objectively and rationally discusses the magical events in the storyworld. For example, after the 

Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

character Pelayo discovers an old man, ‘‘lying face down in the mud . . . impeded by his enormous wings,’’ the curandera who knows ‘‘everything about life and death’’ () takes one look at him and then explains to the townspeople (and therefore the reader): ‘‘He’s an angel. . . . He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down’’ (). The narrator identifies the curandera as the source of ‘‘rational’’ explanation of an otherwise ‘‘unbelievable’’ event. Paratextual codes, trickster/pícaro figures, and narrating entities, as well as curanderas, all help identify for the reader the how-to-readmagicorealism contract. Once the reader has signed the contract and is within the storyworld, then a ‘‘light rain of tiny yellow flowers’’ () can fall from the sky as in One Hundred Years of Solitude and not cause the reader to hesitate between ‘‘unreal’’ and ‘‘real’’ registers of knowing. If such hesitation were to occur, then the contract would be less magicorealist and more fantastic. The fantastic is characterized by its narrators’ and/or characters’ calling attention to the strangeness of the magical events; it unfolds through the identification of an oppositional difference between the ‘‘unreal’’ and the ‘‘real.’’ Kafka’s ‘‘Metamorphosis’’ () is a good example. A third-person narrator opens with Gregor Samsa ‘‘transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect’’ () and describes Samsa’s discovery rationally: ‘‘He was lying on his hard, as if it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position’’ (). However, the fact that Samsa wakes from his bed places the story too near the fantastical world of the dreaming that comes with sleep. Is Samsa awake, or still asleep dreaming himself to be a bug? So, although the narrator explains matter of factly the transformation, the proximity to the oneiric causes the reader to hesitate, and that hesitation solidifies the unreal/real opposition.15 Simply put, the narrative strategy for the fantastic is to set up readerly codes that differentiate between the ‘‘unreal’’ and ‘‘real’’ events appearing in the narration as contrasted in terms of false and true, while the strategy for magicorealism is to establish readerly codes that express an everyday reality that is seamlessly both real and unreal. (For more on this distinction, see Amaryll Beatrice Chanady’s Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy.) This distinction helps us to identify the structural differences of storytelling in different texts, and also in their worldviews. The fantastic operates through conventional oppositions between the real and unreal. For authors and directors who seek new representational means for expressing

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an ethnic and/or postcolonial character’s identity and experience, narrative modes like the fantastic might simply reproduce a binary system that identifies the racialized Other as unreal and the Western Self as real. Hence, too, the necessary alignment between narrative form (generic hybridization, for example) and narrating/protagonist consciousness in magicorealism. Ethnic- and postcolonial-identified magicorealism locates itself within a trickster/pícaro, subaltern spirit: García Márquez’s Melquíades, Rushdie’s Moraes Zogoiby, Kureishi’s Danny/Victoria, as well as Dash, Acosta, and Castillo’s subaltern-identifying narrators. These characters and narrators act as the filters of the text’s worldview: they are not a mystically constructed Other who can magically transform everyday reality of poverty and oppression into a classless society. When Melquíades is invested with the power to magically see ‘‘what there was on the other side of things’’ (), this happens within the world of fiction—and not in our everyday lived reality. Magicorealism, then, collapses distinctions between the real and unreal in the storyworld to reverse the gaze that traditionally objectifies the Other, turning a Melquíades, a curandera, a Zogoiby into the subject with the power to see, name, and tell.16 In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai is a voice that speaks for those traditionally silenced. After decades of suffering British imperial rule, his grandmother lets words pour forth for so long that, ‘‘by the time she had finished the clouds had run out of water and the house was full of puddles’’ (). The magicorealism Acosta locates in his narrator/protagonist finally leads to the announcement, ‘‘I am neither a Mexican nor an American. I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant. I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice’’ (). Julie Dash’s subaltern-identified camera-narrating subject uses the magicorealist mode to tell powerfully the story of the brutal legacy of slavery among those inhabiting the Georgian coast’s Ibo Islands, as well as to celebrate the contemporary diasporic African characters’ hybridized Gullah culture. Hanif Kureishi’s Danny/Victoria becomes the container for Sammy and Rosie Get Laid ’s destabilizing of what it means to be British. Certainly, the techniques used by these authors and directors differ. However, when all is said and done, they each use magicorealism to speak to their character’s estranged sense of self as they inhabit newly bordered geopolitical landscapes such as U.S. barrios, British inner-cities, Bombay ghettoes, or post-plantation islands. Moreover, these magicorealist texts offer a complex mapping of subaltern-identified story and discourse that engages with world narrative traditions such as those of Latin America, subcontinental India, and the United States and Europe.

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Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

                    In closing, I reiterate that it is important to differentiate between, as Thomas Pavel states, ‘‘metaphysical questions about fictional beings and thought’’ () and the real world. We visit Rushdie’s worlds momentarily, then return to our everyday life. By confusing aesthetics with ontological fact, we risk committing acts of romantic racialism that fail to address the real issues of real oppression and exploitation in the world. We risk locating a de facto resistance in the Thirdworld text-as-subject to the evils of capitalism. Frederic Jameson, in his essay ‘‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,’’ locates the resistance to a latecapitalist’s ‘‘reigning reality’’ in just such an Othered text. In ‘‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ’’ Aijaz Ahmad formulates a justifiable critique against Jameson and others for their committing acts of exoticism and for ignoring the harsh realities faced by those inhabiting the Thirdworld. And Homi Bhabha broadens his critical reproach to include the likes of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, writing that their theories of the Other’s resistance to grand recits pushes the postcolonial subject into ‘‘the exegetical horizon of difference [that fails to see such subjects as an] active agent of articulation’’ (The Location of Culture, ). However, while these postcolonial critics are right to criticize the poststructuralist primitivist and reifying theoretical discourse, they do so while continuing to confuse narrative fictions with ontological fact. Rather, the power of an ethnic- and postcolonialidentified magicorealism lies in its rebellious mimetics, wherein the fictional invention of what I identify as a ‘‘fourthspace’’ being and knowing within the boundaries of the narration can have the power to playfully reinvent the reader’s perception of his or her world. Perhaps a more adequate response to a Jameson or a Bhabha is that of a postcolonial author such as Rushdie. He writes, ‘‘It is interesting that so few of these criticisms are literary in the pure sense of the word. For the most part they do not deal with language, voice, psychological or social insight, imagination or talent. Rather, they are about class, power, and belief ’’ (The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, xiii–xiv). By identifying the narratological types and narrative tropes that make a text work as magicorealist, I have set out to map how this mode works within dominant representational paradigms and to identify the contours of an ‘‘island-bridge’’ (cf. José Saldívar) analysis that sets the multiethnic literatures/films of the Americas and postcolonial Britain next to one another. Moreover, contemporary U.S. multiethnic and British postcolo

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

nial novels and films that employ the magicorealist mode draw on (rather than imitate) a rich imaginary landscape that includes Western canonic margins—those mimesis-as-play texts of Rabelais and Cervantes, for instance—and set fictional lands that deconstruct the reifying effects of those forms of discourse that help objectify the subaltern as inexorably and ontologically Other. Magicorealism’s power is not in its ability to replace the real of reality, but in its creative play with its narrative components; its play with its story and discourse that calls attention to the difference between verba and res (word and thing). Finally, magicorealism’s rebellious mimetic force lies in its ability to deftly call attention to its own artifice and its ability to move its readers and transform perceptions of the world.

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Rebellious Aesthetic Acts

Two

DA S H ’ S A N D KUREISHI’S REBELLIOUS MAGICOREELS

C

ontemporary ethnic- and postcolonialidentified magicorealist narratives represent a late-capitalist society that is characterized as being more and more unreal. French critics Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard have respectively identified this as a ‘‘society of the spectacle’’ or the ‘‘hyperreal’’ in which the ‘‘real’’ in the world out there is a grand theatrical performance that covers over the estranging effect of exploitation and oppression by capitalism on peoples around the world. If this is the case, then how might an ethnic- and postcolonial-identified magicorealism use its aesthetic components to guide its readers into an identification of this fact? Again, this is where it is important to distinguish the narrative fiction from the ‘‘real’’ hors texte. In ‘‘Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,’’ Colin MacCabe reminds us that film ‘‘does not reveal the real in a moment of transparency, but rather that film is constituted by a set of discourses which (in the positions allowed to subject and object) produce a certain reality’’ (). This chapter will focus on how film directors ‘‘produce a certain reality’’ in their magicoreels that expose and critique a globalizing late capitalism that turns real violence and oppression of the underclass worldwide into a spectacle. (I think here, for example, of the very real bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan and of the dramatic and sentimentalized productions of war performed by the United States and European nations to cover over their mass destruction of civilian populations. Closer to home there are those ‘‘real life’’ programs such as Cops that feed ‘‘live’’ footage of car chases and the beating and cuffing of ethnosocially identified criminals that cover over the social and political structures that maintain racial and class inequities.) The visual-based narrative form of cinema is inherently weighed down

with a dense referentiality. The distance between the images projected and the audience’s reading and interpretation is much less than that of chirographic narrative. Of course, different film traditions use, abuse, and playfully de-form this inherently dense referentiality present in film. As I mentioned earlier, D. W. Griffith used the silver screen to uncritically reproduce the real racial stereotypes circulating in his day. Like D. W. Griffith, many mainstream directors today continue to use the genre to naturalize, for example, homophobic and racist ideologies. As Daniel Dayan informs, ‘‘if cinema consists in a series of shots which have been produced, selected, and ordered in a certain way, then these operations will serve, project, and realize a certain ideological position’’ (). Conversely, then, if a film is a series of selected shots that can serve ideological positions, then Dash and Kureishi/Frears can choose film-telling techniques and thematics to form a counter-hegemonic series of images. In Dash’s Daughters of the Dust () and Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (), we see how magicoreels employ specific storytelling techniques—Dash’s invention of an unborn-child–identified camera-narrator and Kureishi/Frears’s parodic blend of the West’s ‘‘other forms’’ with Indian film genres—to denaturalize those political forces that exist hors texte and that perform spectacular tricks to distract people from the harsh reality of today’s capital-imperialist oppression. Moreover, Dash and Kureishi/Frears invent magicoreels that destabilize audiences’ perception of reality and thereby denaturalize those networks of films that gel together and form a system of representation that primitivize the racial, gendered, and ethnic subject. Dash and Kureishi/Frears vitally engage with the ‘‘other forms’’ of cinema. Their magicoreels employ the mimesis-as-play tradition in film that uses self-reflexivity and parody to convey meaning. Not so unlike my earlier discussion of narrative fictions by Cervantes, Fielding, Machado de Assis, and so on, there is also an other tradition in cinema that Dash and Kureishi/Frears extend. In the late nineteenth century, at the same time that the French brothers Lumière set out to capture the ripples of reality by simply setting up their camera lens in front of people carrying on with their occupations in life, there was Georges Méliès, who playfully employed the camera lens to call attention to the camera’s distortion of reality. In films such as The Witch () or A Trip to the Moon (), his cameranarrator represented worlds filled with super-sized frogs, dragons, hybrid she-monsters, and fantastically imagined moonscapes. He did so, however, being especially attentive to film’s potential to playfully spectacularize its representation of the real. Méliès was especially aware of the projection of 

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

the film onto a screen, not so unlike a theater proscenium and therefore to be used as the space where the spectacular events could be staged. This is not to say that the more self-reflexive and playful Méliès did not rely on the outside world to convey meaning. While his frogs are gargantuan, they are still recognizable as frogs, and we recognize his bodies as human and the gray, pock-marked terrain of the film as the moon. The difference between Méliès and the brothers Lumière is the degree to which they call attention to their camera’s reconstruction of reality. Unlike the Lumières, however, Méliès used exaggeration and parody to give his camera-narrator a selfreflexive tilt. Of course, the Lumières glossed over artifice, and their ‘‘realistic’’ representation of reality became the industry’s standard; audiences grew accustomed to experiencing effortless vicarious thrills and comfortable ‘‘escapes,’’ shunning those filmic modes that reminded them of the artificial constructedness of their journeys. Dash’s and Kureishi/Frears’s magicoreels use film’s inherently dense referential baggage, but self-reflexively. Their rebellious mimetics give shape and texture to African American and British postcolonial characters that usually come to exist as primitive Others in audiences’ imaginations fed by networks of filmic representation—serious realism and/or the fantastically playful.1 Namely, their magicoreels function on two levels: first, to foreground their own artificiality in their engagement with the overshadowed mimesis-as-play genre; in this spirit, they dialogically mimic, mock, and confront the diametric fixing of hierarchy between the playful and the serious within this constructed generic order. Second, to tell stories that richly texture the experiences (histories and cultures) of the ‘‘realities’’ of their characters—realities that speak to but are not limited to the ‘‘real’’ outside the film world. Their magicoreels at once empresence their subaltern characters and destabilize the categories of representation that have been set up in false opposition: Méliès’s fantastic works just as much within the conventions of realism as the Lumières’s realism works within the conventions of the fantastic.

   ’                   Julie Dash sets her film Daughters of the Dust in ; she sets her story within a real, verifiable moment when the diasporic African families living on the Ibo Islands off the Georgia coast decided to migrate to the United States. Dash’s camera-narrator gives texture to a recognizable landscape that has been home to generations of Africans since 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

the first slavers arrived from Africa in the New World. The premise of the film is simple. The story unfolds over the period of one day in  as some members of the Peazant family ready themselves to move to the mainland. Most of the action gravitates around the family picnic on the day of the migration. Returning from the mainland for the family reunion are Yellow Mary (Barbara O) and cousin Viola (Cheryl Lynn Bruce); Yellow Mary is a prostitute and Viola is a missionary, we discover as the story unwinds. The matriarch Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day) resists the family’s move to the mainland, invoking the spirits of the ancestors to communicate with the younger people in hopes of keeping the family together. As the story unfolds, the camera-narrator’s magicoreel effects allow historical and personal memory to seamlessly interweave with the ‘‘real’’ and the ‘‘magical’’ in this narrative present. That is to say, Dash’s magicorealist camera-narrator presents the multiple cultural and historical layers that inform her diasporic African characters’ lives in reference to the real hors texte. The film opens with a series of shots that linger for just a little too long. This series of shots—the film’s prefatory material—asks the audience to take the time to actively interpret and imagine the setting. Pervaded by incandescent light, the film begins: Shot : slow motion and strobed 2 close-up of two open hands with particles of dust 3 identifiably falling from them. Dissolve into shot : move into real time, no slow motion, with old woman center frame (later identified as Nana Peazant), submerged up to her hips in water. Dissolve into shot : inside wind-filled room with quarter of window at center frame, then pan left to an empty bed. Dissolve into shot : slow motion long shot of black woman in white, bourgeois-like dress confidently standing in hull of small boat on river that moves out of frame left. Shot : cut to close-up and sharp focus of this woman (later identified as Yellow Mary), but her face is not visible, only her neck, part of white dress, and her hand touching a St. Christopher pendant that hangs from her neck. (       ) Here the audience begins to move into a more realistic descriptive mode when the lighting shifts from the soft hue of the first frames to the harsh, contrastive lighting of the last two frames. Along with hybridizing the real 

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

and the unreal, this sequence sets up the film’s general theme: women’s authorship of self through a process of death (‘‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’’) and rebirth and purification, as represented by water. The narrative trajectory will be of a circular and not a linear type. For a magicorealist film to work effectively, the camera-narrator must present the storyworld ‘‘realistically.’’ In other words, as in chirographic magicorealism, a reality based on realistic description must be set. I turn here to Seymour Menton and his useful criteria for identifying magicorealist paintings: . Ultra sharp focus is probably the single most dominant feature of magic realist painting. In and of itself, it produces a strange effect on the viewer. . The importance of objectivity as a basic trait of magic realism in both painting and literature derived from the term Neue Sachlichkeit (‘‘new objectivity’’). . . . For the practitioners of magic realism, objectivity had two meanings: the opposite of subjectivity, and an interest, bordering on the obsessive, in objects or things. . . . As for the other meaning of objectivity, a variety of painters and literati attached at least equal importance to animate and inanimate objects. . [The represented objects] are purposely cold: that is to say, they are calculated to appeal much more to the intellect than to the emotions. . The intellectual response is provoked, at least in part, by the viewer’s attention being purposely divided . . . ; this division is accomplished by the magic realist simultaneous close and far view. (                    ,  -- ) Even though I am analyzing a magicorealist film, it can be read as a magicorealist painting in motion. Obviously, in Daughters of the Dust the abovementioned camera-narrator’s visual shots fit Menton’s criteria  and . The prefatory shots ask the viewer to take in all of the objects, both animate and inanimate, and to think carefully (rather than feel) as well about each one. The audience must abandon the cognitive codes of a realistic film: smooth edits, consistent movements through space, consistent camera angles, and general concealment of the camera-narrator’s presence to create the illusion of objectivity. And, in Dash’s film, the camera-narrator’s auditory 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

channel meets criteria  and : the introduction of a voice-over, together with African music, give us a clarity and sharpness of focus, diminishing the distance between the audience and the visual narrative channel. Notably, however, whereas shots  through  are heavily symbolic and fantastical, shot  places the audience within realistic codes of filmic telling. If the audience were simply left in the previous, more-ethereal mode of presentation, this very real place would be akin to something like the setting of Méliès’s fantastical The Trip to the Moon, and the gravity of recounted events—a history of slavery and the family’s diaspora—might be lost. The move to more realistic visuals in shot  anchors the film’s story in realistic codes. As with One Hundred Years of Solitude—in which a third-person objective narrator introduces that which is coded as ‘‘unreal’’ with a cool, level voice—here a realistic base is provided to satisfy a mainstream audience’s realist-informed cognitive maps; the realistic base acts as a gateway for the audience to enter Dash’s magicoreel world. So the dissolves, lighting, and ethereal quality create a symbolic and iconographic geography that complicates the realist schemata of the rest of the film. At the same time, however, the voice-over offers a clear link to the real for those cinemagoers who do not buy the visuals. A woman’s voice, marked by a ‘‘real’’ dialect of the island, enters the so-called preface on the auditory channel: ‘‘I am the first and the last, the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. [Pause] I am the wife and virgin. I am the barren one, and many are my daughters. [Pause] I am the silence that you cannot understand. [Pause] I am the utterance of my name’’ (notes mine). Briefly, the active sentences define the self as author of self, as the voice first calls attention to those heterosexist forces (within and without the Ibo island syncretic culture) that contain the woman’s body (labeling it either wife or virgin, or, by traditional association, whore). It then conflates those images and redefines the body, positioning the hybrid subaltern female subject within the collective: ‘‘daughters.’’ Once the voiceover ceases (in the middle of shot ), the music increases in volume, filling the auditory channel’s space with the traditional dramatic-realist film technique of conveying codes of realism. This sequence also reinforces a more fluid at-oneness between a mythical past—the woman’s slow, calmly and distantly paced epic-like voice-over together with the slow-motion strobed stills—and a more immediate and present-oriented realism as seen in shot , with its sharp focus on a black woman donning clothing contemporary with her epoch. So the auditory and visual channels, the mixture of a dreamlike quality in shots  through  with the more straight-up realism of the voice and music, work together to present a space, both real and 

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

nonreal, acting as a protoschema that readies the audience for a journey into the magicorealist narrative. With the magicorealist narratological codes set up, the camera-narrator can move into the storyworld proper. Now the camera-narrator’s focus telescopes from an all-encompassing topographic view of the island down into a more local geographic setting. Notably, too, this introductory omniscient camera-eye sweep, set against the magicorealist prefatory material, functions as an implicit critique of the use of the ‘‘realist’’ coded camera lens to control and frame the ethnic-object specimen. The camera-eye assumes the positionality that audiences identify as third-person omniscient and that is traditionally associated with a European subject position; however, this omniscient narrator seeks to unfix from stereotype and ideology the subaltern subject. To this end, Dash relocates the camera-narrator within the spirit of the Ibo island inhabitants: after the introductory sweep, the camera-narrator uses the dissolve to position the filmgoer at eye-level with the island’s subjects and objects. After a track-in, a final subjective shot (slight camera wobble) notifies the viewer of his or her position at the threshold of the film’s storyworld. Dialogue commences; story time begins, and the audience enters the real world of the island. After the first sequence of descriptive visuals and auditory narrative, an unborn narrator/character (Kai-Lynn Warren) appears in the visual register. In her first appearance, the camera-narrator describes her with a strobing, slow-motion visual, a technique that marks her presence throughout the film. Her voice-over, however, acts to emplace the camera-narrator’s special effects in the real. And just in case this connection to the real is not clear enough, the camera-narrator cuts to a shot of her looking directly into the camera eye, shocking the audience out of an unreal, nostalgic past. If Daughters of the Dust were to open without the above-mentioned prefatory material, the jump from the realistic depiction at the beginning to the special effects that appear in the storyworld—say, the visuals of the unborn child—would disorient the audience. This would create a fantastical story and would hence send the wrong message: that the Ibo Islanders inhabit an unreal world. However, by using structures in the discourse to reflect the Ibo Islanders’ worldview presented within the story, neither the real nor the magical are privileged. To this end, the visual and auditory tracks work in unison with the Ibo Island characters’ real interaction with the magical within the storyworld. Dash does not produce a tension between the camera-narrator’s visual and auditory tracks. Whether her camera-narrator presents a realistic visual or unreal (specialeffect) visual together with either the realistic-coded African music or 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

voice-over, its unreal/real representations are seamlessly fused. Briefly, for example, the realism of the auditory complements the special effects in the sepia hues of shots  through . Yet, the voice’s realism, together with the music, locates the unreal-coded filmic frames in the concrete; the auditory provides a transition between the so-called preface and the ensuing omniscient camera-narrator’s realistic visual description, linking the not so ‘‘real’’ world textured in the prefatory material with the magically punctuated realism in the storyworld. Thus the camera-narrator’s two tracks complement one another and do not create opposing tensions, setting a precedent of an infallible narrative gestalt. This is to say, Dash’s magicoreel presents the fictionalized world the Ibo Island characters inhabit as real. The unborn narrator/character functions—like García Márquez’s character Melquíades—to present a magicorealist worldview. As the unborn narrator/character increasingly fills out the film’s discourse space with her voice-over narration, the camera-narrator aligns its gaze directly to the objects the unborn character perceives. The epic-like distant and omniscient voice we hear in the film’s preface continues, but with a twist. While the prefatory voice-over uses present tense—a tense that gives the sense of the urgency in the chronicling of these lives—the unborn narrator/character’s voice is recollecting the story her great-grandmother told her of their family’s migration to the U.S. mainland: ‘‘My great grandma, Nana Peazant, saw her family coming apart’’ (my notes). However, while this is a recollection from a future moment within the storyworld, there is a deliberate connection between the camera-narrator’s present-tense movements and the unborn narrator/character’s voice-over. As the camera pans right to show a couple in the house arguing, the unborn narrator’s voice-over identifies them, ‘‘there was my mom and daddy’s problem’’; as the unborn narrator says ‘‘I could still see their faces,’’ the camera pans left to show a couple in bed (my notes). Not only does this continued use of voice-over complement the cameranarrator’s visuals (tinged with the hue encountered in the prefatory material), but its shift to a voice of recollection—an implied past tense —counteracts and balances the fact that the obviously young speaker’s intonation and pitch moves out of a distant past to a contemporary present. This strategy not only blurs the bounds of real and unreal, but, as the narrator speaks her memories, the generational divide between the older Nana Peazant and the unborn character is also diminished. This process of confusing the real and unreal as the diasporic African character remembers results in a dialogue between the unformed naive character and the wise one, Nana Peazant. This dialogue between the two voice-overs sug

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

gests an internal dialogue with the plural aspects of a self that constitutes the polyphony, or Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, within the construction of subaltern women’s subjectivity. Their unreal- and real-coded voice-over registers fuse to make for a magicoreel double-voice—simultaneously greatgrandmother and great-granddaughter, powerful and powerless, nurturing and nurtured—that expresses a social identity of the Ibo Islander ‘‘daughters’’ who share an expansive, heteroglossic worldview. Ibo Islander ‘‘sons’’ do not necessarily belong to this same doubleseeing/voicing community. For example, the unborn narrator/character’s father, Eli Peazant (Adisa Anderson), turns from Yoruban religion and a belief in ancestral spirits after he discovers the rape of his wife, Yula. In the moment when he loses touch with ‘‘those ol’ Africans,’’ the unborn character appears to him. With exaggerated body movement, Eli expresses surprise and confusion. The camera-narrator presents this scene with the special effects Dash associates with the magical: strobe, slow motion, a fuzzy background, and yellow-brown colors. In this case, the cameranarrator describes Eli as hesitating and disbelieving the presence of the unborn narrator/character; Eli is presented at odds with the camera-narrator’s magicorealist worldview and makes for a sequence that calls attention to unreal/real oppositional narratives. Dash refuses to relegate the unborn narrator/character entirely to the ethereal. In fact, within the storyworld itself the unborn character interacts and shares a physical space with others. The camera-narrator, with its sharply focused visuals, makes no attempt to demarcate her existence as separate from the ‘‘real.’’ Not surprisingly, the unborn character shares physical intimacy only with the very young and very old characters, those who believe in the magicoreal space she comes to embody. In other words, the unborn narrator/character’s voice-over crosses the boundaries usually made where these two, magical and real, abut. For example, in a scene in which she looks through a viewfinder at postcards of life on the mainland, one of her peers in the real realm (as indicated by the camera-narrator’s sharply focused visuals) braids the unborn character’s hair, talking to her and the other ‘‘real’’ children with an easy naturalness. Yet, the audience knows that the unborn narrator/character cannot possibly be interacting with the children before she is born. Just as a García Márquezian magicorealist text employs a secondary character (as I mentioned in the last chapter, in the discussion of the curandera) to present the magicorealist worldview, so Dash constructs the secondary character, the photographer Mr. Snead. However, unlike a García Márquez curandera, Dash’s photographer does not so much present as indirectly af

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

firm the magicorealist worldview. Brought to the island to photograph the family before their dispersal, he is coded as an African American outsider on the island. His wearing of a white suit and white gloves as he arrives not only suggests to what ends of discomfort he is willing to go to uphold assimilatory values, but also marks him as an outsider; someone who is unfamiliar with, and who tries to resist, the Ibo Island’s tropical climate. His bourgeois airs are confirmed when the audience first hears him speak: he intermixes a punctilious English with Latin phrases. As the audience soon discovers, he has been brought to the island to photograph the Peazant family before their diaspora. He is here to frame, shoot, and capture the image of the Peazants. He is also the character who seeks to catalogue and understand the Ibo Islanders. Mr. Snead is the antithetical embodiment of the film’s counter-hegemonic worldview. However, Dash uses the magicorealist form to turn the tables on Mr. Snead and the primitivist enterprise he represents. Dash uses the camera eye, the technological apparatus most like colonialism, to mechanically represent a multiple-layered world. While Mr. Snead is about to take a picture of some of the Ibo Islanders, the unborn narrator/character suddenly appears within the camera-eye’s frame and disorientates Mr. Snead; his Latin and scientific reason fail to explain the unborn narrator’s presence. Moreover, it reminds the audience of the film’s fictionality as well as the fact that they are seeing only objects and characters the director chooses to have jump in and out of her frames. The real story of the Peazant family is only ever known fully by those who lived this moment, really.

        ’            In Dash’s film we see a magicoreel that uses specific narratological codes to texture the Ibo Island diasporic African characters’ culturally hybrid lives. In Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (), Kureishi/Frears’s magicoreel uses a mixture of narrative technique and generic form—that of documentary, classic Hollywood realism, and the magical—to render transparent those age-old visual narratives that systematically represent dark characters as primitive and white characters as civilized. Kureishi/ Frears’s magicoreel invents a culturally hybrid, sexually ambiguous postcolonial trickster/pícaro as the signpost for its audience to identify the camera-narrator’s rebellious worldview. This invention of a rebellious camera-narrator along with its empres

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

encing of a postcolonial trickster/pícaro would make Sammy and Rosie Get Laid a magicoreel that, upon theatrical release, immediately destabilized audiences and caused waves of critical controversy. The Sunday Times was critical of Kureishi ‘‘for not celebrating Thatcher’s achievements at a time of censorship’’ (‘‘Some Time with Stephen,’’ ix). And the academic Norman Stone responded, ‘‘the vision of England [it] provides has nothing to offer the overwhelming majority of the potential audience. [It] represents at best a tiny part of modern England and more likely, a nasty part of [its] producers’’ (cited in Judith Williamson’s ‘‘Dirty Linen’’). And an anonymous reviewer for The Economist commented, ‘‘politics weakens Mr. Kureishi’s touch—as was apparent in his didactic and dismal second film, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Certain classes of people, the Rich and the Establishment, are Bad’’ (‘‘Britain’s Minority Writers,’’ ). (For more on the film’s controversial release, see Kenneth C. Kaleta’s Hanif Kureishi: Postcolonial Storyteller.) Though Kureishi/Frears intended to destabilize audiences—Kureishi tells New York Times writer Helen Dudar that he wanted to churn out a film with a maximum of ‘‘filth and anarchy’’ ()—they also meant to open eyes to an Other London, populated with characters who daily struggle against a homophobic, racial—even a politically correct liberalist—apartheid. While the criticism picked up on the ‘‘filth and anarchy,’’ it failed to recognize storytelling technique: its mixing of realism with the magical, its multiple-registered film score, and its often parodic script. In other words, the critics failed to read the film as magicorealism—that storytelling form most suitable for conveying a politically and socially contradictory London as experienced by inner-city ethnic- and/or woman-identified characters, and for calling attention to the fictionality of its own reel-making representations. Namely, as the story (plot, event, theme) unfolds and becomes recognizable, the audience is never allowed to confuse its fiction with ontological fact. The story unfolds as follows: Rafi (Shashi Kapoor), a Pakistani nationalist once heavily embroiled in politics and exploitative acts, returns to England in his old age to try bonding with his long-ignored son, middleclass Indo-Brit Sammy (Ayub Khan Din), and rekindling a flame with his jilted India-born Anglo lover, Alice (Claire Bloom). Kureishi/Frears also introduce the audience to Rosie (Frances Barber), who is characterized as a middle-class white liberal; Sammy and Rosie, the audience soon discovers, have a marriage of ‘‘freedom and commitment,’’ as Rosie announces on one occasion. The audience meets their respective lovers—an American photographer, Anna (Wendy Gazelle), and the postcolonial-identified trickster/pícaro, Danny/Victoria (Roland Gift)—along with their various ad

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

ventures in London, and the story comes to a close with Rafi’s suicide, Sammy and Rosie snapping back into a heteronormative comfort zone, and Danny/Victoria and his ad hoc family and postcolonial motley crew being forced to relocate their makeshift tent and trailer village. Of course, there is more to the story than first meets the eye. Kureishi/ Frears’s use of specific narrative techniques work along with the story’s content to destabilize the ‘‘real’’-making fictions of cinema by foregrounding its manipulation of different camera-narrating registers and to represent a South Asian and Afro-Caribbean populated s inner city. Their magicoreel tells the story of characters who struggle to survive a capitalistidentified colonial control of the brown/black-populated inner city, all while its self-reflexive techniques remind audiences that this is a story and not real life. The film works to make explicit age-old monologic ideologies that restrict movements of racially targeted peoples; it also celebrates characters and a camera-narrator who represent a heteroglossic, dialogic counterhegemonic presence. The film manipulates a variety of cinematic techniques to tell, as Robert R. Wilson writes more generally of magicorealism, ‘‘richer, more diverse tales’’ (). The audience, however, is not lost completely in this richer, more heteroglossic storyworld. Kureishi/Frears’s magicoreel camera-narrator continuously reminds its audience at the level of telling and showing (diegesis and mimesis) that it must not read this à la Homi Bhabha as an incomplete cultural artifact that represents an ontological act of social survival. (See Homi Bhabha’s essay ‘‘Postcolonial Criticism,’’ especially page .) Kureishi/Frears mix different storytelling modes as the camera-narrator describes the violence-filled, capitalist-informed events that disrupt and alter the direction of what is loosely identified as a two-pronged plot: Rafi’s return to London, his attempt to solidify a paternal allegiance to his long-neglected son, and his failure to cope with a past filled with terrorist acts that leads to his suicide; and Sammy and Rosie’s (anti)romances that lead ultimately to a solidification of their heteronormative coupling. However, the camera-narrator self-reflexively employs docu-drama/cinema vérité, Hollywood realism, and the magical along with an intercutting of s-styled Hollywood romance music, Indi-Pop, African American R&B, Jamaican reggae, New York hip-hop, and London techno/house to destabilize these more-traditional plot lines, forming a narrative gestalt that critiques monologic registers such as that of politically correct liberalism, heteronormativity, capitalism, and political fanaticism. Like Dash, Kureishi/Frears use a prefatory sequencing to introduce their audience to what will become, as the story unfolds, an identifiable magico

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

realism. Before the story unfolds, they open the film with an objective camera-narrator that establishes the film’s grounding in visual codes that refer to a realistic depiction of the real. The opening sequence breaks down as follows: () Visually, the camera-narrator presents an extremely long shot of a decayed urban terrain: desolate, dust-filled landscape fills the foreground and white smoke-spewing factory stacks and an overcast sky fill out the background. () Visually, the camera-narrator uses the stark lighting associated with a cinema vérité technique to add to the sense of desolation and project the landscape’s estranging effects. () Aurally, the camera-narrator projects the voice identified by the cadence, accent, and tone of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: ‘‘We have a great deal of work to do, so no one must slack. [Audience laughter.] We’ll have a marvelous party tonight, but on Monday we have a great deal to do in those inner cities. (         ) The overall effect is a camera-narrator that describes an urban wasteland— highways, smog, corrugated iron, and burning dump heaps—juxtaposed with a voice that both connotes and denotes a racist, politically conservative, and procapitalist worldview. Seymour Menton’s criteria identify the film’s prefatory sequence as magicorealist: The bleak long shot uses the storytelling mode of the documentary to present an inner-city wasteland in ‘‘ultrasharp focus’’ with a cold detachment, and that gives the image that necessary frame of objectivity. With the introduction of Thatcher’s voiceover, the image is made strange, but not a subjectively strange that we might associate with the fantastic. The net effect: before the story proper begins, the film has set up the magicorealist codes that both draw in and then destabilize the audience’s preconceptions of the inner city. After the camera-narrator establishes the codes for reading the film, it then uses its auditory channel to introduce that above-mentioned Hollywood-styled romance score—a tune that functions as a leitmotiv, appearing again and again throughout the film—that asks the audience to shift its generic preconceptions once again. Generic conventions that identify a social realism of docu-drama appear again after the titles finish rolling and the melodramatic romance score stops. In a subsequent sequence, the camera-narrator exaggerates a hand-held, cinema vérité effect when 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

describing the cops’ shooting of a black woman cooking in her kitchen. As the camera-narrator shows the dead woman’s body being carried out on a stretcher, it carnivalizes genres by intercutting shots of Sammy lying naked with his lover Anna and shots of Rosie entering a council flat to discover an old man dead in a bathtub. The crosscutting facilitates a cameranarrator style—intercutting between safe, static interiors and threatening, heterogeneous exteriors as well as layering the content with political, social, sexual dimensions—that embodies the camera-narrator’s mimesis-asplay storytelling spirit and its calling into question the idea of who belongs and who does not to this country many call ‘‘Home.’’ The genre mixing at the level of the discourse firmly locates Sammy and Rosie Get Laid as a magicoreel that engages with a large network of mimesis-as-play storytelling narratives. In this vein, when the cameranarrator shifts from the sociorealist mode to that of the melodramatic, it introduces its doubly oriented and parodic worldview. The story has yet to begin and already the camera-narrator’s mixing of disparate genres creates a parodic double-voice that destabilizes the audience’s expectations of storytelling convention that reflects, as Franz Roh described of magicorealist painting in , ‘‘an insatiable love for terrestrial things and a delight in their fragmented and limited nature’’ ()—and also calls attention to its own fictionality. The shift in the camera-narrator’s tone to that of melodrama and romance locates the narrative not only within an intertextual system characterized by the mimesis-as-play genre, but also within a romance tradition that traces back to Don Quixote and that includes the invention of a character with a magnificently all-encompassing quixotic imagination. Such a character’s elastic imagination perceives a seamless interplay of the magical and real in his or her world. Just as in Don Quixote the romance genre is used to parody the conventions of romance—and formulate a critique of the social and political landscape Quixote traverses in the storyworld— so too do Kureishi/Frears parody those romance codes that characterize a heteronormative, primitivist silver-screen film industry. The mixing of the conventions of social-realism with the romance score announces the camera-narrator’s stylizing of both registers. Namely, as the story unfolds, the camera-narrator’s mixing of genres sets up the codes for the audience to read both its social realism and its romance as stylized; it allows the audience to see how such conventions are laden with heavy semantic baggage that will be unpacked by the camera-narrator with the help of the themes and characters within the storyworld. While the film as a whole identifies with the romance part of the 

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

mimesis-as-play convention (cf. Frye), it does not glorify all the characters who represent the romantic worldview. As the film unfolds, the camera-narrator’s parody of the romance genre is made explicitly after the audience meets Sammy and Rosie. While Rosie is portrayed as an antiromance, feminist character who wants ‘‘marriage without commitment,’’ Sammy is a die-hard romantic. As the camera-narrator depicts, his relationship with love-interest Anna is not by choice. Sammy would much rather have a monogamous relationship with his Rosie, the woman he married. However, the camera-narrator parodies both Rosie’s liberal position and Sammy’s internalizing of an idealized heterosexual romantic life. For the camera-narrator, both are ideological constructs that ultimately prevent real engagement and understanding between people. (Hence, the very sympathetic description at the film’s end when Sammy and Rosie cry onto each other’s shoulder; the mise en scène projects the sense that both characters’ ideological investments have held back deep emotion and understanding.) Rosie speaks in exaggerated politically correct clichés amplified by her stylized performances of sexual liberation. And Sammy daydreams of a prelapsarian moment when he and Rosie lived monogamously and would, for example, attend lectures together on general semantics. While the camera-narrator parodies both Sammy and Rosie for having bought into delimiting ideologies, it more closely aligns Sammy’s internalizing of a hegemonic construct with the estrangement associated with participating in a capitalist production/consumption dialectic. For example, in a sequence that describes Rosie getting ready to go out on a date, Sammy’s gaze fixes on Rosie. Framed by the bathroom doorway, Sammy sees her in fragments: elbow, lower back, buttocks. The camera-narrator holds the shot for a little too long, making the audience uncomfortable. More than the film making the audience aware of its own scopophilia, it portrays Sammy’s gaze as desperate and ultimately fetishistic. Not surprisingly, after Rosie leaves for her lover’s house, the camera-narrator cuts to Sammy lying on a couch, snorting lines of cocaine, sipping on a Coca-Cola, wolfing down a Big Mac, masturbating to Hustler, and listening to opera through headphones.4 Rosie’s blockage of Sammy’s romantic idealization results in his conspicuous consumption. Namely, he lacks complexity and can ultimately relate to the world only according to fragile ideological constructs: idealized Hollywood style monogamous romance and/or capitalist consumption. While the camera-narrator is critical of Rosie’s cold and clichéd feminism and of Sammy’s weak and pathetic consumerism (romantic/capitalistidentified), it positively characterizes Danny/Victoria. Here, a different 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

brand of the romantic is represented; that nonconforming, multiplelayered quixotic quality that characterizes the trickster/pícaro. Too, as the camera-narrator portrays Danny/Victoria, it situates its own heteroglossic mode with that of the trickster/pícaro’s playfully resistant worldview. Giancarlo Maiorino, in his essay ‘‘Renaissance Marginalities,’’ appropriately traces this type of trickster/pícaro spirit back to the sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque tradition where a ‘‘new form of the novel unraveled a ‘genre-in-the-making’ crowded with less than perfect characters, to say the least’’ (xxiv). As a trickster/pícaro, Danny/Victoria inhabits the storyworld both to disrupt the lives of the other characters controlled by monologic ideologies, and also as a reminder of the film’s mixing of genres (we might even identify this as a masala stylization) to open audience eyes to its own fictional representation of such characters and their internalizing of such restricting ideologies as that of Sammy and Rosie. (Danny/Victoria also functions like the trickster in traditional Sanskrit drama who is a selfreflexive device to exaggerate an ‘‘emotional flavor’’ [Sanskrit ‘‘rasa’’] and thereby call attention to the story as theatrical construct.) In this spirit, when the camera-narrator first introduces the audience to Danny/Victoria it is in medias res; a train arrives at a London underground station, the doors open, and the black-British character appears who will later introduce himself as Danny (then later as Victoria). As he steps out of the train, the camera-narrator holds the shot to overdetermine the visual introduction of Danny/Victoria. Then he walks off screen with a cacophonous band of musicians. Without the audience’s yet knowing that Danny/Victoria will be the container of the film’s playfully resistant message, he is already associated with a street polyphony (rag-tag band), with motion (trains and walking), and as a character whose benign facial gestures project what Gayatri Spivak calls a ‘‘reference point for radical innocence’’ (). When Danny/Victoria announces, ‘‘I know these tube lines. Sometimes I travel them all day’’ (my notes), he embodies that which Mikhail Bakhtin identified of the heteroglossic novel, the ‘‘purely carnival nature’’ of the street (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ). And like Bakhtin’s identification of like-wandering, street-inhabiting characters whose presence in fictional narrative crystallizes the ‘‘interactive’’ (cf. Bakhtin) spirit of the road, Danny/Victoria playfully resists and subverts. Danny/Victoria’s streetsensibility is located in his postcolonial positionality; he self-identifies as an enlightened postcolonial character, telling Rafi, ‘‘we’ve got internal colonialism ’cause they don’t allow us to run our own communities’’ (my notes). Yet, Danny/Victoria is not so enlightened that he dismisses a character like Rafi out of hand. He serves as Rafi’s guide through London’s underworld. 

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

During his touring of Rafi through a carnivalesque London, Rafi increasingly faces his own demons: the buying into fanatic ideologies of religious nationalism that led to his torturing, maiming, and killing Others. Danny/Victoria, not so unlike Melquíades, is the world-wise wanderer who creates zones of cultural and racial contact as he collapses hierarchies of racial and cultural difference. His contact zones strip the establishment, in Gates’s words on the African American signifying monkey, of its pretensions in wild masquerade [allowing for] new kinds of perception on the part of the reader. We are moved by a sense of compassion for the suffering individual. . . . What emerges is a many colored light, fresh angles of vision, an epistemology which creates a dynamic awareness of the vital interaction of society’s outcasts with powers whose religion, philosophy and claims for civilization seem vain indeed. ( ) Danny/Victoria is like Gates’s signifying monkey whose ‘‘fresh angles of vision’’ expose just how the racial hypocrisies and nationalist ideologies threaten to destroy the other characters’ lives—and in the case of Rafi, that actually lead to self-annihilation. Not surprisingly, then, Danny/Victoria—either in the cameranarrator’s more subjective filtering shots or in its use of mise-en-scène (hued lighting that paints him as radically innocent, close-ups, and camera angles that magnify physical presence)—is the centripetal force of Kureishi/Frears’s magicorealism. He works like the signifying monkey and/or the trickster/pícaro but is firmly situated within a postcolonial collective that inhabits (albeit tentatively) the metropolitan center of the erstwhile British empire; as such, he is a character who textures the presence of the subaltern Other not as a bodily resource to be exploited in distant lands, but as one that forces those like Rafi, Alice, Rosie, Sammy, and Anna who inhabit today’s postcolonialized metroplex to acknowledge and/or disavow their own implicit and/or explicit role in past and present hegemonic systems that exist through violence and exploitation. Danny/Victoria’s temporary inhabiting of a variety of locations—the street, his makeshift village, Sammy and Rosie’s gentrified, inner-city home—makes his ‘‘purely carnival spirit’’ (cf. Bakhtin) powerfully felt and known by characters like the suburban-inhabiting, Anglo-British Alice. When Danny/Victoria escorts Rafi to visit Alice, his long-lost love who 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

grew up in colonial India, the camera-narrator plays with lighting and mise-en-scène to foreground the stifling feel of what at first appears to be a safe, comfortable, and well-manicured London suburb. (Though the place is not named, the fact that Rafi and Danny/Victoria access it by the underground means that it is not too far from London’s inner city.) Alice (played by a lily-skinned, ephemeral-seeming Claire Bloom) opens her door, and Rafi and the camera-narrator enter her Victorian home. Danny/Victoria remains outside. The camera-narrator uses a sepia-hued light to describe the next scene as Alice and Rafi reacquaint over tea and Jamaican rum cakes. The lighting and mise-en-scène become signposts for the audience to read Alice’s nostalgia for an India filled with memories of her coming of age and her romance with Rafi as static and oppressive. It critiques her desperate groping for an idealized, colonial past and her privileged position as a white Anglo-Brit living in the comfortable suburbs who has washed away the violent history of colonialism in India. On one occasion, Alice tells Rafi with a little too much force, ‘‘I am English.’’ Alice’s inhabiting of a suburban space also reflects her implicit participation in British imperialism. The London suburbs grew fat off British imperial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As John Clement Ball, in his essay ‘‘The Semi-Detached Metropolis: Hanif Kureishi’s London,’’ writes, ‘‘The wealth that funded suburbia in its birthplace (London) came from merchants profiting from imperial trade’’ (). While the camera-narrator negatively judges Alice’s world—linking her and the suburbs to a British colonial past—it is the presence of Danny/ Victoria within this space that forces Alice to come to terms with her past and all that it connotes. While Rafi and Alice drink their tea, the camera-narrator shows Danny/Victoria wearing a flowered-sunbonnet while staring with his radiantly ‘‘radical innocent’’ look (cf. Spivak) at the two through a living-room window. Danny/Victoria as the postcolonial trickster/pícaro disrupts the ‘‘civilized’’ meeting; their overly nostalgic talk of Raj-ruled India is blocked. The effects of Danny/Victoria’s disruptive presence are not presented till later in the story when Alice confronts Rafi in her basement over a chest filled with her faded photographs and a brittle wedding dress. As she assaults Rafi with his sexist machismo and the hypocrisy of his nationalist fervor—his uncritical reproduction of the very hegemonic structures that kept India oppressed—the audience is to read this as her coming to terms with her own complicity in colonialism. The next time we see her, she is in the inner city engaging with young postcolonial Brits. And then she is sympathetically depicted at the site of Danny/Victoria’s makeshift village as it is being bulldozed by corporate developers ‘‘tidy

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

ing up’’ the inner city. Alice, more than Rafi (who commits suicide), learns from the disruptive, heteroglossic spirit Danny/Victoria brings. Before the forced relocation of the makeshift village, Kureishi/Frears spatialize a disruptive heteroglossia at the site of the village—especially demonstrated by Danny/Victoria’s grafittied trailer. The spray-painted words, actively produced by its inhabitant instead of passively inherited, emphasize the difference between Alice’s Britain and Danny/Victoria’s. While Alice inhabits a suffocatingly static suburb, the camera-narrator emplaces Danny/Victoria within a vital site of mixture and resistance. For example, on one occasion several figures dressed in brightly colored colonial regalia sing the Temptations’ ‘‘My Girl’’ outside Danny/Victoria’s trailer.5 As ‘‘My Girl’’ crescendos, the camera-narrator settles on a shot of the trailer just long enough for the audience to read its multicolored graffiti: Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Within the storyworld, the graffiti writes over and inhabits an otherwise alienating compressed place (the trailer) just as the makeshift village writes over and inhabits an alienating London metropolis space. However, with the recognition of the graffitied words as the unreal city poetically imagined in T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Waste Land,’’ the mise en scène becomes a self-reflexive moment. The audience is once again reminded that this is a narrative that tells the story of characters who inhabit a particular vision of London.6 The series of graffitied slashes, strokes, and burns reterritorialize canons and physical spaces. This urban ‘‘territorial writing’’ as García Canclini identifies it, represents that mode of ‘‘disinstitutionalized’’ expression (, ) present within the makeshift, postcolonial-identified village. However, as ‘‘The Waste Land’’ reminds the audience, it is a site of heteroglossic resistance within the realm of fiction and not ontological fact. I have thus far described how the film uses the conventions of mimesisas-play to tell a story that is filled with characters who resist and/or reproduce national, racial, gendered, and sexual ideological structures. As a fictional construct, a character like Danny/Victoria comes to represent the trickster/pícaro spirit present in ethnic- and postcolonial-identified magicorealism generally. I now turn to how the camera-narrator employs a 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

magicorealist storytelling technique to alter audiences’ perceptions of oppressive ideologies. When the camera-narrator portrays Rafi toward the end of the story, he is swiftly being consumed by images of a magically appearing Hindu figure. As Rafi is forced to encounter (with Danny/Victoria as guide) a London that is not all about ‘‘tea and cunty fingers’’ (his words), the violence he inflicted on others in the name of nationalism leads to the shattering of his psyche. The camera-narrator presents this breakdown while Rafi is in Danny/Victoria’s graffitied trailer: as he washes his hands, the Hindu figure magically appears, but this time he interacts with Rafi, placing his torture-headgear on Rafi’s head, turning the electric current on full, then interrogating him. There is nothing to suggest that this is not real within the discourse. In the film’s crystallized moment of magicorealism, the former torturer becomes the tortured. The Hindu figure who had appeared throughout the film as more of a spectral, unreal presence is now tangible and real. Though Rafi is not killed immediately from the torture device, he dies soon after. When Sammy and Rosie find Rafi hanging from a fan in their bedroom, the film becomes complete. Kureishi/Frears invent a camera-narrator that uses the technique of magicorealism to powerfully critique such a character’s fanaticism that suppressed difference at any cost. During the reversed interrogation, Rafi tells the Hindu figure that it was all part of a fight for the better good of the nation. At the film’s close, then, Danny/Victoria’s trickster/pícaro carnivalesque resistant spirit and the camera-narrator’s use of mimesis-as-play genre and magicorealist technique fuse to destabilize those filmic narratives—classic Hollywood realism, cinema vérité, docudrama, and the magical—that uncritically reproduce restrictive ideologies.

                     Clearly, Kureishi/Frears’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust tell different stories. To this end, they invent different magicoreels with different degrees of narrator and/or character participation in the conventions of magicorealism. While Kureishi/ Frears mix genres to represent multiple iconographic layers to collapse foreground/background in their visual-auditory pictorial frame, they lean heavily on the trickster/pícaro character to project the carnivalesque spirit at the heart of magicorealism generally; Dash uses the magicorealist form more at the level of the discourse and less as located within a trickster/pícaro worldview. However, each invents narratives that in their re

Dash’s and Kureishi’s Rebellious Magicoreels

spective manners use magicorealism to tell stories that might not otherwise be told; to critique those film narratives—whether descended from the realism of the brothers Lumière or the magical of Méliès—that have uncritically reproduced scripts that erase and/or primitivize the brown/black protagonist; to critique those ideologies that ultimately kill a Rafi, or that lead to a bitterness in an Alice or a Sammy; to critique those pictographic frames like Mr. Snead’s that either exclude or try to contain those like the diasporic African characters inhabiting Dash’s Ibo Island. Both directors mix genres and play with mimetic storytelling devices to finally insist on the distinction between fiction and ontological fact. Their magicoreels are self-reflexive and to this end powerfully work to destabilize and expose those ideological scaffoldings that lead to oppression, torture, and erasure. Their magicoreels insist on the need for characters to resist such hegemonic structures and to seek instead deep understanding and shared emotion.

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism

Three

O S C A R ‘ ‘ Z E T A’ ’ A C O S T A’ S DE-FORMED AU TO -BIO GRAPHÉ

C

hicano/a novelists such as Aristeo Brito, Alfredo Véa, Ron Arias, Ana Castillo, and Denise Chávez often invent storyworlds whose narrators and characters do not distinguish between the unreal and the real; they use magicorealism as a storytelling mode that allows their characters to engage with and question restrictive ideologies and such divisions as those that separate Latin American from U.S., metropolitan from rural, criollo elite from mestizo campesino, Western from indigenous; they use magicorealism as a self-reflexive storytelling mode that has the potential to expand the reader’s perception of the world. For example, Ron Arias’s use of magicorealism in his novel The Road to Tamazunchale can, as Raúl Homero Villa writes, ‘‘draw parodic attention to the Chicano community’s social geographic location in Los Angeles, while [it] imaginatively contest[s] the debilitating impacts of hegemonic urban development upon the barrios’’ (). However, here I want to turn from a discussion that focuses on magicorealism in novels—narratives that readers more readily interpret as fiction due to conventions of genre—to an analysis of magicorealism in autobiography. Certain ethnic- and postcolonial-identified autobiographers choose to foreground the fictionality of their writing of the self; these autobiographers choose to destabilize readers’ consumption of their life stories as fact. As such, these writers can employ any number of storytelling modes associated with narrative fiction. One such mode is magicorealism. One such writer who employs magicorealism is the late Chicano writer, political activist, and lawyer Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, who uses this mode in his The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo () to call attention to the fictionality of his ‘‘facts’’ and to more generally destabilize the genre of Western

and ethnic-identified autobiography that spreads thick veneers over its manipulation of detail to naturalize as ‘‘fact’’ the centrality of its protagonist’s experience and subjectivity.1 Acosta’s use of magicorealism to reform the genre of autobiography is further complicated when we consider the traditionally marginal status accorded to the ethnic-identified narrating subject. In the canonic and juridical domains, ethnic-identified autobiography has come to stand in for the ‘‘proof ’’ of the narrating subject’s human-ness. To be ‘‘recognized,’’ the racial and ethnic Other has had to convince his or her audience of the reality of his or her experience and, thus, adhere to narrating codes that do not call attention to the gap between mimesis and reality. Such Chicano/a-marked autobiographies, then, have served to emplace and humanize racial subjects deemed inhuman by the dominant class; they have traditionally served to invest such racially marginalized subjects with, as Genaro Padilla identifies, ‘‘historical presence in the face of erasure’’ (). For the disenfranchised narrating subject to give a new form (re-form and deform) to the ‘‘factual’’ representation of the self and world would be akin to self-annihilation. Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta daringly defies convention by playfully and selfreflexively manipulating narrative techniques and storyworld frames to reform those referential structures that have traditionally worked to emplace the Chicano/a subject in the sociopolitical and historical U.S. landscape. Such a move as Acosta’s use of magicorealism as a narrative mode for presenting his life story is a powerful maneuvering out of what has become a restrictive convention—a straitjacket—for ethnic-identified autobiographers. The inception and publication of The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo occurred during the s renaissance of Chicano/a letters—a movement that witnessed those erstwhile marginalized Chicano/a authors writing novels, short stories, and autobiographies in a variety of voices, using a blend of storytelling technique, and re-forming the genre. This became a time for narrative experimentation for many Chicano/a authors. Short stories, novels, poetry, even Chicano manifestos were being published by Chicano/a-marketed journals (Quinto del Sol and El Grito, for example) and publishing houses (Arte Público and University of New Mexico Press). These were often bold and wildly experimental. The time was ripe for Acosta to come along and complicate the Chicano autobiography as laid out by his more conventionally inclined predecessors Raymund Paredes, Ernesto Galarza, José Villareal, et al. Acosta could fashion a text that would put a fun-house mirror up to Chicano and Anglo autobiography. When

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism

Acosta’s autobiography was released, it was not identified as magicorealist per se, but, as Juan Bruce-Novoa indicated, it marked ‘‘a new stage in Chicano literature, a new consciousness’’ (). Acosta uses the structures we now identify as magicorealism to write an autobiography that marks a ‘‘new stage in Chicano literature’’ by inventing a narrator-as-Acosta (my term) who collapses the real and unreal and by inventing a character-asAcosta who engages with and critically resists the repressive ideologies of his world.

                        Acosta’s use of magicorealism as a way to reform conventions of autobiography first takes place at the level of narration. To bring fictional technique into his autobiography, he invents a narrator-asAcosta. For the author Acosta creating the autobiography, this is not to be confused with Acosta as biographically verifiable author. To this end, Acosta deliberately distances himself as author from the invented Acostaas-narrator. At one point the Acosta-as-narrator informs the reader that on July , , ‘‘I am thirty-three, the same age as Jesus when he died’’ (). However, if the reader were to look to biographical record to verify this age against Acosta’s factual birth date, they would discover a discrepancy: Acosta the author would have been thirty-two in . However, it does not take biographical sleuthing to uncover this willful distancing between author and narrator; the text reveals this move. In the Acosta-as-narrator’s fiction, he is the same age as Christ when he tells of his setting out ‘‘on the road’’ in . A quick glance at Acosta-as-narrator’s chronology confirms this play: He announces, ‘‘I am fourteen today. . . . It was April the eighth, , and I was about to complete my first year of high school’’ (–). From this information the reader can calculate Acosta’s birth date: . If born in , he would be thirty-two in the summer of . To drive home the point, Acosta’s invented narrator does not tell the story in the linear manner that typifies autobiography and that might lead the reader to confuse the facts of the author’s life with the ‘‘facts’’ that fill his invented storyworld. For example, the narrator begins in medias res (when he’s ‘‘thirty-three’’ and about to hit the road) and then proceeds to tell the story mostly as it unfolds in the present, with only the occasional flashback to select moments in the forties and fifties when he was a child and



Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta’s De-formed Auto-bio-graphé

teenager. For example, it is not until chapter  that the Acosta-as-narrator flashes back to his coming of age in Riverbank, California, where different events, told in a narrative present, describe the onset of his sexual and racial estrangement from the world. Then Acosta-as-narrator moves readers forward again to the narrative present of  for two chapters, only to jolt the reader back into the past again when he describes a racial and sexual awakening: his lost virginity in a brothel and his failed romance with highschool sweetheart Alice. Then the reader returns to the present, not returning to the past till after three chapters, when we learn of his joining the Air Force and his travels to Panama as a Baptist missionary. Finally, in chapter , the Acosta-as-narrator returns for the last time to the past, where the reader learns of his life in California, his experiences at a Modesto junior college, his trip to Los Angeles where he tries but fails to become a police officer, and his settling down in San Francisco to study for a law degree. In the final three chapters, the Acosta-as-narrator tells only of his experiences in . With these jumps in time and space, Acosta distinguishes between author and narrator who is ‘‘designing’’ his past as a story that is governed by fictive, rather than factually based, mimetic codes. In this way, Acosta creates what Louis A. Renza calls ‘‘a written performance’’ () in which his narrator serves to playfully foreground the selecting in and out of ‘‘facts’’ to tell a magicoreal story. A final example will clarify the character/narrator split and its function. When we open the autobiography, we are in July , just before Acostaas-character sets out ‘‘on the road.’’ The narrator begins: ‘‘I stand naked before the mirror. Every morning of my life I have seen that brown belly from every angle. It has not changed that I can remember. I was always a fat kid. I suck it in and expand an enormous chest of two large hunks of brown tit’’ (). The voice moves from an immediate present, acknowledging his naked brown flesh in front of the mirror, then dips into a past memory (‘‘I was always’’), only to prove his hypothesis stated in the present (‘‘It has not changed’’). However, this moment is set in July , and we are at the beginning of a journey that will end in January . The January  space/time continuum is closest to the narrating voice. Acosta has reinvented himself as the character looking at himself in the mirror in July ; having done so, he not only shifts into a magicorealist descriptive style, but actively invents or changes details, such as his name and age. The writer invents himself as character and frees himself to promote his ideological agenda.



Postethnic Narrative Criticism

                           A necessary second split takes place within The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo: narrator from character. Acosta’s splitting of authorial presence from narrator presence also allows the reader to distinguish between an Acosta-as-narrator and an Acosta-as-character—the character who inhabits a space that is temporally prior and spatially removed from that of the narrator. Here the narrator describes an Acosta-ascharacter who has run-ins with characters and who ultimately experiences a life-changing epiphany: at the end of the story, the character comes into a new consciousness: ‘‘I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice’’ (). He affirms his mixed-ethnic heritage and celebrates a new self-identification that is neither assimilatory nor Chicano-raza exclusive, but something in between. In this manner, Acosta-as-character assumes a ‘‘fluid’’ form that allows him to resist the ideological environment that has tried to drive and determine his life. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa identifies a similar mestiza worldview: La facultad is the capacity to see in the surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. It is an instant sensing, a quick perception, arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak; that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings, that is, behind which feelings reside/hide. The one possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world. ( ) With The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo there is a coming into such a heightened facultad, but seen as fictional construct. Acosta’s careful foregrounding of his autobiography as fictional narrative—the splitting then recombining of an invented narrator and invented character—moves our interpretation safely away from confusing his character’s coming into a resistant way of perceiving and being in his world with that of Anzaldúa, who locates her resistant, borderland vision in the ontologically real. Indeed, Acosta’s self-reflexive technique allows him to invent a character who comes into a new, ideologically fluid sense of self: the narrator tells the

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Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta’s De-formed Auto-bio-graphé

story in the present tense (mostly), but from a slight remove from events in the storyworld. That is, in spite of the pronominal fusion of character and narrator (‘‘Acosta’’), Acosta the author distinguishes between the narrator and the character. This allows Acosta to reconnect in the reader’s mind his character’s worldview as representative of the narrator’s; it opens the reader’s eyes to a narrator who uses the techniques that Seymour Menton identifies as characterizing magicorealism: an ‘‘ultrasharp focus,’’ a simultaneous ‘‘close and far view,’’ and a commitment to the ‘‘representational’’ (Magic Realism Rediscovered, –, –).

    -   -         Before the Acosta-as-character comes into his epiphany at the story’s close, the reader learns of events early in his life that marked him as a racialized body estranged from the world. Acosta-ascharacter first experiences a sense of estrangement as a ‘‘stinky,’’ primitive Other at elementary school. Like many characters that fill Chicano/a coming-of-age stories, this happens in the school setting where disciplinary power is exercised and racially Othered children are made to feel dirty, degenerate, and racially out of place. The young Acosta-as-character’s attraction to the Anglo Jane Addison—or ‘‘Miss It’’ () as he identifies—is blocked by the racist Junior Ellis. Though he manages to beat Ellis up on the playground in the hopes that his victory will gain the favor of ‘‘Miss It,’’ he fails. His proof of manliness does not allow him access to the privileged space accorded to the white boys. After the fight, Jane Addison asks the teacher, ‘‘Will you please ask Oscar to put on his shirt?’’ because, as she explains, ‘‘he stinks’’ (). The room fills with laughter, and Acosta’s ‘‘ears pound red’’; he suddenly feels ‘‘the overpowering weight of the fatness of [his] belly’’ (). Finally, he tells himself, ‘‘I am the nigger, after all. My mother was right. I am nothing but an Indian with a sweating body and faltering tits that sag at the sight of a young girl’s blue eyes’’ (). His desire for that most-coveted white female body in the logic of white, male narratives of realism is violently blocked; racist ideological structures become tangibly felt, and his otherwise positive sense of self is turned into its opposite. It is not that Acosta-as-character chooses to channel his desire into mere whiteness, but that his desire is directed for him—and that desire ends up in reproductive dead ends. The dominant system directs his desire toward

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism

an object he can never have, it frustrates the ever-threatening act of miscegenation, and ultimately convinces him he is powerless: ‘‘fat,’’ a ‘‘nigger,’’ and an ‘‘Indian.’’ His sense of sexual/racial powerlessness is solidified during other formative sexual moments. In junior high school, after taking Senaida Sanchez (a girl from his side of the tracks) to a Halloween party, his sense of ethnosexual self is again assaulted. His postparty stroll with Senaida ‘‘under a blood moon’’ () is violently interrupted by Junior Ellis and his redneck gang. They attack Acosta, forcing him to strip naked and simulate sexual intercourse with Senaida. They direct their flashlights at Acosta’s crotch then shout, ‘‘Whooee! Look at that. This nigger ain’t even a man. . . . This pussy Jigaboo ain’t even got hair on his prick’’ (). From this moment on, Acosta-as-character stops pursuing Chicanas and refers to his penis as ‘‘limp,’’ ‘‘wilted,’’ and ‘‘abandoned’’ (, ). As a character, then, Acosta internalizes and makes real those narratives that a perverse and racist white masculinity perpetuate. The narrator further describes the Acosta-as-character’s internalizing of the racist world when his teen-age romance with an Anglo girl leads to a deleterious encounter with the police. The girlfriend’s father discovers that Acosta is a Chicano and pulls out his police badge and threatens Acosta with incarceration. Soon after, Acosta finds himself suddenly ‘‘caught up in uncontrollable laughter’’ that then transforms into ‘‘convulsions [and] wretched vomit’’ (). In fact, Acosta-as-character’s ethnosexualidentified borders are so rigidly policed that by the time the reader meets him as an adult in July  he has transformed his image of himself into that of degenerate object: ‘‘For twelve months now all I have done is stuffed myself, puked wretched collages in a toilet bowl, swallowed  tranquilizers without water, stared at the idiot-box, coddled myself, and watched the snakes grow larger inside my head while waiting for the clockhand to turn’’ (). He has internalized the white gaze’s abnormalization of the brown subject, transforming himself into an object able to ‘‘quote every fucking show on Channels , , , ’’ (). The internalizing of racist ideological structures is completed as the adult Acosta-as-character embodies the degenerate, primitive Other. He becomes an unruly bodily mass of brown flesh that consumes white images—and foodstuffs: ‘‘Snicker bars, liverwurst sandwiches with gobs of mayonnaise and those Goddamned caramel sundaes’’ ().



Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta’s De-formed Auto-bio-graphé

               When the adult Acosta-as-character sets out on the road, he does more than, as Juan Bruce-Novoa puts it, become ‘‘a Chicano Kerouac, in search of his identity and the American Dream of selffulfillment’’ (). While traveling across the United States, he ingests and then regurgitates all of American mainstream culture, revealing his environs to be a society of the spectacle controlled by the magic of capital. For example, when the narrator describes the Acosta-as-character driving through San Francisco’s North Beach district, the spectacularization of built spaces is made apparent: We roll gently in our black submarine down Bay Street past staid Victorian houses with nooks and crannies, Austrian shades and garages, lit to look like European brothels. We circle the two giant steeples above Peter and Paul’s across from Washington Square where the old Italian men smoke stubby Toscanas and spit brown on the lawn. (  ) The narrator’s description reveals how the dislocated objects in his character’s late-capitalist cityscape simply appear (‘‘lit to look like’’) as a nondisjunctive fusion of objects symbolic of different times/spaces. A further example is the narrator’s description of the Acosta-as-character’s entering a North Beach Italian restaurant where images of different national cultures exist side by side: ‘‘flat-red carpets’’ are juxtaposed with ‘‘violet tablecloths’’; ‘‘dazzling chandeliers’’ hang from the ceiling, and artificial ‘‘whitecamellias [sic], red roses and purple spidermums’’ are interspersed between organic ‘‘olive trees, . . . pink brick walls,’’ and a ‘‘fountain that spouts yellow water from the pelvic bone of a whale’’ (). This restaurant’s jumbled interior leaves the describing eye no single point of fixation. Here, Acosta’s narrator and character simultaneously reveal how this nondisjunctive space is an artificial construct where signs of the exotic Thirdworld are dislocated, commodified, and consumed: ‘‘furs of dead animals, diamonds from the caves of deepest Africa, rubies from the eyes of deities’’ (). Acosta’s narrator sees through what his character experiences—literally morphing into ‘‘a motherfucking gorilla. Fangs and grizzly hair’’ ()—to critique the spectacularization and commodification of the exotic. 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

The Acosta-as-character’s hypervisibility as abnormal/unreal ethnosexual object ironically leads him into an empowered ethnosexual position that playfully resists hegemonic structures. As I have already discussed, the character comes into a more fluid sense of self and a nondisjunctive way of seeing his world at the story’s close when he comes into his mestizo Mexican heritage on the U.S.–Mexico border: ‘‘I decided to go to El Paso, the place of my birth, to see if I could find the object of my quest. I still wanted to find out just who in the hell I really was’’ (). Here he becomes aware of the futility of struggling to fit into ideologically structured categories of identification. He informs, ‘‘my single mistake has been to seek an identity with any one person or nation or with any part of history. . . . What I see now . . . is that I am neither a Mexican nor an American. . . . I am a Chicano by ancestry and a Brown Buffalo by choice’’ (). However, such a process has its downside, one that Acosta the author is careful to highlight. The Acosta-as-character’s act of empresencing a new, more fluid self that is critical of all categories of identity that are manipulated by ideology takes place via the brown female body. In an exaggerated style, he informs the reader how Mexicanas have ‘‘the answer to my pain’’ and will cure him of his ‘‘ulcers, and the blood in the toilet’’ (). If we consider that Acosta-as-narrator is closest in narrative time to the moment of Acosta-as-character’s transformation, then the reader must reread the entire story—including those moments when Acosta-as-character encounters the disciplining narratives of Junior Ellis and the police—as filtered through a narrator who, like García Márquez’s Melquíades in One Hundred Years of Solitude, can ‘‘see the reality of things beyond any formalism’’ (). In other words the author Acosta’s splitting of narrator (the entity that describes and who filters the storyworld) from character (the entity who experiences directly events and characters and who internalizes racist ideologies) allows the reader to see the formation of the entity that controls the autobiography’s magicorealist vision. The character’s emergence into a fluid nondisjunctive subjectivity is to be identified with the narrator of the story in toto—a narrator who amplifies and reveals the mechanisms that operate in a U.S. consumer culture and naturalize late capital’s spectacularization of society.

        -   -        The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo is a narrative that describes the powerfully subversive spirit of laughter. The Acosta-as

Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta’s De-formed Auto-bio-graphé

character’s laughter in the face of adversity and/or even his encounter with mainstream-identified characters’ racist stereotyping makes present the resistant, carnivalizing spirit of laughter. In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin locates the subversive spirit of the underclass collective in the act of laughter: For Bakhtin, laughter ‘‘builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state’’ (). Laughter happens all over the place within Acosta’s storyworld: from the character’s reaction to the policing of his racially sexualized desire, to his drug-induced run-ins with mainstream America, to his hallucinatory banter with his Freudian shrink, and so on. Here, laughter does not overturn disciplining narratives, but it does offer him a moment of insertion (felt anger) into and against the disciplinary power structures. His laughter appears at the moment that he, as a subject in this encounter, discovers a way to channel his aggressivity and paralyzing anxiety into an activity that is eminently pragmatic and external to himself. In spite of the disciplinary nature of a mainstream system (coded as ‘‘Anglo authority versus ethnosexual criminal’’), for the Acosta-as-character laughter works as an inhabiting mechanism. For example, the day Acosta resigns as a lawyer he also walks out on his Freudian-trained shrink, Dr. Serbin: ‘‘I turn and walk away from [Dr. Serbin]. . . . I cannot control myself. The laughter of madness clenches my throat. Tears are flowing down my fat cheeks, their wetness is warm. . . . I have paid all my debts, I have paid all my dues and now nothing remains but the joy of madness. Another wild Indian gone amok’’ (). Both his profession (lawyer) and his psychoanalyst are symbolic of disciplining structures that suffocate the character. By laughing, he breaks with the system. Indeed, Acosta’s laughter, like that of Gary Gossen’s American Indian trickster, ‘‘swallows the categories of evil and good, confounds them in experience and creates a world that is neither the one nor the other, but a mixture of both’’ (). The device of laughter, then, is a space-clearing device that allows the character to confound and/or subvert ideological structures that restrict his experiences. As I have noted, central to Acosta-as-character’s coming into a fluid sense of self-identification and subversive spirit at the end of the story is his coming into a sense of himself as Chicano and as a playfully self-titled Brown Buffalo. His transformation is the key to unlocking the Acosta-asnarrator’s carnivalesque worldview. Once finished, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo demands to be reread with this subversive, parodic worldview in mind. Acosta’s parody works on the margins between genres and rhetorical modes; it is a form that identifies and is identified by the magicorealist storytelling mode. First, Acosta employs parody to work within and 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

against ideological structures that normalize whiteness and abnormalize brownness. Second, the narrator’s descriptive exaggeration of events parodies verisimilar narrative strategies. For example, he does not just take a couple of painkillers, but describes downing ‘‘ tranquilizers without water’’ to quell the burn in his stomach after, for example, eating ‘‘hot sauce, sawdust hamburgers, [and] Chinese curry’’ (, ). Such exaggerated description resonates with mimesis-as-play storytelling conventions (François Rabelais’s encyclopedic lists) that parody the capitalist consumptive hegemonies of his day. And while generic convention places The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo within the picaresque genre identified by such texts as Kerouac’s On the Road or Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it does so from the point of view of a parodying brown narrator: ‘‘another Indian gone amok,’’ he announces playfully and to call attention to the primitivism in Kerouac and Thompson. In The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, the narrative spirit speaks to and from within such picaresque narratives, but from the point of view of a parodic Brown Buffalo.

               As a functional device of magicorealism, parody works to both emplace the narrative within larger networks of mimesis-asplay texts and to re-form conventions of autobiography. As such, the narrative gravitates around the underdog figure. The narrator describes Acostaas-character as gargantuan antihero: I tighten, suck at the air and recall that Charles Atlas was a ninety-nine-pound weakling when the beach bully kicked sand in his girlfriend’s pretty face. Perhaps my old mother was right. I should lay off those Snicker bars, those liverwurst sandwiches with gobs of mayonnaise and those Goddamned caramel sundaes.’’ () However, the narrative invests his underdog status with the subversive spirit that characterizes the trickster/pícaro. His parodic sensibility and quixotic imagination allow him to laugh at and destabilize traditionally restricting generic and ideological categories. On one occasion, when the episodic narrative pauses to describe the Acosta-as-character’s run-in with 

Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta’s De-formed Auto-bio-graphé

wealthy, white America, he is described waking up in an Aspen chalet where he playfully imagines himself trapped in a medieval dungeon and asks, ‘‘But how does a man deal with fantasy? When you’re in a dungeon all by yourself, a giant Doberman guarding against your escape’’ (). He describes a battle with the dog in much the same way that Don Quixote battles his windmills, though with Acosta’s character wearing swim ‘‘trunks, construction boots and the CIA pilot’s blue goggles’’ () and not Quixote’s papier-mâchéd armor and shield. Acosta and Cervantes’s characters use different means to the same end, however. Both invest their narratives with, as Bakhtin identifies more generally, a ‘‘parodied hybridization of the ‘alien, miraculous world’ chronotope of chivalric romances, with the ‘high road winding through one’s native land’ chronotope that is characteristic of the picaresque novel’’ (Rabelais and His World, ). The narrative event and its playful rendering, then, announce its affiliation with the mimesis-as-play genre. It does so, however, with a slight difference to Cervantes’s narrative: it emplaces a racially identified trickster/pícaro. The parodic play is given a Chicano rasquache spin identified by Tomas Ybarra-Frausto as not only an act of subverting and turning ‘‘ruling paradigms upside down‘‘(), but also an act of recycling available images and objects to engender ‘‘hybridization, juxtaposition, and integration [that] creates a florid milieu of admixtures and recombinations’’ (). For example, after vomiting, the narrator identifies the ‘‘fluid patterns’’ as ‘‘the potential for art’’ and concludes: ‘‘Dali could do something with this, I’m sure. Perhaps I should write to him’’ (). On other occasions, Acosta-as-character role plays as Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, and García Lorca, as well as ‘‘Old Bogey,’’ James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Charles Atlas. Here we see how his form of parody and cultural blending become two related techniques. He recycles the U.S. mainstream’s images to parody these tough-guy personae and also call attention to white masculinity as a performative construct that reproduces an image of white paternalism. And he also mixes the low and high styles of Chicano caló (‘‘pendejo,’’ ‘‘chingón,’’ ‘‘simón’’) with book-English as well as the low- and highbrow cultural references: Tarzan and Jefferson Airplane with García Lorca and Dylan Thomas, for example. The net effect: the narrator/character’s parodic rasquache spirit gives tangible expression to the autobiography’s nondisjunctive vision of the real and unreal, fact and fiction, to destabilize genre and denaturalize those repressing ideologies the character encounters. I have argued that Acosta’s narrative uses the conventions of magicorealism—the narrator and character’s nondisjunctive representation of the unreal and real—to re-form the conventions of ethnic-identified autobi

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

ography. In The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo we see how the splitting of author from narrator and narrator from character allows the reader to identify the contours of the narrator’s magicorealist worldview. It is a worldview formed out of the character’s experiences with a spectacularizing, exploitive racist society. This splitting also becomes the self-reflexive device that reminds the reader that this magicorealist worldview is a fictional construct experienced by an invented character/narrator. Finally, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo presents its readers with a complexly textured magicorealism that attempts to re-form its reader’s expectations by providing a multidimensional self-narration that superimposes, combines, and critically amplifies traditionally segregated genres and repressive ideological structures.

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Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta’s De-formed Auto-bio-graphé

Four

ANA CASTILLO’S (EN)GENDERED MAGICOREALISM

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agicorealism can be a narrative mode used by U.S. Latina authors to invent stories that centrally emplace their Latina characters. As we have seen in the past few decades, the form can also be a storytelling mode used by some Latina authors as a formulaic container for spiced-up, magical stories that uncritically reproduce exotic stereotypes. (As I mentioned in the first chapter, this would include, but is not limited to, writers such as Isabel Allende, Sandra Benítez, and María Amparo Escandón.) In this case, Febe Portillo’s critique of magicorealism as a narrative that limits ‘‘how much of a social message [Chicanas] can convey’’ () is appropriate. However, as I suggested earlier in this book, magicorealism can work as a powerful storytelling mode that allows less-formulaic authors to draw readers into storyworlds where Latina-identified characters and their complex experiences can expand readers’ perception of the racist and heterosexist injustices in the world hors texte; I think here of Denise Chávez, Graciela Limón, Cecile Pineda, Isabella Ríos, and María Helena Viramontes. Ana Castillo, in her novel So Far from God (), not only uses the mode to invent stories that call attention to social injustices, she also uses an amplified parodic technique to self-reflexively engender the mode. Castillo invents a story where the ‘‘unreal’’ and the ‘‘real’’ coexist within the storyworld but do so as filtered through the parodic voice of a Chicana-identified narrator and characters. In this sense, Castillo’s novel self-reflexively engenders her magicorealism to write within and against its primitivist and masculinist identifications. She uses the mode to write within and against ideologies that primitivize non-Western cultures such as those identified by Keith Hollaman and David Young in the use of ‘‘myth,

folktale, tall story’’ as emblematic of the Other’s prerational logic that is akin to ‘‘our childhood self ’’ ().1 Castillo also uses the mode to write within and against the tradition that one-dimensionalizes and/or erases women in male-protagonist-centered stories. Rudolfo Anaya, Arturo Islas, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, and Victor Villaseñor, to name a few, use the form to critique racist and classist hegemonies, but their stories often uncritically reproduce heterosexist paradigms of dominance. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, García Márquez uses the nondisjunctive unreal/real narrator to invent a self-reflexive story that describes a panoply of characters who uncritically reproduce and/or forcefully critique oppressive and exploitive ideologies. Yet García Márquez’s use of magicorealism operates through the point of view of the male character and narrative filter, Melquíades. Thus, while One Hundred Years of Solitude uses the form of magicorealism to depict its characters’ complex interactions with a world increasingly caught up in ideological and sociopolitical structures of containment, it does so as focused through a hundred-year patrilineage that ultimately relegates the women characters to a backdrop: they function either as the men’s love/lust objects (pure, virginal, childlike women like Remedios the Beauty or prostitutes like Pilar Terner or the gargantuan Nigromanta) or as domestically bound maternal figures (Ursula, Santa Sofía de la Piedad, Fernanda del Carpio, and Amaranta). The male’s heroic exploits—leading rebellions, discovering alchemical mixtures, or deciphering Sanskrit parchments—play center stage while the women characters are placed within a static backdrop of domestication and/or sexualization. For the woman characters, then, the heterogenizing spirit of this magicorealist storyworld lacks the vitality and complexity experienced by its male characters. Before moving into an analysis of Castillo’s engendered magicorealism, to foreground how certain Chicana authors have destabilized and critiqued the masculinist type of magicorealism, I turn briefly to Cecile Pineda’s Love Queen of the Amazon (). Here Pineda invents a self-reflexive narrator who nondisjunctively presents the unreal/real events in her storyworld, and that shows the bitter, suffocating effects of the carnival spirit in masculinist magicorealism. García Márquez’s Melquíades and his band of gypsies carnivalize the homogenous space of a Macondo by introducing such magical objects as magnifying glasses, flying carpets, and ice largely to the Buendía male characters. Pineda’s circus arrives in her story’s Peruvian outback and brings the smell of death and annihilation to her female protagonist, Ana Magdalena. Ana Magdalena’s contact with other cultures and worlds does not expand her perspective of the world as it does with García 

Ana Castillo’s (En)gendered Magicorealism

Márquez’s José Arcadio Buendía, but rather makes her feel a nightmarish oppression: There were dead things in [the rooms], skeletons of small, defenseless animals, the vertebrae of snakes strung on animated wires, fusty dead herbs and flowers, votive candles, and a row of women dressed in angel costumes, their eyes sewn up with darning needles. It was a house of horrors from which her mother had to carry her, nearly lifeless and paralyzed with fright, and from which it had taken her three weeks to recover. ( ) Pineda’s narrator is showing us the other side of the carnival spirit so central to magicorealism; she shows readers a world where women are not the positive recipients of new cultural contacts, but rather become contained objects ornamented as spectacle (‘‘eyes sewn up with darning needles’’), causing the protagonist to experience a lifeless paralysis. Pineda not only uses the content of the storyworld to critique the masculinist type of magicorealism, but proceeds to do so by inventing a parodic narrator who caricatures male characters like Don Federico Orgaz y Orgaz. Don Federico Orgaz y Orgaz—as his name might foretell—is styled after a brand of male-identified magicorealism that is full of hot air. The narrator parodies Don Federico Orgaz y Orgaz by giving him an exaggerated self-importance as a writer of magicorealism. Don Federico Orgaz y Orgaz exclaims, ‘‘Fabulation! Fabulation is what is needed, the endless and obsessive elaboration of the narrative line to form labyrinthine arabesques, polyhedrons, dodecahedrons of astonishing and dizzying complexity’’ (). However, the reader soon learns that Don Federico Orgaz y Orgaz suffers from writers block and cannot write such a novel. The narrator playfully pokes fun at Orgaz y Orgaz’s appropriating of Ana Magdalena’s stories to overcome his block. In an interesting twist, Ana Magdalena is the character who accumulates experiences and changes—she transforms the domestic sphere of home into a money-making brothel—and Orgaz y Orgaz is the character who sits in his study cut off from the world and who never experiences change. Here Pineda’s novel centralizes the female character and critiques a magicorealist tradition that privileges male-centric storyworlds. Ana Castillo similarly uses the magicorealist storytelling mode to complicate novels that one-dimensionalize Latina characters as objects to be penetrated and/or to be oppressively ornamented. Castillo also redresses a 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

magicorealist tradition that essentializes its women characters by inventing a third-person magicoreal narrator who is Chicana-identified and by the foregrounding of the Chicana characters’ experiences—but within a contemporary, late-capitalist spectacularizing United States setting. Thus, unlike Pineda, who sets her novel in a vaguely contoured temporal past and in a Peruvian outback, Castillo locates her engendered magicorealism in a United States present. The net effect, for all of Pineda’s parodic play and critique of a masculinist type of magicorealism, is that its atemporalizing and aspatializing nonetheless primitivizes its engendered brand of magicorealism. Castillo’s characters resist and/or conform to patriarchal ideologies within a vibrantly identified contemporary mainstream United States. Castillo’s magicorealism does not exist in some distant narrative horizon. Here five Chicana characters living in Tomé, New Mexico, interact with an everyday culturally and historically situated American mainstream. Her characters Sofia and her four daughters, Fe (Faith), Esperanza (Hope), Caridad (Charity), and La Loca (The Crazy One, a name shared with Queen Isabella of Spain’s daughter) live surrounded by telenovelas, baseball, and newage psychic surgery; these characters interact with Mexican mythic figures like La Llorona, and their actions lead to thunderous cries from the Amerindian god Tsichtinako. Castillo’s narrator presents these characters within a seamless mixture of Mexican, Amerindian, and United States mainstream cultures.

                    In this nondisjunctive representation of a United States/Chicana/Mexican contemporary setting that these characters inhabit, Castillo does more, as Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak points out than ‘‘decenter patriarchal biases inherent in the form’’ (). Castillo uses magicorealism to emplace her characters within a late-twentieth-century world dominated by capitalism that naturalizes as normal the estrangement these characters feel in an increasingly spectacularized society. Guy Debord defines such an omnipresence of spectacle in society as ‘‘capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’’ (). Castillo’s characters no longer experience their contemporary United States directly; they struggle to survive in a world that has made tangible capitalist ideology in the form of ‘‘the spectacle’’ (Debord, ). Castillo invents Chicana characters like Fe who are ultimately destroyed by their uncritical participation in the society of the spectacle; however, Castillo mostly invents characters who come into some 

Ana Castillo’s (En)gendered Magicorealism

sort of resistance to such a society of the spectacle; she uses magicorealism as a form to convey a story wherein characters learn to oppose and subvert capitalist ideology not from some magical, primitive-identified space outside of the society of the spectacle, but from within. And she conveys this through a self-reflexive metacritical narratorial lens that reminds its reader that the submission and/or resistance to the society of the spectacle exists in the land of narrative fiction.2 The characters’ experiences make visible the misogynistic and racist violence that a society of the spectacle otherwise seeks to normalize. The narrator describes how Caridad finds herself in a gutter, having been mysteriously attacked by ‘‘a thing both tangible and amorphous [that] was pure force’’ (). However, when the reader learns that this mysterious ‘‘pure force’’ was responsible for her violation and disfigurement, and that she was out with a man the night of the attack, the narrator is careful not to leave the mysterious event as only mysterious: Caridad’s ‘‘nipples had been bitten off. She had also been scourged with something, branded like a cattle. Worst of all, a tracheotomy was performed because she had also been stabbed in the throat’’ (). The mysterious event is the violence of a society that covers over the ‘‘pure force’’ of a sexist and racist hegemony. Caridad’s society of the spectacle brands, maims, and disfigures gendered bodily sites—and it silences. While Caridad reclaims her body and voice as a site of resistance in a magical act of self-repair, Castillo’s other character Fe experiences the violence of a society of the spectacle to a tragic end. The narrator describes Fe as a character who wants to achieve the American Dream. After she fails to get married—the first hurdle to realizing this dream—she magically begins speaking with a ‘‘scratch-sounding’’ voice that garbles her sentences like ‘‘a faulty World War II radio transmitter’’ (). However, this does not stop her from acquiring that ‘‘long-dreamed of automatic dishwasher, microwave, Cuisinart, and the VCR’’ (). To get her ‘‘three-bedroom, two-car-garage tract home in Rio Rancho’’ (), she works a variety of jobs—jobs that inevitably lead to a run-in with racism and that finally land her working with toxic waste at the ACME chemical plant. At this point in the story, the narrator describes Fe as having breath that reeks of glue, red rings around her nose, and ‘‘big dried spots on her legs’’ (). Finally, Fe’s body magically melts into air. While Castillo’s narrator narrates Fe’s magical disappearance as anything but real, it also locates this within a spectacularizing patriarchal, racist society. In Castillo’s story, the heterosexist and racist violence that the society of the spectacle deploys to ensure its existence manifests itself differently for

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism

the character Esperanza. Here we see more directly how television works as an appendage to naturalize oppressive and exploitive capitalist ideology. The narrator describes how Esperanza’s job as a local television broadcaster leads to her promotion—a ‘‘promotion’’ that takes her to Iraq as a U.S. correspondent during the Gulf War. Here, she magically disappears. The narrator informs, ‘‘The last traces of her and the other three members of the news crew were their abandoned jeep, six thousand dollars in cash, camera equipment, and footsteps in the sand leading toward enemy lines’’ (). Again, the narrator is careful not to locate the magical disappearance in a folkloric vein; this would be a magicorealism that serves the function of idealizing the Chicana character’s disappearance; it would locate its narrative in primitivism. Rather, the narrator’s unflinching representation of Esperanza’s magical disappearance comments again on the violence of the society of the spectacle—an ideological structure that, in this case, not only disappears bodies like Esperanza’s, but needs ‘‘enemy lines’’ to authorize its existence. According to Esperanza’s story, the society of the spectacle is an ideological construct that makes visible an Other (in this case, the Arabs) and/or magically erases this Other (in this case, the Chicana) for the exploitive and oppressive machine of capitalism to continue to operate.

              Fe and Esperanza are characters who magically disappear never to reappear; within the storyworld, they function as sites of brown femaleness violently erased as the society of the spectacle peddles a patriarchal nationalist ideology. However, Castillo invests her character Caridad with the magical ability to reappear in the storyworld. The narrator describes her mother, Sofia, stepping ‘‘back when she saw, not what had been left of her daughter, half repaired by modern medical technology, tubes through her throat, bandages over skin that was gone, surgery piecing together flesh that was once her daughter’s breasts, but Caridad as she was before’’ (). As the reader soon learns, Caridad’s magical reappearance as a central character in the novel functions to make visible other spectacles, like that of Catholicism, that might otherwise cover over exploitive and oppressive ideological structures. She also reappears to undergo a shift into a lesbian sexuality that is soon followed by her magical ascendance into a pre-columbian spiritual matrix—the mythical realm of Tsichtinako. (All of this, of course, told from a narrator’s self-reflexive, parodic voice

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Ana Castillo’s (En)gendered Magicorealism

that reminds the reader of the spectacular nature of events that, with too serious an approach, might be read as Castillo uncritically reproducing a primitivist magicorealism.) Castillo invents the character Francisco el Penitente (a.k.a. ‘‘El Franky,’’ ‘‘Panchito,’’ ‘‘Paco,’’ or ‘‘Chico’’) as a counterpoint to Caridad’s entering into a feminist-indigenous spirituality. Francisco also comes into a new faith system—indigenous Catholicism typified by the syncretic santería—but one that leads to less liberating ends. At first, Francisco’s identification with santería is simply a way for him to survive as a soldier in the Vietnam war. It acts as the vehicle for a solidarity to form between the New Mexican Francisco and a fellow soldier who is Puerto Rican. Both are already marginalized by the group of soldiers because they are Latinos; when they discover a cultural common ground, this solidifies their bond. They survive the war together. At this point, the Francisco character functions to demonstrate the power of santería as a modern-day, pan-Latinidad survival strategy— and that speaks of the syncretic strategies used by Amerindians during the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas. (Shangó becomes Santa Barbara, for example.) When Francisco returns to New Mexico after the war and lives in ‘‘a kind of mummified state’’ (), his increasingly active identification with a syncretic, indigenous-identified Catholicism also functions as a survival strategy. As a self-identifying santero, he finds meaning in life again. That is until Caridad appears. Here, the narrative shifts gears, representing this indigenous Catholicism less as a powerful, race-identified survival strategy and more as a spectacle that covers over oppressive heterosexist ideological paradigms. Even though Francisco is described as a loner who finds solace in the carving of bultos (wooden saints), the reader soon discovers that he is no different from the other male characters in the story. He lives within a patriarchal system wherein even a paganized Catholicism comes to exist as a spectacular construct to cover over the deeper ideological workings of the virgin/whore dialectic. For example, Francisco as a boy reads his mother’s slow death as her becoming ‘‘no less than a saint’’ (). The narrator expands Francisco’s sainting of his mother to identify a patriarchal culture generalization where ‘‘Many men say this of their mothers’’ (). And when Francisco first sees Caridad, he falls for her because he sees her as his virginal savior: ‘‘he looked upon her as one looked upon Mary’’ (). However, the narrator soon reveals this to be a spectacular construct. Francisco swiftly shifts his perception of her as a ‘‘sweeter-than-the-nectar-froma-trumpet-vine Caridad’’ () the moment his heteronormative desiring is blocked and his masculinity threatened. In Francisco’s mind, when he 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

learns of Caridad’s same-sexual desire, she is no longer the virgin, but the whore. Silvio Sirias and Richard McGarry pointedly summarize: ‘‘Caridad’s lesbianism violates the patriarchal codes to which he strongly subscribes, and he perversely snaps’’ (). In a rage, Francisco abducts Caridad’s lover Esmeralda: ‘‘Yes, abducted her, right in front of the rape crisis center’’ (Castillo, ). Here the narrator makes a spectacle of Francisco’s heteronormative violence; this spectacle of blocked desire and Francisco’s submission to a masculinist whore/virgin paradigm leads to his own selfdestruction. After Caridad and Esmeralda magically disappear, Francisco is later found ‘‘dangling sorrowful-like like a crow-picked pear from a tall piñon, which was how someone had first put it and how it was remembered after that’’ (). While the narrator emphasizes the macho destructive ideological structure that leads to Francisco’s self-annihilation, the possibility arises too for the narrator to present an alternative. As I suggested before, Castillo also invents a story that positively codes faith systems—especially those faith systems identified as matrilineal. Caridad represents a character who moves from the heavy and oppressive faith of Catholicism to a more liberating, indigenous, female-identified faith. After Caridad uses pagan Catholicism in the process of self-repair, this belief system ultimately weighs her down: having lived in a cave for a year, she is fixed magically to the earth, and even a troop of grown men cannot move her. Along Caridad’s journey to coming into a liberating faith system, she first apprentices with doña Felicia—a French-speaking curandera. Here Caridad lives in a trailer with a Formica kitchen table and a ‘‘wood-trunk coffee table that the mexicano merchant who sold it to Caridad swore he bought from some indios in Chihuahua’’ (), a single futon bed, and a ‘‘three-dimensional picture of La Virgen de Guadalupe, San Martin Caballero, and El Santo Niño on the wall’’ (). And during this period Caridad learns to heal as a curandera and to vision-quest: ‘‘Now her dreams were not hits and misses no more like in the beginning, but very clear messages which, with the help of her mentor, doña Felicia, she became adept at interpreting’’ (). However, after Caridad falls in love with the Acoma Pueblo Indian Esperanza, she rejects this faith system; she frees herself of a syncretic faith system that is ultimately still tied to a restrictive domestic sphere and that ultimately serves as another form of the spectacle that wraps over an oppressive masculinist and primitivist ideology. Caridad’s rejection of the curandera role is tied to her falling in love with the character Esperanza. The narrator identifies Esperanza as a physically strong mestiza: ‘‘She was dark. Indian or Mexican. Black, black hair. Big 

Ana Castillo’s (En)gendered Magicorealism

sturdy thighs’’ (). Caridad’s falling in love with the mestiza Esperanza ultimately serves, as Ralph Rodriguez succinctly identifies, ‘‘a narrative strategy for ruminating on creation and offering an alternative genesis myth’’ (). Though Caridad first sees Esperanza sitting on an adobe wall at the Catholic church in Chimayo, the narrator is careful not to associate Esperanza with Catholicism. She is sitting on the wall in between the Catholic sanctuary and another space; as the narrative unfolds, Esperanza is associated with the matrilocal faith system of her Acoma Pueblo heritage. Anthropologist M. A. Jaimes Guerrero identifies the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico as a communal space that is characterized by a pre-colonial matriarchal social and cultural structure. In such a community, there is the seamless interweaving of the social structures with a culture filled with, as Guerrero writes, ‘‘archetypal images of strong native Woman Entities endowed with a powerful spiritual presence’’ (). It is within this woman-centered, ‘‘geomythological’’ (cf. Guerrero) social and cultural matrix that Caridad finally experiences an existence free of the spectacle. The Acoma Pueblo villagers hear the thunderous voice of Tsichtinako, a god the narrator describes as ‘‘the Invisible One who had nourished the first two humans, who were also both female’’ (). Ralph Rodriguez elaborates on this event, writing how Tsichtinako locates Caridad and Esperanza within the Acoma Pueblo creation story where ‘‘two sister-spirits—later named Iatiku (LifeBringer) and Nautsiti (Full Basket)—are born underground’’ (). After Tsichtinako raises them, Rodriguez continues, ‘‘the sisters are each given a basket, one contains plant seeds and the other classy sculptures of animals. With the assistance of a badger, a locust, and Tsichtinako, the sister-spirits leave the underground world to populate the world created by Uchtsiti with their plants and animals’’ (). So as Caridad and Esperanza take a leap off the mesa cliff and fall not to their death, but to disappear into the earth, they magically return to an indigenous- and feminist-empowered origin. To this end, the narrator describes their flight not ‘‘out toward the sun’s rays or up to the clouds’’ ()—a narrative readers might confuse with the more patriarchal and Western Icarus myth—but a flight that leads them ‘‘down, deep within the soft, moist dark earth where [they] could be safe and live forever’’ (). As the god Tsichtinako calls, Caridad and Esperanza magically enter an emancipatory, nongendered space associated with an originary feminist creatrix.3 The narrator frames Caridad and Esperanza’s magical disappearance within non-Western, matrifocal geomythological structures. This might lead one to conclude, as Ralph Rodriguez does, that ‘‘Castillo recuperates

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism

the Acoma creation myth to demonstrate the availability of alternative originary narratives and their usefulness in critiquing social domination’’ (). Or, this might lead to a critique such as that of Ellen McCracken, who faults the novel for not fully developing Caridad as a lesbian and for finally keeping its lesbian thematic ‘‘closeted’’ (). Silvio Sirias and Richard McGarry find that Caridad’s lesbianism is presented as ‘‘unacceptable’’ and read Caridad’s magical return as an act of sacrifice ‘‘to purify patriarchal society’’ (). This recounted, these critics seem to miss the selfreflexive magicorealist signposts present in the narrative. The narrator’s parodic voice and the novel’s participation within a mimesis-as-play tradition (often characterized by so-called flat and not round characters) identify Caridad and her story as fictional construct and not an ontological manifesto. While Caridad’s story might lead one to celebrate or critique her disappearance as a return to a counter-hegemonic originary space, the narrator’s parodic voice calls attention to the construction of an ‘‘authentic’’ precolonial, pregendered space of emancipation as a spectacular construct. The narrator’s use of a stylized voice (exaggeration, repetition, and a thickening of cliché) serves as a metacritical signpost of those magicorealist novels—and also critical theories that identify an authentic, mystically resistant fronterista consciousness—that function as mouthpieces for exoticist and primitivist ideologies. So the narrator’s self-reflexive techniques not only reveal such events as Caridad’s geomythological return as a spectacle of primitivism, but operate more generally to call attention to formulaic uses of magicorealism that peddle the Other as preternaturally exotic. The narrator’s destabilizing of the spectacle of primitivism is fully realized at the novel’s end. Here, the narrator playfully describes the character Sofia organizing the annual conference of M.O.M.A.S. (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints), a ‘‘world event’’ that takes ‘‘the cake over the World Series and even the Olympics’’ (). The narrator reveals how Sofia and ‘‘Las Blessed Mothers’’ manipulate the spectacles of Catholicism, capitalism, and primitivism to turn a profit through selling T-shirts with phrases such as ‘‘The Twenty-Third Annual Convention of M.O.M.A.S., Flushing NY,’’ or ‘‘Perros Bravos, Nuevo León’’ or ‘‘Las Islas Canarias,’’ or ‘‘My Mother Is a Member of Mothers of Martyrs and Saints—Genuflect, Please!’’; posters; ‘‘forever-burning votive candles’’; and ‘‘the all-time favorite—La Loca Santa and her Sisters [sic] Tarot Deck’’ (–). Sofia and ‘‘Las Blessed Mothers’’ sell more ‘‘products and souvenirs than what a tourist could find on a given day at Disney World’’ (), manipulating the ideological structures of capitalism and religion to cre-

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Ana Castillo’s (En)gendered Magicorealism

ate a spectacle of Latina empowerment. The narrator parodies their harnessing of the power of spectacle—sensationalist media and consumable exotic commodities—as a self-reflexive moment that critiques the dangers of slipping into a formulaic use of magicorealism to package and sell the Latina as consumable exotic Other.

             The narrator in So Far from God uses a metacritical magicorealist technique to both represent the unreal appearances and disappearances of its characters as real within the storyworld and to call attention to the representation of these events as a narrative spectacle. It uses a metacritical magicorealist storytelling mode to call attention to those novels that use a ‘‘labyrinthine arabesque’’ (Pineda, ) style and magical event to spice up otherwise banal, formulaic stories. As I have begun to identify, the narrator uses a parodic style both to identify its use of magicorealism as a storytelling form and to destabilize those masculinist magicorealist novels penned by García Márquez, Rudolfo Anaya, Victor Villaseñor, and so on. In so doing, then, Castillo’s Chicana-articulating metacritical magicorealism announces its participation within, and deforming of, a masculinist mimesis-as-play narrative tradition. Here, the Chicana-identified parodic narrating style locates So Far from God within a narrative zone where it dialogically engages with a global network of antirealist narrative canons. As Héctor Calderón identifies of such a narrative contact zone: It’s not ‘‘Western’’ literature in the conventional sense, yet it has grown both from within the tradition of Western literature, and in response to the pressures from the periphery of Western culture. If you think in terms of where we’re educated, the universities we attend, the institutional framework which transmits a European, in some cases a very British tradition, and then you examine the cultural bonds with Mexican or Latin American tradition—this dual formation, First World and Third World, is going to come through. . . . A Chicano writer has a certain social formation that may run counter to the Western tradition at the same time that he or she has an

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism

ideological formation that is Western. It’s there, we can’t deny either aspect. (                   ’      ‘‘                                    ,’’   ) While Castillo’s narrator announces its engagement with other networks of mimesis-as-play narrators seen in the narratives of Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, García Márquez, and so on, its filtering of events through a Chicana narrator and its intensification of parody to a metacritically selfreflexive degree reveal how such mimesis-as-play, counter-canonic genres can, in their very solidification as a genre, lose their power to offer up antirealist subversions. That is to say, Castillo invents a metacritical magicorealist narrator to up the ante on the mimesis-as-play genre, to re-form this tradition á la Chicana and to revitalize it. The reader can identify any given chapter as the narrative’s participation within the conventions of a mimesis-as-play genre. For example, chapter  reads: ‘‘What Appears to Be a Deviation of Our Story but Wherein, with Some Patience, the Reader Will Discover That There Is Always More Than the Eye Can See to Any Account’’ (). The long-winded summary of events to follow in an identifiably parodic voice that plays with cliché identifies the conventions of the picaresque. (In Don Quixote a chapter reads, ‘‘Which treats of the station in life and the pursuits of the famous gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha,’’ for example.) The reader can identify Castillo’s chapter titles as signposts indicating the novel’s participation in a larger picaresque tradition because of its use of techniques that are no longer seen as novel, but as part of a narrative convention. From the very beginning of the novel, the narrator announces that it is engaging with and de-forming those ‘‘other forms of fiction’’ (Frye, ) characterized by parodic narrators, digressive plot lines, lengthy catalogues, and stylized characters. Castillo’s narrator begins the story accordingly: ‘‘La Loca was only three years old when she died. Her mother Sofi woke at twelve midnight to the howling and neighing of the five dogs, six cats, and four horses, whose custom it was to go freely in and out of the house. Sofi got up and tiptoed out of her room’’ (). The exaggerated laundry-list catalogue is reminiscent of the narrator’s style in François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Such a narrator, for example, describes Gargantua undoing ‘‘his magnificent codpiece and, bringing out his john-thomas, pissing on [the Parisians] so fiercely that he drowned two hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and eighteen per-



Ana Castillo’s (En)gendered Magicorealism

sons, not counting the women and small children’’ (). Castillo’s narrator uses a similar hypotactic style and lengthy catalogue; however, her narrator does not focus on the adventures of epic-proportioned male heroes, but rather on the experiences of its Chicana characters. As another chapter title reads: ‘‘An Account of the First Astonishing Occurrence in the Lives of a Woman Named Sofia and Her Four Fated Daughters; and the Equally Astonishing Return of Her Wayward Husband’’ (). In this spirit, Castillo’s narrator defamiliarizes such mimesis-as-play conventions through her narrator’s use of a heightened self-reflexive language and its self-identification as Chicana. For example, the narrator describes Fe’s return from having a bridal gown fitted for herself and ‘‘the three gabachas (my term, not Fe’s) she had chosen from the bank’’ (). The narrator’s parenthetical ‘‘(my term, not Fe’s)’’ to indicate that it is she, not Fe, who uses the word gabacha is an ‘‘intrusive’’ gesture aimed at identifying the narrator as Chicana. When the narrator uses such words as troquita (small truck), la mayor (the elder) and simón (yes) that characterize Chicano caló, she clears narrative space for the Chicana voice. On another occasion, Castillo’s narrator calls attention to language as self-reflexive device, describing how a lady looked like a nun and was a nun, but because ‘‘she didn’t smell like nothing . . . Loca was not sure if she was a present nun or a past nun or maybe hasta una future subjunctive nun’’ (, emphasis mine). Again, the narrator employs a self-reflexive storytelling technique that calls attention to the narrative’s antirealism but also serves to emplace the Chicana voice. Similarly, while Castillo’s narrator employs that opaque style characteristic of mimesis-as-play narratives, it ultimately serves to identify a particular set of racially gendered ideological constructs: ‘‘Caridad has a somewhat pronounced ass that men were inclined to show their unappreciated appreciation for everywhere she went’’ (, emphasis mine). Finally, Castillo’s Chicanaidentified, metacritical mimesis-as-play narrator engages with and vitally re-forms her reader’s cultural, linguistic, and generic assumptions about the magicorealist storytelling mode.

      -        Castillo’s generic and stylistic re-visions are not the only way her narrator reconstitutes the reader’s expectations of those mimesis-as-play techniques that characterize magicorealist narratives. Unlike many writers of magicorealist narratives where there is a third-person objective narrator, Castillo gives flesh to her third-person narrator (as Chi

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

cana) but identifies her narrator as fallible. García Márquez typically invents a reliable third-person narrator, as in One Hundred Years of Solitude or his story ‘‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.’’ His third-person narrator describes both unreal and real events with the same objective voice. Castillo, on the other hand, re-forms the rules of the game and creates a somewhat fallible third-person narrator. For example, on one occasion the narrator tells the reader, ‘‘It seems that these two Californian women would be thought of somehow as being responsible for Francisco’s end since who had asked them to come here in the first place? But this all depends on who is telling the story’’ (); and on another, it informs, ‘‘The rest of this story is hard to relate’’ ().4 Though the net effect of the novel is that the narrator does not distinguish between the real and the magical, there is at times an element of playful hesitation. The reader is never completely sure if an event—magical or real—has taken place or not. In this move to reinvent the magicorealist narrator as partially fallible, Castillo engages with and de-forms the magicorealist conventions; ultimately, this creates a metacritical effect that calls attention to the novel’s self-conscious performing of magicorealism. Castillo’s newly revised Chicana-identified magicoreal narrator serves as a metacritical signpost to direct readers within the fictional world of the characters and their experiences with the racist and sexist ideological structures that make up the society of the spectacle. Finally, in So Far from God we see how a gendered and self-reflexive magicorealism can spectacularize its own engagement with both the masculinist and consumerist magicorealist traditions.



Ana Castillo’s (En)gendered Magicorealism

Five

SALMAN RUSHDIE’ S F O U R T H S PAC E NARR ATI V E R E - C O N Q U I S TA S

W

hen Rudyard Kipling published Kim in , he did not just give the world an adventure novel. The detailed realism he used to describe the protagonist Kim’s coming-of-age and his journey across Northeast India mapped an Indian landscape filled with primitive, childlike ‘‘burned-black’’ () people who depended on the parenting of a civilized, white, colonial elite for survival. The narrative pauses to give sympathy to Kim’s plight only when he enters into a space where he is subservient to the British Raj; it renders Kim degenerate when he enters into the Indian- and Arab-identified autonomous cultural spaces. Here, Kipling’s realism uncritically maps racialized bodies into ideologically bounded and hierarchically divided spaces. In this hierarchy, the European characters inhabit a firstspace coded as civilized and racially pure and the non-Western characters inhabit a thirdspace coded as primitive and racially impure. Kipling’s narrative cartography does not only imagine an ethnoracialized spatiality, it uncritically reproduces the colonialist spatializing of racist ideological structures. Though it would be a mistake here to seek a one-to-one correspondence between Kipling’s fiction and the ‘‘real’’ world, one can see why a writer such as Salman Rushdie would invent storyworlds that destabilize and re-conquer such narrative cartographies. In Rushdie’s novels Midnight’s Children (), Shame (), The Satanic Verses (), and The Moor’s Last Sigh (), magicorealism is used as a storytelling form to re-conquer and complicate the primitivized thirdspaces. Rushdie uses magicorealism to critique narratives that reproduce a racialized Us/Them binary opposition where each concept defines the other by a reifying contrast; he uses magicorealism to invent a fourthspace wherein his cultural and racial hybrid protagonists and characters exist in

an enlarged contact zone where firstspaces (Spain and Britain) and thirdspaces (Latin America and India) coexist.1

  Rushdie’s magicorealism gives texture to a culturally and racially complex and comprehensive fourthspace; rather than invent storyworlds and narrators that reproduce a binary opposition between a firstspace—coded as European, rational, civilized, and real—and a thirdspace—coded as racial Other, prerational, magical—Rushdie uses magicorealism as the form to invent fourthspace narratives that critically revise such divisions. I define this as Rushdie’s fourthspace to emphasize his imaginative revision of German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller’s identification of the Americas as the ‘‘fourth part’’ in his Cosmographiae Introductio (). Waldseemüller wrote, ‘‘Now, these parts of the earth have been more extensively explored [referring to Asia proper] and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci. . . . The earth is now known to be divided into four parts’’ (quoted in Vespucci’s Letters in a New World, –).2 Rushdie’s fourthspace magicorealism is such a fourthpart space, but told from the point of view of postcolonial characters and narrators who inhabit a subcontinental Indian and/or diasporic territory; his fourthspace narrative approximates that pre-columbian, Mexica codex’s palimpsest-layered fourth-part cosmology where there is an overlapping of, as Walter Mignolo identifies, ‘‘a complex calculus of time, space, memory, and semiotic codes’’ (). Rushdie’s novels are told from the point of view of postcolonial characters and narrators; not so unlike the Amerindian representation of ‘‘coexisting territories within the same space’’ (), Rushdie’s magicorealism systematically foregrounds a palimpsestic fourthspace where the development of his postcolonial-identified characters takes place within a complex matrix of spatialized time. Rushdie’s fourthspace is, however, an imaginative engagement with the Mexica codex’s fourth-part cosmology. As his narrator in Shame tells the reader, ‘‘the country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exists, like me, at a slight angle to reality’’ (). Shame’s coexistence in a fifteenth-century India and during the time of the India-Pakistan partition renders patent that Rushdie’s fourthspace is a fictional construct. Indeed, Rushdie builds into all of his magicorealist narratives a degree of self-reflexivity that acts as metacritical signposts to the 

Salman Rushdie’s Fourthspace Narrative Re-conquistas

reader and that reminds of the fictionality of his resistant fourthspace. To this end, he uses the language and form of magicorealism to foreground the fictionality of his racially and culturally hybrid characters’ power to uncover, in the character Saladin Chamcha’s words, ‘‘power in its purest form, disembodied, invisible’’ (Satanic Verses, ).3 Rushdie also uses the fourthspace conceit as a narrative device that calls attention to intertextuality in his novels. When, for example, in Shame, the character Omar comes into the world to form a fourth point in a rather odd family arrangement— he is born to three mothers, or as the narrator informs, ‘‘between a third pair of thighs, as if in an alleyway’’ ()—and grows up in the palimpsestic space of Nishapur, Rushdie alludes to Borges’s short story ‘‘El Aleph.’’ Both Omar and Borges’s character discover a place where they can see layers of time and space from multiple angles. (Borges’s character can see simultaneously the ‘‘multitudes of America,’’ the ‘‘tattered labyrinth’’ of London, and the ‘‘sunset in Querétaro [that] reflects the color of a rose in Bengal,’’ for example, ). This allusion and others are used by Rushdie to call attention to his novel’s fictionality and its intertextual engagement with expansive magicorealist narrative systems that, as Robert Wilson theorizes, offer a ‘‘dual inscription of incompatible geometries’’ (). Rushdie uses theme and event not only to inscribe his novels within larger networks of magicorealist narratives that similarly reimagine and destabilize firstspace divisions and hierarchies, but to engage with those ‘‘other forms of fiction’’ (Frye, ). According to the mimesis-as-play conventions that characterize magicorealism, Rushdie invents narrators who employ hyperbole, digression, and parody to portray Rabelaisian-like, hypercorporeal characters.4 And in the narrative spirit of Rabelais, Rushdie also uses the encyclopedic narrative technique to describe, as Sadik Jalal Al-Azm writes, the ‘‘politics, history, mythology, religion, theology, philosophy, fiction, poetry, folklore, anecdotes and all the varieties of life’s quotidian experiences in the contemporary First and Third Worlds’’ (‘‘The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie,’’ ). When the narrator introduces Omar, he identifies him as of ‘‘colossal weight’’ (Shame, ) and refers to him as ‘‘our sidelined hero’’ (). However, more than Omar’s mimesis-as-play characterization, he is invested with a perspective that is at a ‘‘slight angle to reality’’ (). Here, Rushdie engages with the mimesis-as-play tradition as a form that allows him to give parodic voice to a colonial politics, history, and culture that informs the experiences of his postcolonial-identified characters in the storyworld. Rushdie’s participation in a mimesis-as-play tradition works at the level of genre to foreground his magicorealist novels’ metacritical announce

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

ment of their own spectacular construction of fourthspaces that resist and critique dominant firstspace narratives. For example, in Shame the narrator playfully gives flesh to and literalizes Omar’s inhabiting of a fourthspace when, after he is born between the legs of three mothers, he opens his eyes to see the world with an ‘‘upside-down’’ vision (). The narrator uses repetition and play to spectacularize Omar’s born ability to see beyond the reality of things. To remind us that this ability is not that of the mechanically emancipating vision Alejo Carpentier associates with his lo real maravilloso or Homi Bhabha with his idealized thirdspace ‘‘presencing’’ (‘‘The Third Space,’’ ), the narrator identifies this skill as an affliction. The character Omar is raised within the walls of a space/time fluctuating Nishapur—his home that lies on the outskirts of the border town Q—that is described as an ‘‘indeterminate frontier universe’’ () and as ‘‘a sweltering, entropical zone [that is] neither material nor spiritual’’ (). Within the walls of Nishapur, Omar learns ‘‘classical Arabic and Persian, Latin, French, and German’’ () and reads ‘‘manuscripts of the poetry of Ghalib [as well as] volumes of letters written by Mughal emperors to their sons, the Burton translation of the Alf laylah wa laylah, the Travels of Ibn Battuta, and the Qisa or tales of the legendary adventurer Hatim Tai’’ ().5 On one occasion, Omar discovers a crack in time and space that opens ‘‘beyond history into what seemed the positively archaeological antiquity of ‘Nishapur,’ discovering in almirahs . . . forms of painted neolithic pottery in the Kotdjii style [and] in the kitchen quarters whose existence was no longer even suspected he would gaze . . . upon bronze implements of utterly fabulous age’’ (). However, this palimpsestic fourthspace that is made up of a collection of objects that encapsulate the essence of different historical epochs and that represents the layered space of personal memory is by no means automatically resistant. The sisters’ inability to cope with a world outside of Nishapur leads to a transformation of the fourthspace into a static site that contains ‘‘lingering, fading miasmas of discarded ideas and forgotten dreams’’ (). It begins to suffocate rather than empower Omar. Whether at the level of language, theme, or event, Rushdie’s narrators sidestep a romantic idealization of a character’s coming into a resistant vision or the inhabiting of an inexorably resistant fourthspace. Rushdie engages with a mimesis-as-play tradition to re-form the language and techniques associated with magicorealism to both invent and metacritically spectacularize its fourthspaces—those spaces in his novels where characters and narrators experience the ‘‘unreal’’ as ‘‘real’’ and are often invested with the magical power to see beyond what is ‘‘known.’’ Rushdie, then, does not invent narrative fourthspaces that pretend to revise and unmake a factual 

Salman Rushdie’s Fourthspace Narrative Re-conquistas

imperial history or the real colonial cartographies. Rushdie’s use of a spectacularized magicorealism resists the reader’s identification of hybridizing of space and language as emancipatory in a real world where, as Robert Young has indicated, such a hybrid configuration (creole, pidgin, and miscegenated children) has been often used to identify ‘‘threatening forms of perversion and degeneration and became the basis for endless metaphoric extension in the racial discourse of social commentary’’ ().

                        In his magicorealist novels, Rushdie invents a series of characters whose racial and cultural hybridity allows them to see beyond a variety of ideologically restrictive firstspaces. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the first-person narrator/protagonist, Moraes Zogoiby, identifies himself as ‘‘raised neither as a Catholic nor as a Jew. I was both, and nothing; a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was— what’s the word these days—atomised’’ (). Not surprisingly, Zogoiby plays with new forms of expression to give shape to new forms of being racially and culturally fragmented: ‘‘Yessir: a real Bombay mix. Bastard: I like the sound of the word. Baas, a smelly, a stinky-poo. Turd, no translation required. Ergo, Bastard a smelly shit; like, for example, me’’ (). Too, Zogoiby uses language to thicken (spatialize) his hybrid (‘‘cathjew’’ and ‘‘Baas’’ ‘‘turd’’) sense of self. As with Rushdie’s other narrators, Zogoiby intermixes Bollywood film melodrama with English canonic plots, masala mise en scène with the populist characterizations of Phoolan Devi and Indian penal and civic documents. Kumkum Sangari reads Rushdie’s heteroglossic storytelling style generally as ‘‘the genuine plurality of unmerged and independent voices [that marks the] continuing struggle between contending social forces that, like the sentence, has no ‘natural’ culmination’’ (). This ‘‘plurality of unmerged and independent voices’’ is the language Rushdie’s narrators like Zogoiby use to describe the characters’ resistance to, and conformance with, different ideologically restrictive spaces. And when a narrator like Zogoiby exaggerates and repeats terms such as ‘‘mongrel,’’ ‘‘hybrid,’’ and ‘‘bastard,’’ he both destabilizes such terms as used in pseudoscientific theories of race to primitivize Indian subjects and redeploys such categories to express and affirm his own postcolonial identity. So, Zogoiby’s ‘‘mongrelizing’’ (cf. Rushdie) of language to express his postcolonial identity captures the governing heteroglossic flavor



Postethnic Narrative Criticism

of novels that seek, as Rushdie writes, ‘‘to draw new and better maps of reality’’ (‘‘Outside the Whale,’’ ). So far, we have seen how Rushdie invests mostly male-identified narrators and characters with a heteroglossic spirit that can fictionally reinhabit restrictive ideological spaces. However, in Shame Rushdie invents not only the character Omar, but also Sufyia Zinobia. Zinobia comes into a resistant space less through an intermixing play of language and more through her otherwise restrictive, gender-marked body. Born a girl, and not a muchdesired boy, she is regarded by her parents (the megalomaniacal dictator Raza Hyder and wife Bilquìs) as a ‘‘brain idiot’’ (). Sufyia, however, does not remain a ‘‘brain idiot’’; as a teenager she takes to studying her father’s war stratagems and is empowered by them. For example, as she grows into the body of a woman, she uses warrior strategies to resist being co-opted and domesticated within heterosexist ideological firstspaces. She rips the heads off her suitors. On one occasion, at her overly domesticated sister’s wedding, Sufyia begins to ‘‘flame all over’’ with ‘‘the burning heat of that supernatural passion’’ (), then attacks and twists Captain Talvar Ulhaq’s head so hard ‘‘that he screamed at the top of his voice, because his neck was on the point of snapping like a straw’’ (). Through her patriarchal-directed violence, Sufyia magically enters into a fourthspace of acorporeality. When ‘‘the edges of Sufyia Zinobia were beginning to become uncertain, as if there were two beings occupying that air-space, competing for it, two entities of identical shape but of tragically opposed natures’’ (), the narrator describes the beginning of her transformation into a genderless space of resistance. The narrator does not, however, identify Sufyia’s coming into a genderless space of resistance as passive and esoteric. After waking up from a drugged stupor and locked in the family’s attic, Sufyia magically transforms into both the ‘‘beauty’’ and the ‘‘beast’’ (). She turns into a ball of fire that ‘‘demolishes the house [then rolls] outwards to the horizon,’’ morphing into a cloud ‘‘in the shape of a giant, gray and headless man, a figure of dreams, a phantom with one arm lifted in a gesture of farewell’’ (). She destroys completely her family’s home—that masculinist firstspace that restricts female-gendered bodies—like her literary predecessor, Brontë’s Bertha. However, unlike Bertha who destroys Thornfield Hall and its symbolic representation of a racist and heterosexist firstspace and then jumps and smashes herself ‘‘on the pavement’’ (Brontë, ), Sufyia ascends to the sky and magically morphs into a ‘‘giant, gray and headless man’’ and gestures affirmingly farewell. Finally, Sufyia’s magical transformation into



Salman Rushdie’s Fourthspace Narrative Re-conquistas

both ‘‘beauty’’ and ‘‘beast,’’ as well as her transmogrification, point to her destruction of masculinist firstspace within the resistant fourthspace of the self-reflexive, playful magicorealist mode. Radical transformations of structures that symbolize a host of ideological forms of containment occur in most of Rushdie’s magicorealist novels. In The Satanic Verses, his character Saladin Chamcha is forced to occupy the attic space of a London boardinghouse because he stinks, is hairy, and has hooves like a goat. Within the storyworld, Saladin’s magical transformation into a degenerate goat who cannot control his bowels is part of his becoming the physical embodiment of those stereotypes that racialize brown/black characters as Other in the novel. Saladin’s abode is a room directly under a roof—a dwelling place that is at a careful remove from ‘‘human’’ inhabitants on the lower floors of the boardinghouse. However, if we follow the Western vertical systematizing of mind/body space, Saladin inhabits the highest space in the house: the space analogous to that of the mind. Ironically, then, the more Saladin undergoes a magical transformation into a primitive body (‘‘he was growing hairier all over his body, and had even sprouted, from the base of his spine, a fine tail that lengthened by the day’’ []), the more he inhabits that firstspace constructed as white and civil. The narrator describes how his horns grew ‘‘into fanciful arabesques [and wrapped] his head in a turban of darkening bone’’ (). Saladin’s inhabiting the attic (the rational) defies a firstspace ideology that constructs the black/brown subject as primitive and pertaining to the lower-stratum and the white subject as civilized and in possession of the highest reaches of the mind. His exaggerated transformation into the Other is not an internalizing of such a primitivist firstspace ideology. On the contrary, the narrative uses magicorealism and spectacular characterization (‘‘Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing reinvention’’ []) as a means to destabilize such a firstspace ideological construction.

                  As we have seen, Rushdie uses magicorealism to invent characters who spectacularly deform restrictive firstspaces. Omar’s coming into a fourthspace understanding of his world in Nishapur, Sufyia’s morphing into a headless man-cloud, and Saladin’s growing cloven hoofs —are all narrated as ‘‘real’’ within the storyworld. But Sufyia and Saladin’s magical transformations take place within narrative spaces (Bom

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

bay, Delhi, Karachi, and London, for example) that squarely belong to a mainstream contemporary culture. Even the narrator of Shame reveals that Omar’s coming into a fourthspace and a sidelined vision of his world is made possible because of constant visits by ‘‘vendors of meats, fruits, haberdasher, flowers, stationery, vegetables, pulses, books, flat drinks, fizzy drinks, foreign magazines, newspapers, unguents, perfumes, antimony, strips of eucalyptus, bark for tooth-cleaning, spices, starch, soaps, kitchen utensils, picture frames, playing cards and strings for musical instruments’’ (). Rushdie’s magicorealism is not set in fictional never-never lands, or in a subcontinent cut off from the rest of the world, but rather within storyworlds textured with references to contemporary global capitalism. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Moraes Zogoiby describes how he grew up during the civil-war period of a post-Indian independence characterized by famine and bloodshed as well as with Batman comic books and Bollywood films. In The Satanic Verses when the narrator first introduces the reader to Gibreel and Saladin, they are magically transforming into hybrid manbeasts, gods, bulls, spiders, and wolves as they fall from an exploding jumbo jet (). Their transformation happens within a contemporary setting—a fictionalized representation of Air India Flight  that was bombed by Sikh terrorists in —and over metropolitan London. And, before Saladin magically transforms into a Godzilla-like figure, he channel-surfs the television and is described as watching Dr. Who, in which bizarre creatures ‘‘crossbred with industrial machinery’’ appear (). In Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, with his magically developed olfactory sense, becomes a soldier in the Pakistani/Indian war of . And in Shame, postpartition Karachi starts to decompose into the ‘‘biggest collection of airport terminals on earth, a garbage dump for unwanted transit lounges and customs halls’’ (), and the first things to stop working are the air conditioners and toilets. While Rushdie’s magicorealist narratives detail objects that identify the contemporary world, they also formulate a critique of firstspaces and point to the vigor of certain fourthspaces, such as those identified by the ‘‘chaotic bazaars’’ () in Shame. Here, the narrator describes a fourthspace that is filled with vitality; all sorts of outcast animals, plants, and humans fill up the bazaar’s streets: ‘‘savages, breeding endlessly, jungle-bunnies good for nothing but growing jute and rice, . . . swamp aborigines, little dark men with their unpronounceable language of distorted vowels and slurred consonants; perhaps not foreigners exactly, but aliens without a doubt’’ (). Not only does the narrator identify those who inhabit a fourthspace of resistance—these bazaar-dwellers end up sabotaging ‘‘refineries, airports, the 

Salman Rushdie’s Fourthspace Narrative Re-conquistas

homes of God-fearing civilians’’ ()—but the narrator’s exaggeration of a laundry list of stereotypes destabilizes a primitivist ideology at the same time that it calls attention to the fictionality of the narration. Rushdie’s magicorealism refers both to a world out there and to the narrative strategies used to refer to it. For example, in Shame the narrator refers to a contemporary Karachi as filled with ‘‘iceboxes, foot-operated sewing machines, American popular music recorded at seventy-eight revolutions per minute . . . domestic air-conditioning units, coffee percolators, bone china, skirts, German sunglasses, cola concentrates, plastic toys, French cigarettes, contraceptive devices, untaxed motor vehicles, big ends, Axminister carpets, repeating rifles, sinful fragrances, brassières, rayon pants, farm machinery, books, eraser-tipped pencils and tubeless bicycle tires’’ (). Not only does his laundry list description self-reflexively identify its own fictionality, his enumeration of the consumed contraband objects also foregrounds the increasingly globalized nature of the society in which the novel’s characters evolve.

         -          While self-reflexively inventing and critiquing restrictive firstspaces and resistant fourthspaces, Rushdie’s magicorealist novels reterritorialize at the level of fictional narration those narratives of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Sir John Mandeville, and other chroniclers who claimed to be making an objective and factual description of the so-called fourth world.6 Rushdie’s magicoreal narratives imaginatively reshape and critique those marvelously detailed accounts of the Yndias where spatial confusions (Yndias with the Americas) framed the magical fusions of man with animal. In Midnight’s Children, for example, when Saleem Sinai enters a tropical jungle space that he is the first to penetrate, he feels ‘‘unnerved’’ by the ‘‘greeny sea-bed quality of the light’’ and other-worldly look of the place (). To regain his psychological footing, he begins to tell his fellow soldiers, ‘‘legends of sea-beasts with glowing eyes, fish-women who lay with their fishy heads underwater, breathing, while their perfectly-formed and naked human lower halves lay on the shore, tempting the unwary into fatal sexual acts’’ (). Saleem’s legends easily overlap with those of Columbus; however, this time it is a telling from the point of view of the postcolonial subject. Rushdie’s re-conquering takes place as Saleem uses the narrative of New World discovery as a form of self-empowerment in the face of the unknown. In The Satanic Verses, Gibreel and Saladin fall out of 

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the jumbo jet and push ‘‘their way through hybrid cloud-creatures’’ in the form of ‘‘gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs’’ (). As they fall through the clouds, Saladin acquires ‘‘the quality of cloudiness’’ and becomes a ‘‘hybrid’’ (). And as the novel unfolds, Saladin is held in a detention center for illegal ‘‘aliens’’ where he encounters beings ‘‘he could never have imagined, men and women who were also partially plants, or giant insects [as well as] men with rhinoceros horns instead of noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe’’ (). And in The Moor’s Last Sigh, Moraes Zogoiby’s mother, Aurora, is subject to painterly fits wherein she fills walls and ceilings with pictures of ‘‘creatures of her fancy, the hybrids, half-woman half-tiger, half-man half-snake [and] sea-monsters . . . figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in a sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of color’’ (). And, when the character Rosa Diamond in The Satanic Verses is given a copy of Vespucci’s accounts by her doctor—‘‘the man was a notorious fantasist, of course, . . . but fantasy can be stronger than fact; after all we had continents named after him’’ ()— the event speaks to Rushdie’s narrative re-conquering of firstspaces to emplot and empower his pan-Indian (the Yndia of the New World and the India of the subcontinent), postcolonial-identified characters. Rushdie uses magicorealism to de-form and re-form those chronicles that authorized the Euro-colonial conquest of Othered spaces. He invents postcolonial characters that recuperate the agency lost in a lineage of European narratives that erased the ‘‘contact zones’’ between the European and Amerindian where there existed, as Mary Louise Pratt writes, ‘‘the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect’’ (). Rushdie’s magicoreal fourthspaces foreground such a contact zone where the Yndian culture mingled with and transformed European cultural canons. It is not surprising that Rushdie invents a character like Moraes Zogoiby who can trace his lineage beyond his twentieth-century India all the way back to January ; his character traces his history back to that originary moment of the interpenetration of global cultures (–). And, in The Satanic Verses, his character Saladin Chamcha tells his love-interest, Zeeny, ‘‘the earth is full of Indians, you know that, we get everywhere, we become tinkers in Australia and our heads end up in Idi Amin’s fridge. Columbus was right, maybe; the world’s made up of Indies, East, West, North’’ (). Rushdie uses magicorealism to revitalize that contact zone with its complex disordering of cultural centers and margins.

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Salman Rushdie’s Fourthspace Narrative Re-conquistas

                         Rushdie’s magicorealist novels often allude to, and thematically revise, Columbus’s and Vasco da Gama’s marvelous chronicles of Yndia. Such re-vision not only makes visible a historical moment of discovery and subsequent destruction, it also revitalizes that moment of new cultural creation and expansion. Bakhtin writes of colonial expansion as Europe’s ‘‘emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships. A multitude of different languages, cultures and times became available to Europe’’ (Dialogic Imagination, ). Alfred Arteaga similarly re-conquers such a historical moment to celebrate the mixings of space, time, and genre that gave ‘‘rise (wanted or not) to the heterotext’’ (). Rushdie’s use of the picaresque and Rabelaisian mimesis-as-play conventions more than alludes to his magicorealist novels’ return to the moment of the birth of the heteroglossic novel—the ‘‘heterotext.’’ He reshapes and revitalizes the spirit of the heterotext’s birth moment. In so doing, his brand of magicorealism recuperates the energy of birth and of the Rabelaisian body. Here he uses Rabelaisian body dimensions—Saleem’s magnificently sized penis, for example—not only to celebrate a heteroglossic birth, but also to ground the hybrid postcolonial character in the body. For example, in Shame Omar’s longing to enter the world beyond the womb-space of Nishapur is ‘‘transformed into a dull ache in the groin, a tearing in his loins’’ (). And, when Omar does leave Nishapur, he is extremely overweight and has a ‘‘newly potent . . . generative organ’’ (). After a series of manifold digressions, the narrator then locates his own bodily presence within the story: ‘‘On my way back to the story I pass Omar Khayyam Shakil, my sidelined hero, who is waiting patiently for me to get to the point at which his future bride, poor Sufyia Zinobia, can enter the narrative, head-first down the birth canal’’ (). Elsewhere Rushdie emphasizes the body’s apertures and appendages in much the same way that Rabelais and Cervantes speak to real-life bodies and activities. For example, Rabelais’s narrator opens the story of Gargantua and Pantagruel asking the reader not only to ‘‘be cheerful’’ when reading the story, but to ‘‘read joyfully on for your bodily comfort and to the profit of your digestions’’ (). Rabelais’s narrator reminds the reader of his or her own bodily presence and also goes to exaggerated lengths to describe the bodily functions of the characters. On one occasion, the character Panurge eats wheat blade because it

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Postethnic Narrative Criticism

induces the appetite, pleases the taste, fortifies the heart, tickles the tongue, clarifies the complexion, strengthens the muscles, tempers the blood . . . dilates the spermatic glands, tightens the testicle-strings, purges the bladder, swells the genitals, straightens the foreskin, hardens the ballock, and rectifies the member: giving you a good belly, and good belching, farting—both noisy and silent— shitting, pissing, sneezing, crying, coughing, spitting, vomiting, yawning, snotting, breathing, inhaling, exhaling, snoring, sweating, and erections of the john-thomas. () By exaggeratedly embodying his characters, however, Rushdie’s magicoreal novels do more than simply recuperate the West’s ‘‘other forms of fiction’’ (cf. Frye). In Shame Sufyia is first introduced as a freakish ‘‘near midget’’ () and comes later to embody a hypersexualized exotic woman: she is overcome with ‘‘a fire beneath the skin, so that she began to flame all over, a golden blaze that dimmed the rouge on her cheeks and the paint on her fingers and toes’’ (). Here she exaggeratedly embodies the image of the Orientalized woman, and her ‘‘passion’’ flames out of control; however, her unusual ‘‘exotic’’ flames lead her to destroy certain phallocentric containment narratives as she takes to decapitating men’s heads, wrenching ‘‘off their neck by some colossal force’’ (). Rushdie’s magicoreal novels, while written in the mimesis-as-play tradition, point to (and denounce) a world hors texte that codes the brown/black subject as only body—as hybrid, hypergenitalized men/women-animals. His fiction counteracts this modus operandum as seen, for instance, in Columbus’s chronicles, where the inhabitants of the New World were relegated to a primitivism that hypersexualized them and defined them as hermaphroditic freaks and man-beast sodomites, a relegation that served later to justify genocide and oppression and exploitation.

              In the  Oxford Companion to English Literature, editor Margaret Drabble included in the entry ‘‘Salman Rushdie’’ the cross-reference, ‘‘See magic realism’’ (). And Stephen Henighan details

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Salman Rushdie’s Fourthspace Narrative Re-conquistas

Rushdie’s use of the ‘‘epic voice, sage-like use of numbers,’’ and the ‘‘theme of the loss of heritage’’ () not just to place him in dialogue with Gabriel García Márquez, but also with Juan Rulfo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes; here, Henighan remaps those ‘‘trade routes’’ between the ‘‘Indian– Latin American connection’’ (). Henighan’s and Drabble’s placement of Rushdie within a Latin American magicorealist tradition marks his novels’ carving out cultural contact zones that celebrate world fictional spaces that include texts as seemingly far afield as Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude, Nights of the Circus and So Far from God, and Daughters of the Dust and A Trip to the Moon. In this spirit, Rushdie’s so-identified fourthspace magicorealism engages his postcolonial South Asian characters in dialogue with those characters that populate magicorealisms from the past and present, North and South, East and West. Salman Rushdie uses the magicorealism storytelling mode to open up and revitalize cultural contact zones; he invents a variety of postcolonialidentified characters to variously inhabit restrictive firstspaces and nonidealized, fictionally resistant fourthspaces. As Rawdon Wilson says of Rushdie’s novels, they make explicit ‘‘what seems always to have been present. Thus the world interpenetration, the dual worldhood, the plural worldhood even, of magic realism are no more than an explicit foregrounding of a kind of fictional space that is perhaps more difficult to suppress than to express’’ (). Rushdie’s magicorealism narratively remaps such ‘‘interpenetrations’’ and celebrates the cultural birth of the heteroglossic novel in its deliberate participation in a mimesis-as-play storytelling tradition. Rushdie’s narrative fourthspaces playfully affirm racial and cultural diversity and also self-reflexively remind the reader that such remappings are both in the spirit of fiction and potentially in the new and liberating reality that humanity is striving to create.

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MAPPING THE POSTETHNIC CRITICAL METHOD

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abriel García Márquez ends One Hundred Years of Solitude with the last of the Buendías, Aureliano Babilonia, deciphering Melquíades’s Sanskrit parchments. The more he deciphers, the more he discovers that he is reading his own beginning and end. At the end of Postethnic Narrative Criticism: Magicorealism in Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’ Acosta, Ana Castillo, Julie Dash, Hanif Kureishi, and Salman Rushdie, I return to the beginning—to the preface where I begin to tell the story of my ethnic and cultural dislocation. While I had no choice in my family’s decision—nor for that matter did my mother have much choice, living in a heterosexist and racist United States—to pack me off to inner-city London with my madrina, I was certainly privileged. Privileged in the sense of not having to worry about food, shelter, and a stable family (ad hoc) life. Privileged in the sense that I could partake of the tools of knowledge and understanding made available through education; not something certain segments of society can take for granted in a capitalist system that continues to polarize the Haves and Have-nots. Privileged in that I was one of ten teenagers out of a class of one hundred fifty to be tracked through a state-funded, innerLondon ‘‘Comprehensive.’’ Privileged because I was not one of the others tracked en masse to drop out of school at sixteen—or, for the more fortunate, to take up a trade. Privileged because I was given the opportunity to use the three R’s (Reading, Writing, Arithmetic) to win my way back to my other family in California. Privileged because I could go on to study for a higher degree—that is today more a luxury for the few and less a basic civil right—and could continue to learn, synthesize, and sharpen writing and thinking skills that might help me understand and (dis)articulate our everyday world.

I return to the beginning to emphasize my privilege in light of the great majority of dislocated, racially hybrid peoples who in today’s capitalist system are increasingly denied access to education and therefore to tools for economic survival and sustenance. However, I do not intend my story to appear as an act of self-indulgence—that type of scholarly activity that stakes a claim within the margins to justify its theorizing of resistance. The intention here is not to claim a marginal status that then leads to scholarship that uses, as Aijaz Ahmad identifies, ‘‘a kind of rhetoric which submerges the class question and speaks of migrancy as an ontological condition, more or less’’ (In Theory, ). Nor is the intention to assume a representative ontology wherein I become the interpreter of Chicano and British diasporic subaltern culture. Rather, this return to the beginning is a way to point to different experiences of social reality that are increasingly polarized and also to point to the necessary identification of a categorical distinction between the powerfully subversive and eye-opening potential of imaginative and aesthetic acts and that of a world hors texte that is rapidly closing off the majority of people’s access to such realms. In this spirit, I return to some of my original observations about ethnic and postcolonial criticism today. To clear the space for a comparative mapping of ethnic and postcolonial narratives, Postethnic Narrative Criticism gives texture to the specific discourse and story configurations that form ethnic- and postcolonial-identified magicorealist novels, films, and autobiographies. In so doing, this study not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between these different genres—invented within different cultural and historical climates—it also shatters that interpretive lens that traditionally confuses aesthetics with the ontological fact. To clarify, let me return to several of my initial observations. Many Latin American and postcolonial critics transform a storytelling mode such as magicorealism (governed by specific diegetic and mimetic structures) into the socially representative or anthropologically identified text. Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso is a case in point. Here a storytelling mode becomes a subaltern subject’s magically invested subversive amplification of ‘‘the measures and categories of reality’’ (). The case with other postcolonial critics generally is similar. Even the most obviously fiction-identified narratives are situated in a one-to-one relationship with reality. Here characters come to stand in for subaltern peoples generally who either resist—Brenda Cooper’s ‘‘third eye’’ magical realism, for example—or conform to colonial and imperialist hegemonies. This confusion of storytelling mode with reality leads to a series of similarly misdirected observations. For example, postcolonial critic Kumkum Sangari 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

suggests that critics make visible a local-identified epistemology as found in a variety of narrative texts to critique systems that stabilize knowledge and to demonstrate how truth is ‘‘historically circumscribed’’ (). And, while the intention of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group is well and good—to facilitate an exchange and dialogue between U.S. and Latin American cultures—the outcome is not so good. Their identification of a so-called social semiotics of the subaltern not only confuses narrative fictions (Boom writers and authors of the testimonio) with ontological fact, but also its so-called protagonism of subaltern subjects (Beverly et al, ) uncritically reproduces a primitivist discourse: the locally produced text is an Othered knowledge that is de facto resistant to a globalizing capitalist hegemony. This scholarship’s scholarly fusions lead to a critical position that simultaneously rejects and embraces a relativist and constructivist poststructuralism; it leads nowhere. I have argued elsewhere that such U.S. ethnic and postcolonial theory generally confuses the act of social and textual inquiry with wishful thinking and the spurious application of a political agenda. (See my essay ‘‘Poststructural Sand Castles in Latin American Postcolonial Theory Today.’’) Identifying the postethnic critical purview requires both the untangling of this confusion of aesthetic with the ontological as well as the identifying of a theoretical frame for reading ethnic- and postcolonial-identified narratives as a constructed mimetics. Here I do not propose a return to some prelapsarian mode of reading narrative fictions; postethnic narrative criticism is not a form of theoretical atavism in an attempt to reclaim an Edenic site of reading that exists before theory. Postethnic textual analysis helps enrich our reading—making tangible and reproducible those fuzzy first impressions—of a novel by Rushdie or a film by Dash, for example. It also functions to solidify a systematic reading of traditionally marginalized ethnic and postcolonial narratives. As Valentine Cunningham excitedly informs, ‘‘who would not be happy with the way Theory has not just given a voice to former marginal interests and persons in texts, but has given an affirming voice to critics from, or identifying with, those margins’’ (). The postethnic critic also formulates a hypothesis based on prior knowledge of, for example, genre, mode, language, character, and point of view to build, revise, and transform our understanding. In the postethnic analysis of magicorealism, we can build on and amplify our understanding of how, say, the narrative point of view alters the degree of a given story’s identification with a trickster/pícaro character. Or we can understand how the convention of the picaresque genre is de-formed in order to convey a Chicana-centered worldview. All this within the larger understanding 

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that there is a fundamental difference between what a text can accomplish and an objective reality that can be known and on which we can operate changes. Certainly, narrative fictions require enough referential density (some use greater or lesser degrees of referentiality) so that the reader can suspend disbelief—so that the reader can, in a sense, make the invented live as ‘‘real.’’ However, the ‘‘magic’’ of magicorealism, as Gregory Rabassa indicates with respect to One Hundred Years of Solitude and Don Quixote, ‘‘lies in the very novel itself, not in what it says’’ (‘‘A Reader’s Guide to García Márquez’s ‘Macondiad,’ ’’ –). The postethnic critic is aware that any given analysis must take into account a given text’s referentiality. For example, characters like Saleem Sinai, Danny/Victoria, or Caridad have runins with social- and political-inscribed events. Their critical engagement with these clustered, contextual moments speaks to how they negotiate age-old restrictive social and moral attitudes and beliefs. Another necessary ingredient for postethnic narrative criticism is to fully realize the subversive power of ethnic- and postcolonial-identified texts, in its careful analysis of a given text within a larger constellation of like genres. Historian Vinay Lal is right to propose that postcolonial scholars ‘‘think ‘more of the rest’ and ‘less of the west’ ’’(). He is also right to suggest that such scholars must look to ‘‘a less oppressive West’’ (). Namely, the postethnic scholar will tilt the axis of analytic spin toward the rest as well as the West. Such magicorealist texts as those by Acosta, Dash, Castillo, Kureishi, and Rushdie rotate around and within a complex intertextual galaxy inclusive of narratives from Latin America, the United States, India—and Europe. As I have shown, this can be achieved by carefully paying attention to both the level of discourse—the narrative and stylistic techniques used in narratives worldwide to tell the story and convey meaning—and to the level of the story: themes, events, and characters that can convey specific cultural and historical contextual contours. The postethnic narrative critic does not confuse his or her task with that of the social or political scientist or historian. While these areas of scholarship can help the postethnic narrative critic enrich a reading of theme and event, they are not to overwhelm what should be primarily an aesthetic-based method of analysis. The postethnic critic will sidestep analytic temptations that might otherwise force—and therefore simplify and reduce—a given ethnic or postcolonial narrative into an a priori agenda. The postethnic criticism present in this study shows how Oscar Zeta Acosta’s playfully inventive The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo opens his readers’ eyes not just to the fictionality of autobiography, but also to how his narrator/protagonist negotiates the racial and social limitations of 

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his world. And when Salman Rushdie engages with an entire system of mimesis-as-play narratives—European, Latin American, and Indian—his endeavor serves to open his readers’ eyes to a polyglot, polycultural fourthspace wherein characters can forcefully inhabit postcolonial identities. Kureishi/Frears’s aligning of the camera-narrator with the trickster/pícaro character Danny/Victoria, whose movements and gestures cut through a constructed unreal/real world, opens audiences’ eyes to the multiplelayered, fictionally reconstructed Britain he negotiates. And, with Ana Castillo, readers see how magicorealism as a storytelling mode can deform male-identified mimesis-as-play narratives—Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example—to reveal to readers how picaresque and male-protagonist-centered magicorealisms have traditionally marginalized and/or erased the brown female character’s presence. Like Ana Castillo, Julie Dash builds on and adds to a tradition of magicorealism gravitating around male characters to open audiences’ eyes to the worlds her daughters of the dust inhabit. As I have attempted to demonstrate, the postethnic narrative critic aims to celebrate those moments of contact between reader and invented storyworld wherein subversive pleasures are discovered and expressed. As Robert Alter sums up nicely: ‘‘As readers, we live in constant unfathomable intercourse with the written word—that mere artifice which ensconces itself in the inner sanctum of our imagination, delights us in odd and unpredictable ways, even affects our perception of the world’’ (). The postethnic critic’s careful distinction between narrative and ontological fact also points to the difference between theories of hybridity and borderless worlds, and the often less-emancipatory reality of living within such a ‘‘real’’ reality. Often the counter-hegemonic methodologies theorized by subaltern-identified, postcolonial critics (the Indian and Latin American Subaltern Studies Group is a case in point) differ from the methods used to accomplish social change in reality. Certainly, a shared history of colonialism and capital globalization increasingly equates experiences of marginal groups in Los Angeles with those of marginal groups in Mexico City, a fact that should lead the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group to consider it essential to examine ‘‘master paradigms used in representing colonial and postcolonial societies both in the cultural practices of hegemony developed by elite groups and in the disciplinary discourses of the humanities and social sciences that seek to represent the workings of these societies’’ (Beverly, ). And U.S. ethnic scholars see a similarly North/South American fusion when identifying cultural borderlands. However, this theorizing of a borderless world out there is a problematic 

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abstraction. The destruction of nation-states such as Yugoslavia has given way to the mass murder of entire populations, and to barbarism. Beyond Europe is a whole continent—Africa—that is being destroyed by assaults against the nation-states. And when theories such as those of subaltern third-eye visioning and resistant knowledge subjectivity circulate outside the academy, they risk being used to primitivize and then justify the exploitation and/or genocide of subaltern peoples. For instance, during the Vietnam war, General Westmoreland and head of Department of Defense McNamara used such primitivist rhetoric to comfort an American public infuriated by the napalming of women, elderly people, and children by U.S. troops, saying, in effect, that the Vietnamese did not feel pain the same way we do, so it was okay if we maimed, tortured, and killed them. Of course, we see this rhetoric of the savage-Other in the present economic and military aggressions against the peoples of Africa, a continent that is considered by the United States, the European Union and its member countries, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to be devoid of any future whatsoever, and therefore deserving of its current fate, marked by the destruction of entire states (like Somalia), pandemics (of AIDS, for example), and extreme scarcities of food, water, and medical supplies, as well as the systematic destruction of workers’ organizations and labor laws, and so on. There is an undeniably significant increase in the numbers of people suffering in the world today. Critics must be especially careful when using phrases such as ‘‘savage atopics,’’ ‘‘lo real maravilloso,’’ ‘‘hybridity,’’ ‘‘mimicry,’’ and ‘‘third spaces of enunciation’’ to identify real communities who experience oppression and exploitation in not-so-abstract ways. Critics must be careful of this rhetoric when the masters of the real world out there continue to use mystical abstractions such as these to objectify and then justify the exploitation and oppression of underclass peoples. Finally, critics must be careful with theories of the hybrid Other that often conflate narrative fictions with actual facts: the world with the text. Because if the world is a text, and there is no verifiable reality, then how for instance do we objectively represent the genocide of the American Indian or the Jewish holocaust? We need to keep in mind that it is the role of the university to collect and disseminate knowledge, and that the role of mobilizing the millions of people needed for the abolition of racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, and exploitation present in every country and worldwide does not pertain to the university but to the organizations built by the workers. Theorizing a mystical lo real maravilloso ontology or a ‘‘savage atopics’’ will do little or nothing to transform the real social circumstances that deter

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mine the lives of millions and millions of workers and campesinos, women, ethnic minority groups, gays and lesbians, and so on. We are and should be accountable for what we do and say. Postethnic Narrative Criticism is an analysis of magicorealism as employed by a series of writers and film directors who invent self-reflexive narratives that tell stories of subaltern pleasure and pain, and that resist the confusion of fiction text with ontologic fact. As this postethnic critical method aims to demonstrate, the power of such narratives lies in their ability to affect our vision of the world. Here we discover, as Gregory Rabassa says, ‘‘the greatest defense and protection against solitude, loneliness, and barren isolation from our fellows: the re-creative force of art’’ (). I end where I began, that is, with the identification of a rebellious mimetics that is not a retreat from history, but rather an engagement with ‘‘our fellows’’ through an appreciation of, and delight in, the magnificent possibilities these fictional lands offer us. I end with a reminder that if we lose sight of our passionate engagement with such genres as the novel, film, and autobiography, then our job as postethnic narrative critics is rendered meaningless.

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Notes

          . See Michael Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. . Franco Moretti posits a similar argument in his Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez: that the magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude not only covers over the link between magic and empire, but also craftily locates a deep denial of colonial violence within the subaltern subject. Again, aesthetic and ontological crisscross in the articulation of a magical realist episteme. . Indeed, much of postmodernist readings of magical realism hails from— but is not limited to—a poststructuralist theoretical maneuvering that began in the early s. Inspired by Tzvetan Todorov and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Floyd Merrell was one of the first to look at how an investigation of language and structure in magical realism can open the door to how magical realist texts resignify (realigning the signifier, signified, and referent relationship). However, Merrell’s look at how magical realism is a new narrative mode ultimately falls back on an opposition of Western-as-scientific versus Latin America-as-mythic primitivist oppositionality. (See Merrell’s essay, ‘‘The Ideal World in Search of Its Reference: An Inquiry into the Underlying Nature of Magical Realism.’’) Perhaps the most interesting study that sidesteps the magical-as-primitive versus the realism-as-civilized binary is Irlemar Chiampi’s  book, O realismo maravilhoso: Forma e ideologia no romance hispano-americano. Chiampi’s book more clearly lays out the narratological dimensions of magical realism, asserting that ‘‘the internal (‘magical’) causality of marvelous realism is a factor of a metonymic relationship between the facts of the diegesis’’ (, my trans.). She then expands her text-based theory to identify its presence within specific historical periods of global expansion and ideological crisis. For a more detailed summary of the poststructural approach to magical realism, see María-Elena Angulo’s Magic Realism: Social Context and Discourse. Angulo takes her analytic lead from Asturias and Carpentier’s ethnologically based ‘‘lo real

maravilloso’’ to elucidate, she writes, ‘‘a new way of writing which transcends the limits of the fantastic by entering the social realm’’ (xii). . Theo L. D’haen reads postcolonial magical realism across the postmodern theory of the destabilized Self/Center. This is not the only way magical realism has been articulated according to a postmodern paradigm. In Latino Fiction and the Modernist Imagination, John S. Christie focuses less on postmodern as epistemology and ontology and more on the category’s literary-ness. He sees how postmodern (irony and self-reflexivity, for example) and modern (reliance on mythic structures) operate to varying degrees in the magical realism of Ana Castillo, Cecile Pineda, Rudolfo Anaya, and Arturo Islas, to name a few. Such Chicano/a authors (magical realist or otherwise) have roots in the writings of Julio Cortázar, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and James Joyce. The telenovela plot line in Castillo’s So Far from God, for example, resists closure in a postmodern fashion. Interestingly, after identifying a gendered difference in the use of postmodern and modernist technique, Christie concludes: Latinas continue to find modernist experiments valuable in their ‘‘reeducation’’ of the reader. It would be fruitless to argue that Latinos tend to preach more than Latinas, just as it would be to claim that Latinas experiment more in their narrative, yet the role of gender, as a component of fiction that revolves around the conflict of oppositions (of class, race, ethnicity etc.), is certainly a dominant force in literary creativity. Considered from non-gender perspectives, one can conclude that the most innovative Latino writers, men and women, tend to preach the least, and that rebelliousness of thought often parallels stylistic innovation. ()

I will leave the quote at that. . Many Chicano/a and postcolonial critics have critiqued the Linda Hutcheon and Theo L. D’haen postmodern-inflected readings of ethnic-inscribed text-acts. In ‘‘Postmodernism and Chicano Literature,’’ for example, Rosaura Sánchez declares that Chicano/a fiction is only ‘‘tangentially’’ postmodernist (). Sánchez believes that while Chicana/o literature might employ postmodernist techniques, it maintains a strong footing in localized history and localized subjectivity. . In Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, Marianna Torgovnick discusses at length this process of the West’s willful invention of Africa. . For the South Asian Subaltern Studies manifesto, see Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak’s edited anthology of essays, Selected Subaltern Studies. For Latin American rearticulations of South Asian Subaltern Studies, see John Beverly, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna, The Postmodern Debate in Latin America. Also see scholarship generally produced by Julio Ramos, John Beverly, and Norma Alarcón. . This confusion between magical realism as literary category and as a reflection of Latin American being-in-the-world is not helped when Gabriel García

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Notes to pages –

Márquez himself makes statements that conflate the two. If the writer most identified with perfecting—if not ‘‘inventing’’—the language and form of magical realism confuses narrative technique with ontology, it is not so surprising that critics would do the same. Again and again García Márquez has centralized magical realism as a direct, naive transcription of reality in Latin America. Thus, during an interview García Márquez states, I’m a realist writer because I believe that in America, everything is possible and everything is real. It is a technical problem to the degree to which the writer has difficulty transcribing the events that are real in Latin America because they would not be believed in a book. We live in the midst of those extraordinary and fantastic things while certain writers insist on relating to us immediate realities devoid of all importance. I believe that we have to work in the research of the language and of the technical forms of narration in order that all Latin American magical reality will become part of our books. Latin American literature should correspond to Latin American life where the most extraordinary events occur everyday. . . . What I believe is that what we have to do is to assume this reality squarely because it’s a form of reality that can give something new to universal literature.’’ ( ‘‘                  ,’’  ,      . )

Even one of the most renowned Borges scholars, Jaime Alazraki, shares this view. In his essay ‘‘Para una revalidación del concepto ‘realismo mágico’ en la literatura hispanoamericana,’’ Alazraki commits acts similar to those of Carpentier et al. in his primitivizing of the Latin American subject as frozen in some mythical, mystical time and in his lack of the critical capacity to differentiate between the real and the magical. . See Jacques Stephen Alexis’s ‘‘Of the Marvelous Realism of the Haitians,’’ reprinted in The Post-colonial Studies Reader. . See Román de la Campa’s insightful review essay, ‘‘Magical Realism and World Literature: A Genre for the Times?’’ that comments on this blatant absence of contemporary Latin American scholarship. . In El realismo mágico y otros ensayos, Enrique Anderson Imbert also begins to identify the two threads—anthropological and narrative poetic—that have informed the scholarship on our subject. However, his criticism is much less sustained than that of Alicia Llarena—or of Seymour Menton for that matter. At one point Anderson Imbert does identify Carptentier’s specious formulation of lo real maravilloso and his privileging of reality over art. He concludes that Carpentier’s concept ‘‘does not belong to aesthetics and so should not be confused with magical realism, which is an aesthetic category’’ (, my trans.). However, while showing how any



Notes to pages –

attempt at turning aesthetic acts into psychological or ontological notions leads to a radical incomprehension of the subject at hand, Imbert falls back on a Kantian philosophical model of the mind, so his critique of Carpentier remains anchored to an idealist aesthetics. What Imbert fails to recognize is that magical realism is not an eternal and atemporal Kantian fixture of the mind, but rather a socially and historically grounded literary phenomenon that uses language and narrative form to articulate two coexisting realities at the level of the story and discourse. We do not need to conjure up Kant to refute Carpentier’s formulation of lo real maravilloso as ontological site. It suffices to characterize magical realism as a literary mode that is patently concerned with the whole of reality, including its surprising, unlikely, and ‘‘miraculous’’ components. . See her book Realismo mágico y lo real maravilloso: Una cuestión de verosimilitud, which amplifies on this article. . Ironically, Carpentier and Asturias formulated a real maravilloso ontology, only to write novels deliberately privileging a Euro-Anglo audience that would be ushered into the world of the indigenous Caribbean American. . In Historia verdadera del realismo mágico, Seymour Menton is careful not to stretch too wide the definition of magical realism in his formulation of a comparative rubric. He is critical of the comparative model set forth in Zamora and Faris’s anthology Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, in which the essays, he writes, propose ‘‘an equivalence between magical realism and postmodernism and postcolonialialsm’’ (, my trans.). . Though the typology in Seymour Menton’s Historia verdadera del realismo mágico is an important move away from the messy ideological terrain that identifies lo real maravilloso, I chose to summarize it here so as not to move the discussion too far afield. Basically, Menton identifies seven necessary characteristics for a painting, short story, or novel to function as magical realism, a list he condenses from the twenty-two he identified in his earlier book Magic Realism Rediscovered, –: () Ultrasharp focus. ‘‘Probably the single most dominant feature of magic realist painting,’’ where all the objects in the picture tend to be painted with an equally sharp focus. () Objectivity. An almost obsessive interest in depicting objects, and a detached, unsentimental, unemotional vision in the depiction. (). Coldness. A deliberate attempt to appeal much more to the intellect than to the emotions. () Close and Far View: Centripetal. A mosaic-type composition, where the viewer’s attention is purposely divided by the magical-realist simultaneous use of close and far view rather than the use of an expressionist close-up view, and by the utilization of the magical-realist centripetal force rather than the expressionist centrifugal force. () Effacement of the Painting Process: Thin, Smooth Paint Surface. Unlike expressionists, magical realists concealed their brush strokes and did not strive for special effects using thick layers of paint; instead, they painted with a smooth, thin paint to create the illusion of a photograph. In literature, a skillful use of non-ornate, apparently simple everyday language. () Miniature, Naïve. The creation of a toy-like



Notes to pages –

world. () Representational. Contrary to abstractionist tendencies, in magical realism people and objects are depicted in such a way that their identity could be recognized. A relatively simple yardstick for distinguishing between magical realist and surrealist paintings—the improbable versus the impossible—was proposed by the Dutch magical-realist painter Pyke Koch: ‘‘Magical Realism is based on the representation of what is possible but not probable; surrealism, on the other hand, is based on impossible situations’’ (Magic Realism Rediscovered, –, –, paraphrase).

 .                       . García Márquez not only put magicorealism on the world literary map, he began a trend reminiscent of the Bovarism set into motion by Gustave Flaubert in the nineteenth century. Not so unlike Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary was as much a critical as it was a mainstream success, One Hundred Years of Solitude had people of all walks of life engrossed in the lives of the Buendías. Not so unlike Madame Bovary, it too set off a publishing flurry of novels—mostly of the formulaic Harlequin romance variety—that used a diluted form of magicorealism. This is not to say that just any magicorealist novel could have created a following. For example, in  when Günter Grass’s novel Tin Drum hit the international bestseller lists, no one claimed that a new subgenre was born. No one decided that his brand of realismas-fantastic should be formally studied and/or creatively reproduced. When One Hundred Years of Solitude hit the world literary marketplace, it was swiftly identified as an archetype. The difference: García Márquez taught writers how to use language systematically to express things that before writers knew only how to represent in the fantastical mode; he taught them a different way of breaking the ‘‘reality’’ pact with their readers. Candidly speaking, Grass periodically introduces the fantastic in a primarily straightforward realist novel, only then to explain its presence: why his protagonist Oskar is not going to grow, for example. Where Grass gave us a good story, García Márquez’s consistent use of a particular storytelling mode conveyed through a precision of language gave his readers a radically new way of imagining storyworlds. . Unfortunately, over a decade and a half after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude—the novel that so carefully reminded readers of its own fictionality— García Márquez conflates fiction with reality. In an essay entitled ‘‘Latin America’s Impossible Reality,’’ he begins by affirming the autonomy of artistic creation and states that the ‘‘imagination is the particular faculty artists possess that enables them to create a new reality from the one they live in. That is the only artistic creation that seems valid to me’’ (). However, he then adds that for Latin American artists and writers, it is not a matter of inventing, but of ‘‘making their reality credible’’ (). The artist/author is no longer an active agent in the imaginative reshaping of reality, but simply a mirror that reflects passively a Latin American and Carib-

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Notes to pages –

bean reality overflowing with ‘‘primitive myths’’ and ‘‘magical syncretism’’ (). He confuses ontological and aesthetic concepts again when he says, ‘‘Reality is also the myths of the common people, their legends; they are their everyday life and they affect their triumph and failures. I realized that reality is not just the police that kills people, but also everything that forms part of the life of the common people’’ (quoted in José Saldívar, ). . Salman Rushdie, in his novel Midnight’s Children, uses a narrative filtering device similar to that used by García Márquez. As in One Hundred Years of Solitude where the reader discovers that the narrative has been filtered through the point of view of the world-traveling, Asian-looking Melquíades, in Midnight’s Children the reader discovers that the narrative has been filtered, not just through the point of view of the postcolonial-identified narrator/protagonist, Saleem Sinai, but also through the point of view of the outcast boatman, Tai, whose ‘‘magical talk’’ (– ) at the beginning of the novel informs directly how the reader receives Saleem’s story as it unfolds. . Publishing houses and film producers are not alone in amassing the wealth. Hand-picked authors with positive-profit-generating profiles such as Salman Rushdie also benefit. Rushdie received a reported . million advance for his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (). . See Pankaj Mishra’s ‘‘A Spirit of Their Own’’ for more on this erasure of a polylingual, radically multiethnic India. . As early as , Goethe made a series of pronouncements wherein he coined the term Weltliteratur to define a repositioning of German Romanticism within a transnational network of intellectual contact and exchange. He announced, ‘‘National literature is no longer of importance; it is the time for world literature, and all must aid in bringing it about’’ (cited in John Geary, ). . In Inventing America, José Rabasa also identifies Columbus’s manipulation of time. He writes how Columbus ‘‘kept two records of the crossing; not only does this duplicitous distortion of time alleviate the crew’s anxiety before the sighting of land, but it also enables Columbus to affirm himself the sole possessor of the secret route to the Indies toward the end of the Diario’’ (). . See my essay ‘‘Postcolonial Sandcastles in Latin American Postcolonial Theory Today,’’ where I draw an analogy between today’s postcolonial theorists and the Latin American modernistas who also turned to forms of mysticism and esoteric belief systems as an illusory attempt to control and restrain the effects of the development of capitalism. . The pícaro functioned as a guide that did not always represent the emerging world in uncritical language. These pícaros were usually identified with the social and racial margins—the converso Jew, for example—who inevitably revealed the underlying chaos, violence, and oppression that was the underbelly to a protocapitalist Spanish society. . García Márquez, in his  Nobel address, summarizes some of the traumatic, unrepresentable events that make up his contemporary Latin America:



Notes to pages –

We have not had a moment’s rest. A Promethean president, entrenched in his burning palace, died fighting an entire army, alone; and two suspicious airplane accidents, yet to be explained, cut short the life of another greathearted president and that of a democratic soldier who had revived the dignity of his people. There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God’s name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one. . . . Those missing because of repression number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. ( ‘‘                        ,’’    )

For García Márquez, such a history filled with violence, pain, and bitterness is not a twentieth-century phenomena; it is a further playing out of the legacy of conquest and genocide that has plagued the Americas. . In ‘‘Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster,’’ Franchot Ballinger solidifies the connection between the trickster and the pícaro, describing how ‘‘both are heroes of adventures recounted episodically; both are roguish travelers whose transgressions against moral and civil strictures place them in marginal relationship to their societies; both are said to be ambiguous figures; and both seem to serve satirical ends’’ (). . Here I refer to the age-old division between the tragic (serious, rational, and referential) and the comic (nonserious, prerational, nonreferential). This division is deeply imbedded in Western critical practice going back to the Poetics of Aristotle and to Plato’s Republic. For more on the history of the privileging of the serious over the playful mimesis, see Mihai Spariosu’s essay, ‘‘Mimesis and Contemporary French Theory.’’ . In The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, late-nineteenth-century Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis signals the novel’s affiliation with Frye’s ‘‘other forms of fiction’’ by the deceased narrator’s meditation on the nose: ‘‘Nose, conscience without remorse, you were very helpful to me in life. . . . Have you ever meditated sometime on the purpose of the nose, dear reader? Dr. Pangloss’ explanation is that the nose was created for the use of eyeglasses’’ (, emphasis mine).

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Notes to page 

. In the first edition of Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Acosta appears on the cover in close-up and multiple-imaged shots showing him pulling a variety of comical faces: blowing strawberries, crossing eyes, taunting with thumb on nose, and so on. While this cover does not build a prefatory code that asks the reader to interpret the autobiography as a seamless mixture of the unreal and real, it does point to the text’s participation in the mimesis-as-play genre—a genre that is characterized by its flexibility and that readies, not so unlike the contemporary cover, the reader for storytelling acrobatics. . In an article ‘‘Novel Possibilities: Fantastic and Real Fusions in Our Mutual Friend,’’ I complicate this identification of the fantastic as a narrative that reminds readers of the difference between a ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘unreal’’ register within the storyworld. Here I identify how the referentiality of verisimilar realism functions handin-hand with the fantastical. That narrative realism is itself fantastical—the imaginative leaps, etc., that it requires of its readers—and that the fantastical is a form of realism. I discuss how in Dickens’s least critically acclaimed novel, ‘‘the text’s ability to maintain a fluid motion between the fantastic and the real as they mutually reform world views rests precisely in Our Mutual Friend ’s ability to destabilize in the implied reader’s (adult/child) imagination the hierarchy of difference between the familiar and the unfamiliar’’ (). . Eduardo González, in his essay ‘‘Baroque Endings,’’ reads Alejo Carpentier’s identification of an exalted spirit that can see beyond the limits of things as ‘‘a retinal apotheosis, or the Eye’s last recourse before the insistent return of Voice, of the sound which would (will?) arrive to end Allegory’’ (). Carpentier’s mystification of the Amerindian vision is read uncritically by González as a postcolonial resistant and recuperative strategy ‘‘aimed at producing more than the Eye can see’’ ().

 .    ’             ’                      . The fantastically playful film can just as easily participate within this network of films that solidify stereotypes of racial and ethnic subjects as primitive Others. For example, the self-reflexive playfulness of A Trip to the Moon does not absolve it from its uncritical primitivism. The film is a reproduction of the colonial captivity narrative. In ‘‘Gender and the Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema,’’ Ella Shohat identifies how ‘‘the skeleton creatures carrying spears burst from the moon’s simulacrum of a jungle but are defeated by the male explorers’ umbrella-like guns which magically eliminate the savage creatures. Such a film, not in any obvious sense ‘about’ colonialism, but one produced in a period when most of the world was dominated by Europe, can thus be read as an analogue of imperial expansion’’ (). In this Orientalist spirit, one could also read

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Notes to pages –

Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon as a contemporary revisiting of Columbus’s fantastical chronicles of the New World. . The slow-motion effect is created when the film runs by the shutter at a faster speed than the playback. The strobe effect is created when the camera misses out chunks of image between the images’ movement by holding on to a frame longer than ‘‘normal.’’ . This image draws attention to the religious ( Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and West African) and cultural syncretism (Native American, African, and Western) present on the island: ‘‘Man, dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.’’ . Sammy’s failure to interest Rosie sexually leads to an escape into McDonalds, Hustler, and Coca-Cola. This is not only the film’s critique of the estranging effects of capitalism, but also an oblique reference to older, globalizing economies. One of the main ingredients that give Coca-Cola its secret formula is nutmeg. Nutmeg was one of the original spices ‘‘discovered’’ and monopolized by the Portuguese during the globalization that began with the spice trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dutch-based Vereenigde Ooost-Indische Compagnie established modern forms of capitalism with its vast networks of trade and system of commercial credit. By  it had become the richest corporation in the world; it also became a fierce corporation that hired Japanese mercenaries to torture, quarter, and decapitate competitors and rebellious, subaltern laborers. . Kureishi, in his essay ‘‘Some Time with Stephen,’’ writes, ‘‘After years of colonialism and immigration and Asian life in Britain; after years of black American and reggae music in Britain comes this weird fusion’’ (). . For more on the connection between the film and ‘‘The Waste Land,’’ see Colette Lindroth’s essay, ‘‘The Waste Land Revisited: Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.’’

 .      ‘‘    ’’      ’    -          -    -       . Leigh Gilmore, in his essay ‘‘The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography, and Genre,’’ writes: ‘‘The Augustinian lineage drawn by traditional studies of autobiography has naturalized the self-representation of (mainly) white, presumably heterosexual, elite men. Efforts to establish a genre of autobiography based on the works of Augustine, Rousseau, Henry Adams, and so on, must be seen as participating in the cultural production of a politics of identity, a politics that maintains identity hierarchies through its reproduction of class, sexuality, race, and gender as terms of ‘difference’ in a social field of power’’ (). Gilmore’s observation need not be restricted to white, heterosexual, elite men. Many ethnic and postcolonial autobiographies told in a non-self-reflexive vein also naturalize the centrality of their subjects—subjects that, prior to the women-of-color publishing boom in the s, were largely male, heterosexually identified.

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Notes to pages –

 .         ’  (   )                     . See also Walter Roland’s Magical Realism in Contemporary Chicano Fiction, in which he falls into the trap of a primitivist idealization of the Chicana/o novel, showing how it uses a ‘‘rational mode which is centered on reasoning’’ and a ‘‘magical mode which is centered on the unconscious, dreams and imaginations—a mode grounded on the Chicano’s hispanic and Indian Heritage’’ (). . More obliquely, too, the use of a self-reflexive, metacritical narrator also calls attention to Castillo’s self-conscious use of magicorealist technique as a storytelling form caught up in a commodifying book marketplace. . See M. A. Jaimes Guerrero’s essay ‘‘Native Womanism: Exemplars of Indigenism in Sacred Tradition of Kinship’’ for more on the identification of the various Amerindian creation stories that gravitate around genderless and/or woman gods. . Like Castillo, Salman Rushdie similarly bends the rules of magicorealist storytelling convention. In his novel Shame (), he invents a fallible magicorealist narrator. The narrator first tells the reader that the character Sofia Zogoiby never physically grew because she took after her ‘‘midget paternal great-grandmother’’ (); on another occasion, the narrator tells the reader that she does not grow because of an after-effect of her drinking a ‘‘liquid distilled from cactus roots, ivory dust and parrot feathers [that] had the effect of slowing her down for the rest of her years’’ (). And once again, Rushdie’s narrator in Shame tells the reader, ‘‘And once upon a time there was a retarded daughter’’ (), only to later revise this statement with an identification of Sofia not as retarded, but as the ‘‘family’s shame made flesh’’ ().

 .              ’                      -          . The Spanish crown’s ‘‘reclaiming’’ of Iberian territories from the Moors is one of many texts Rushdie grafts onto The Moor’s Last Sigh. An obvious indication of the graft is Rushdie’s naming of his protagonist’s grandmother Isabella Souza, after queen Isabella of Spain; Rushdie thereby accords the character her own type of domestic reconquista (–). . Gordon Brotherston, in his pre-columbian cultural excavation, writes, ‘‘According to the mappamundi invented by the Babylonians and later adopted by the Romans and medieval Europe, there were once three worlds. Within the surrounding ocean, Asia, the first and greatest, occupied the upper eastern half-circle; below the west lay the Second and Third Worlds, Europe and Africa. Numerically, in this Old World scheme, America then came to occupy the fourth and final place, as the quarta orbis pars of post-columbian cartography’’ (). Interestingly, Brotherston’s

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Notes to pages –

recovery of a pre-columbian cultural matrix—codices and conquest literatures of the Fourth World—becomes a comparative framework for his analysis of a transnational literature of the Americas. He writes, ‘‘it may even be identified as a factor that led to the Western notion of world literature, specifically Goethe’s ‘Weltliteratur’ ()’’ (). Pre-columbian Amerindian cosmogony, history, poem, and manifesto become a way for Brotherston to link the European Romantics and Modernists with Latin American narrative traditions. . Though I do not discuss Rushdie’s more recently published The Ground Beneath Her Feet () or Fury () in this book, we see in these novels a similar characterization of South Asian diasporic protagonists who, like García Márquez’s Melquíades, can see beyond the limits of reality and who embody the magicorealist worldview. For example, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie’s character Rai Merchant uses his camera to ‘‘see beyond the surface, beyond the trappings of the actual, and penetrate to its bloody flesh and heart’’ (). The narrator also identifies a fourthspace in his portrayal of Rai Merchant. Merchant builds on the character Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s proposition that ‘‘Aryan cultures rested on the triple concept of religious sovereignty, physical force and fertility’’ () to formulate a ‘‘fourth function of outsideness’’ inhabited by those ‘‘who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like’’ (). Like most of Rushdie’s protagonists, Rai also celebrates a fourthspace inhabited by ‘‘the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks’’ (). . For an interesting and lively discussion of Rushdie’s use of parody to selfreflexively reinvent his own narrative form, see Laura Moss’s essay, ‘‘ ‘Forget those damfool realists!’ Salman Rushdie’s Self-Parody as the Magic Realist’s Last Sigh.’’ . Much like Omar in Shame, Rushdie’s character Gibreel in The Satanic Verses devours ‘‘the metamorphic myths of Greece and Rome . . . ; the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet . . . ; and the surrealism of the newspapers in which butterflies could fly into young girls’ mouths’’ (). . Stephen Greenblatt, in his book Marvelous Possessions, indicates that Mandeville’s descriptions of the ‘‘divers folk and divers kinds of beasts, and many other marvelous things‘‘() that populate the New World were largely drawn from his readings of ancient Greek epics. Later, Sir Thomas More’s inspiration from reading Amerigo Vespucci’s chronicles led to the writing of his Utopia, where his ‘‘justdiscovered’’ utopian spaces are inhabited by, he describes, ‘‘wild beasts, serpents, and also by men no less wild and dangerous than the beasts themselves’’ (Utopia, ).

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tory, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, –. Durham: Duke University Press, . Roland, Walter. Magical Realism in Contemporary Chicano Fiction. Frankfurt am Main: Vervet Verlag, . Rushdie, Salman. The Ground beneath Her Feet. New York: Holt, . . Midnight’s Children. London: Picador, . . The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Jonathan Cape, . . ‘‘Outside the Whale.’’ In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism –, –. London: Granta, . . The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, . . Shame. New York: Vintage International, . Rushdie, Salman, and Elizabeth West, eds. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: – . New York: Vintage, . Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, . . Orientalism. New York: Vintage, . Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique and Literary History. Durham: Duke University Press, . Sánchez, Rosaura. ‘‘Postmodernism and Chicano Literature.’’ Aztlán , no.  (): –. Sangari, Kumkum. ‘‘The Politics of the Possible.’’ Cultural Critique  (): –. Shohat, Ella. ‘‘Gender and the Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of the Cinema.’’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video , no. – (): –. Sirias, Silvio, and Richard McGarry. ‘‘Rebellion and Tradition in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God and Sylvia López-Medina’s Cantora.’’ MELUS , no.  (): – . Spariosu, Mihai. ‘‘Mimesis and Contemporary French Theory.’’ In Mimesis in Contemporary Theory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Mihai Spariosu, –. Philadelphia: John Benjamin, . Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘‘In Praise of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.’’ Critical Quarterly  (): –. Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in England Today. London: Bloomsbury, . Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, . Uslar Pietri, Arturo. Hombres y letras de Venezuela. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, . Vespucci, Amerigo. Letters from a New World: Amerigo Vespucci’s Discovery of America. Trans. David Jacobson. New York: Marsilo Publishers, . Villa, Raúl Homero. ‘‘Marvelous Re-creations: Utopian Spatial Critique in The Road to Tamazunchale.’’ MELUS , no.  (): –.



Works Cited

Wicks, Ulrich. Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions: A Theory and Research Guide. New York: Greenwood, . Williamson, Judith. ‘‘Dirty Linen.’’ New Statesman , no.  ( January , ): –. Wilson, Robert R. ‘‘The Metamorphoses of Space: Magic Realism.’’ In Magic Realism and Canadian Literature, edited by Peter Hinchcliffe and Ed Jewinski, –. Ontario: University of Waterloo Press, . Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. ‘‘Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.’’ In Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, –, edited by Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarno, –. Los Angeles: Wright Art Gallery Publication, . Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, . Zamora, Lois Parkinson. ‘‘Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. and Latin American Fiction.’’ In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, –. Durham: Duke University Press, .



Postethnic Narrative Criticism

Index

Acosta, Oscar ‘‘Zeta’’: and capitalist book and film marketplace, ; characters and narrators of generally, , ; and intertextuality, ; magicorealism of, –, –; narrative mode of, ; and self-reflexivity, –,  —work: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, , , –, –, n. Adams, Henry, n. Africa, –, , ,  African Americans, , –,  Ahmad, Aijaz, ,  Alarcon, Norma, n. Alazraki, Jaime, , n. Alexis, Jacques Stephen,  All the Pretty Horses (McCarthy),  Allende, Isabel, , , –,  Alter, Robert,  American Indian writers,  Amerindian creation stories, –, n. Amerindians, , , , , , , –, , , n. Anaya, Rudolfo, , , , n. Angulo, María-Elena, , –n. Anzaldúa, Gloria, ,  Appiah, Kwame Anthony,  Arau, Alfonso, 

Araújo, Helena,  Arguedas, José María, ,  Arias, Ron, ,  Aristotle, n. Aronna, Michael, n. Arreola, Juan José,  Arte Público,  Arteaga, Alfred,  Asian Subaltern Studies Group, , n. Asturias, Miguel Angel de, , –, , , , n. Augustine, n. autobiography: Augustinian lineage in, n.; Chicano/a-marked autobiographies, –; ethnic-identified autobiography generally, , – , n.; and identity politics, , , –, n.; magicorealism in, –, – Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (Acosta): Acosta-as-character in, –; Acosta-as-narrator in, , –, , , –; antihero in, –; authoring a magicoreal narrator in, –; character-as-laughter in, –; dustjacket cover of, , n.; flashbacks in, –; and identity politics, , , –; and mimesis-as-play genre,

, , n.; parody in, –; psychoanalyst Dr. Serbin in, ; racist ideology in, –, , , ; selfreflexivity in, –, ; significance of, –, –; spectacularization of society in, –, ; splitting narrator from character in, –, ,  awards for authors, , ,  Al-Azm, Sadik Jalal,  Bakhtin, Mikhail, , , , , , , ,  Ball, John Clement,  Ballinger, Franchot, n. Balzac, Honoré de,  Barnes, Djuna,  Barthes, Roland, ,  Baudrillard, Jean,  Bautista Gutiérrez, Gloria, ,  Bejel, Emilio, – Benítez, Sandra, ,  Beverly, John, , n. Bhabha, Homi, , ,  ‘‘Big Mama’s Funeral’’ (García Márquez),  Birth of a Nation,  Bless Me, Última (Anaya),  book and film marketplace, – Booker Prize, , ,  Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa),  ‘‘border writers’’ and borderlands, , , – Borges, Jorge Luis, , , ,  Bovarism, , n. Boyle, T. Coraghessan, – Breton, André,  Brito, Aristeo, ,  Bromley, Roger, – Brontë, Charlotte,  Brotherston, Gordon, –n. Bruce, Novoa, Juan, ,  Burroughs, William, 



Calderón, Hector, – Camayd-Freixas, Erik,  Canclini, Néstor García,  capitalism: book and film marketplace, –; in Castillo’s So Far from God, , –, –; in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, –; and globalization, , ; and magical realism, ; Marx on, ; poststructuralists on, ; resistance to, ; in Rushdie’s works, ; in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, , n.; and violence of the spectacle, – Capote, Truman,  carnivalesque, , –, , – Carpentier, Alejo, , , –, , , , n., –n., n., n. Castillo, Ana: and capitalist book and film marketplace, ; characters and narrator of, , , –, n.; engendered magicorealism of, – , ; and intertextuality, ; magicorealism of, , –, , – ; Menton’s analysis of, –; and mimesis-as-play, –, –; narrative style of, , –; and parody, , , , ; postmodern and modern in writings by, n. —work: So Far from God, , , , –, n. Catholicism, – Cervantes, Miguel de, , , , , , , , , ,  Chabram, Angie,  Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice,  characters: Acosta-as-character in Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, –; in Castillo’s So Far from God, , , – , n.; curandera figure, –, , , ; in Daughters of the Dust, , –; female characters in masculinist magicorealism, ; fourthspatialized characters in Rushdie’s works,

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

–; in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, , –, , , , , , , ; in magical realism generally, ; in magicorealism generally, , , ; in mimesis-as-play genre generally, ; in Rushdie’s novels, , , , , –, n., n.; in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, , –, , – ; trickster/pícaro character, , , , , , –, –, , , . See also specific works Chaudhuri, Amit,  Chavez, Denise, , ,  Cheney-Coker, Syl,  Chiampi, Irlemar, n. Chicana/o fiction, , –, , – , n., n.. See also Latina/o fiction; specific authors Christian, Karen,  Christie, John S., n. Cien años de soledad (García Márquez): capitalism in, –; characters and narrator in, , –, , , , , , , ; class in, ; ending of, ; female characters in, ; language of, nn.–; Macondo in, , – , –; and mimesis-as-play, , , ; narrative filtering device in, n.; pícaro spirit in, ; playfulness of, ; praise and criticism for generally, , n.; Rabassa on, ; rain of yellow flowers in, ; significance of, , , , n. class, , ,  colonialism and imperialism, –, , , , , , , , –n., n.. See also postcolonialism Columbus, Christopher, , , –, n. comic versus tragic, , n. comical epic form,  Communist Manifesto (Marx),  conforming magicorealistas, –



Index

Connor, Steven,  convention of fictionality,  converso Jews, n. Cooper, Brenda, –, ,  Cops,  Cortázar, Julio, , n. Cosmographiae Introductio (Waldseemüller),  creation stories, –, n. Cunningham, Valentine,  curandera, –, , ,  Dash, Julie: and capitalist book and film marketplace, ; characters and narrators of, , ; compared with Kureishi/Frears, –; and Daughters of the Dust, , , , , –, –; and epic form, , ; and intertextuality, ; magicorealism in films of, , –, –, ; and mimesis-as-play,  Daughters of the Dust: camera-narrator in, , , –; compared with Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, –; dialogue between two voice-overs in, –; epic tone in, , ; female characters in, , –, ; Ibo Islands in, , –, ; male characters in, –; and mimesis-as-play, ; opening shots of, –, nn.–; photographer Mr. Snead in, –, ; and self-reflexive techniques of, ; significance of generally, ; unborn narrator/character in, , , –; voice-over in opening of, ,  Dayan, Daniel,  De la Campa, Román, , n. Debord, Guy, ,  Derrida, Jacques,  Desai, Kiran,  D’haen, Theo L., –, , nn.– Dickens, Charles, n.

Don Quixote (Cervantes), , , , , ,  Drabble, Margaret, ,  Dreaming in Cuban (Garcia),  Dudar, Helen,  Durix, Jean-Pierre,  ‘‘El Aleph’’ (Borges),  El Grito,  El Norte,  El Reino de este mundo (Carpentier), ,  El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, – Eliot, T. S., , , n. Ellis, John M.,  epic form and tone, , ,  Escandón, María Amparo, , ,  Esperanza’s Box of Saints (Escandón),  Esquivel, Laura, – essentialist paradigm,  ethnocentrism,  ethnopoetic model of magical realism, –, –,  Faith and the Good Thing ( Johnson),  fantastic, –, , , –n. Faris, Wendy, , , n. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Thompson),  Ferré, Rosario,  fictionality, convention of,  Fielding, Joseph, , , ,  film marketplace. See book and film marketplace films. See Dash, Julie; Kureishi, Hanif; and specific films firstspace, – Flaubert, Gustave, , n. Flores, Angel,  fourthspace, –, –, – nn.– Frears, Stephen, , –,  Freud, Sigmund,  fronterista consciousness, 



Frye, Northrop, , , ,  Fuentes, Carlos, ,  Fury (Rushdie), n. Galarza, Ernesto,  Gama, Vasco da, ,  Garcia, Cristina,  García Márquez, Gabriel: confusion of ontological and aesthetic concepts by, –n., –n.; curandera in works of, –, ; female characters in works by, ; on Latin American traumatic events, –n.; magicorealism of, –, , , , n.; Menton’s analysis of, ; narrative mode of, ; Nobel address () by, –, –n.; pícaro spirit in works by, , ; ‘‘Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,’’ –,  —works: ‘‘Big Mama’s Funeral,’’ ; Cien años de soledad, , , –, , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , n., –nn.– Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), , –, – Garro, Elena,  Gass, William,  Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.,  German Romanticism, n. Ghosh, Amitav,  Gilmore, Leigh, n. globalization, ,  God of Small Things (Roy),  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, n., n. González Echevarría, Roberto,  González, Eduardo, n. Gooneratne, Yasmine,  Gossen, Gary,  Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck),  Grass, Günter, n. Greenblatt, Stephen, n. Griffith, D. W., , 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

Ground Beneath Her Feet (Rushdie), – , n., n. Guerrero, M. A. Jaimes, , n. Guha, Ranajit, n. Haitians,  Henighan, Stephen, – heteroglossia, –, , , , , –, ,  heterosexism. See sexism and heterosexism heterotext,  Hollaman, Keith, – Hombres de maíz (Asturias), ,  homophobia, ,  House of the Spirits (Allende),  How Natives Think (Levy-Bruhl), – Hulme, Keri,  Hutcheon, Linda, , , n. identity politics, , , –, n. Imbert, Enrique Anderson, –n. imperialism. See colonialism and imperialism Indian and Latin American Subaltern Studies Group,  intertextuality, ,  Ishiguro, Kazuo,  Islas, Arturo, , n. James, Henry,  Jameson, Frederic, , ,  Jane Eyre (Brontë),  Jen, Ghish,  Jews, , , n. Jodorowsky, Alejandro,  Johnson, Charles,  Joyce, James, , , n. Kafka, Franz, ,  Kaleta, Kenneth C.,  Kanga, Firdaus,  Kant, Immanuel, n.



Index

Kerouac, Jack,  Kesaban, Mukul,  Khan, Adib,  Kim (Kipling), ,  Kingston, Maxine Hong,  Kipling, Rudyard, ,  Koch, Pyke, n. Kristeva, Julia,  Kureishi, Hanif: Bromley’s analysis of, , ; and capitalist book and film marketplace, ; characters and narrators of, , , –; compared with Dash, –; on fusion in Britain, n.; and intertextuality, ; magicorealism in films of, , –, –; and mimesis-as-play, , – ; narrative mode of, ; reviewers on, ; and Rushdie, ; and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, , , –, ; trickster/pícaro in films of, –, –,  Laing, Kojo,  Lal, Vinay,  language: of Chicana identity in Castillo’s So Far from God, , , ; distinction between ontological fact and, ; of García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, nn.–; of magical realism generally, ; of magicorealism, –, ; of Rushdie’s novels, – Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, , , , n. Latina/o fiction, , –, , n.. See also Chicana/o fiction; and specific authors laughter, – Lazarillo de Tormes,  Leal, Luis, – Lee, Chang-Rae,  lesbianism, , – Lévi-Strauss, Claude, n.

Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, – Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel), – Like Water for Chocolate (film),  Limón, Graciela,  Lindroth, Colette, n. literary versus nonliterary texts,  Llarena, Alicia, , –, n., n. London, ix–xi, – Love Queen of the Amazons (Pineda), – Lumière brothers, ,  Lyotard, Jean-François, ,  MacCabe, Colin,  Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, , , n. Madame Bovary (Flaubert), , n. magical realism: in African novels, –; characteristics of, , , –n.; characters in generally, ; as comparative matrix, –; compared with lo real maravilloso, –; and confusion of storytelling mode with reality, –, –, –n.; death of, , , ; definition of, –, ; double reification of, –; ethnopoetic model of, –, –, ; first use of term, ; language of generally, ; Latin American scholarship on, – ; as localized knowledge and form of being, –, ; narrotological dimension of, n.; postmodern readings of, –, –nn.–; and poststructuralist paradigm, , , –n.; questions on, –; scholarship and debate on, –; as transculturative process, ; usefulness of, as analytic concept, –. See also magicorealism magicorealism: arch-textures of, – ; authors using generally, , ; in autobiography, –, –; characters and narrators in gener-



ally, , , ; compared with the fantastic, –; curandera in, –, , , ; epic tone at beginning of, , ; explanation of term, –; in films generally, ; formulaic uses of, –, , ; fourthspace in, –, –; fourthspace magicorealism of Rushdie, –; geopolitical landscapes of, ; global marketplaces and exotic narratives in, –; and heterogenizing/homogenizing forces, –; impurities of, –; language of, –, ; masculinist type of, –, , , , ; and mimesis-as-play genre, –, , –, –, , , –, –, –, , n., n.; narrative filtering device in, , n.; narrative structure of, –, ; paratextual markers in, ; parody in, , , , –, –, , , , ; preface-like entry at beginning of, , –, –; realism in, , –; as rebellious aesthetic, –, –, –, ; reference/discourse/story tripartite modality of, –; selfreflexivity of, , –, , , , , , , , , , –, , – , n., n.; trickster/pícaro character in, , , , , , –, –, , , . See also magical realism; and specific authors, books, and films magicoreels. See Dash, Julie; Kureishi, Hanif; and specific films Maiorino, Giancarlo,  Makhmalbaf, Mohsedn,  Mandeville, Sir John, , n. Marx, Karl,  masala stylization, ,  masculinist type of magicorealism, –, , , ,  Mastretta, Angeles, 

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

McCarthy, Cormac,  McCracken, Ellen, ,  McGarry, Richard,  McNamara, Robert,  Méliès, Georges, –, , –n. Mena, Christina,  Menton, Seymour, , –, , , , n., –nn.– Mermann-Jozwiak, Elisabeth,  Merrell, Floyd, n. mestiza worldview,  ‘‘Metamorphosis’’ (Kafka),  Mexica codex,  Mexican Revolution, – Midnight’s Children (Rushdie): Booker Prize for, , , ; and capitalist book-producing/consuming marketplace, ; characters in, ; critical response to, ; fourthspace in, ; narrative filtering device in, n.; New World narrative in, ; Rushdietis offshoots of, ; search for unity in, ; transformation of restrictive firstspace in, ; violent splitting up of post-Independence India in,  Mignolo, Walter,  Miller, Henry,  mimesis-as-play genre: in Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, , , n.; authors using generally, ; in Castillo’s So Far from God, –, –; and Cervantes, , , , , ; characters in generally, ; and Daughters of the Dust, ; in García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, , , ; and Méliès’s films, –; and Rabelais, , , , –, , –; in Rushdie’s works, –, –, , n.; and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, , – Mishra, Pankaj, –, n. Mishra, Vijay, –



Index

Mistry, Rohinton, ,  modernism, , n., n. modernistas, n. Momaday, Nathan Scott,  Moor’s Last Sigh (Rushdie): fourthspace in, ; narrator in, , –, ; New World narrative in, ; spectacular firstspace in, ; texts grafted onto, n. More, Sir Thomas, n. Moreiras, Alberto, –, ,  Moretti, Franco, n. Morrison, Toni,  Moss, Laura, n. Mukherjee, Bharati, , – Nair, Mira,  narrative contact zone, – narrative filtering device, , n. narrative techniques: Acosta-as-narrator in Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, , –, , , –; epic tone at beginning of, ; fallible narrator in Rushdie’s Shame, n.; of fantastic literature, –; in Latina/o fiction, ; of magicorealism, –, ; narrator in Castillo’s So Far from God, , –, –, n.; narrator in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, , , , , , ; preface-like entry at beginning of, , –, –; and referential density, –, ; Rushdie’s encyclopedia narrative technique, ; Rushdie’s narrators, –, , , n. Nava, Gregory,  New World chroniclers, –, –, n., n. Noble Savage,  nonliterary versus literary texts,  Okri, Ben, ,  On the Road (Kerouac), 

Ondaatje, Michael,  One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez): capitalism in, –; characters and narrator in, , –, , , , , , , ; class in, ; ending of, ; female characters in, ; language of, nn.–; Macondo in, , –, –; and mimesis-asplay, , , ; narrative filtering device in, n.; pícaro spirit in, , ; playfulness of, ; praise and criticism for generally, , n.; Rabassa on, ; rain of yellow flowers in, ; significance of, , , , n. Orientalism, , , –n. Other/Otherness: and book marketplace, ; in Castillo’s So Far from God, , –; in films generally, , –n.; hybrid Other, ; Latin American primitive Other, , , –; and locally produced text, ; and magicorealism, , ; in New World chronicles, – , –; and postcolonialism, , ; and poststructuralism, ; and prerational logic, –; as preternaturally exotic, –; in Rabelais, ; racial and ethnic Other, , , –, , –, , ; in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, ; subaltern as Other, ; thirdspace of, –; in Trip to the Moon, –n.. See also primitivism; subaltern peoples Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), n. Oviedo, José, n. Padilla, Genaro,  Palestinians,  paratextual markers,  Paredes, Américo,  Paredes, Raymund,  parody: in Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, –; in Castillo’s



So Far from God, , , , ; and heteroglossia, ; in Latina/o fiction generally, ; in Méliès’s films, ; in Pineda’s Love Queen of the Amazon, ; purpose of, ; in Rushdie’s novels, , , n.; in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, – pastiche,  Pavel, Thomas, ,  Perez Family, The,  picaresque, , , , , . See also pícaros pícaros, , , , , , –, –, , , , n., n. Pigafetta, Antonio,  Pineda, Cecile, , –, , n. Plato, n. Pleasures of Conquest (Gooneratne),  Poetics (Aristotle), n. Polo, Marco,  Popul Vuh,  Portillo, Febe,  postcolonialism, , , , , –, n. postethnic critical method, – Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Machado de Assis), n. postmodernism, –, –nn.– poststructuralism, , , –, , – n. Pratt, Mary Louise,  preface-like entry, , –, – primitivism: African primitivism, , ; and Amerindian subjects, ; and Asturias, ; and Castillo’s So Far from God, , ; and earlytwentieth-century painters and writer/intellectuals, ; in films generally, , –n.; and firstspace ideology, ; and India, ; in Kipling’s Kim, ; and Latin American subjects, , , –, n.; myth and folktale associated with,

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

–; in New World chronicles, –, –; and Orientalism, , , –n.; and photographer Mr. Snead in Daughters of the Dust, ; and poststructuralism, ; and protagonism of subaltern subjects, ; and Roland’s primitive idealization of Chicana/o fiction, n.; and Rushdie’s Shame, –; in Trip to the Moon, n.; and Vietnam War, . See also Other/Otherness privilege, – Proust, Marcel,  Punter, David, – Quinto del Sol,  Rabassa, Gregory, , ,  Rabassa, José, n. Rabelais, François, , , , –, , – racism, , , –, , , , , –, , , , , . See also Other/Otherness; primitivism radical realism,  Ramos, Julio, n. rasquache spirit,  lo real maravilloso, , , , –, , , , , –n., nn.–. See also magical realism; magicorealism real maravilloso americano, – realism: in Daughters of the Dust, –; in films generally, ; in Kipling’s Kim, ; in magicorealism, , –; on television,  el realismo mágico,  rebellious mimetics, –, –,  Reed, Ishmael,  referential density, –,  referentiality, –, –,  religion, – Renza, Louis A.,  Republic (Plato), n.



Index

Restrepo, Laura,  retinal apotheosis, n. Ríos, Isabella,  Road to Tamazunchale (Arias),  Rodriguez, Ralph, – Roh, Franz, , ,  Roland, Walter, n. romance genre, , – romanticism, n., n. Romero, Flor,  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, n. Roy, Arundhati, , ,  Ruiz de Burton, María,  Rulfo, Juan, , , , , ,  Rushdie, Salman: Booker Prize for, , , ; and capitalist book and film marketplace, ; characters and narrators in works by, , , , , –, n., n.; on critical approaches, ; D’haen on novels of, ; encyclopedia narrative technique of, ; finances of, n.; fourthspace narratives by, –, –nn.–; and heterotext, ; intertextuality in novels by, , ; magicorealism of, , , –, –; and mimesisas-play genre, –, –, , n.; Mishra’s critique of, –; narrative filtering device in novels by, n.; narrative mode of, , , , ; narrative re-conquests by, –; and parody, , , n.; pícaro spirit in works by, ; and self-reflexivity, , –, , n.; spectacular firstspaces in works by, –; transformation of restrictive firstspaces in works by, – —works: Fury, n.; Ground Beneath Her Feet, –, n., n.; Midnight’s Children, , , , , , , , , , n.; Moor’s Last Sigh, , , –, , , n.; Satanic Verses, , , , , , –,

n.; Shame, , , , , –, , , n., n. Rushdietis, – Said, Edward, –, , ,  Saldívar, José David, ,  Sammy and Rosie Get Laid: Alice in, , –; camera-narrator in, –, –, ; capitalist consumption in, , n.; carnivalesque in, –; characters of, , –, , –; compared with Daughters of the Dust, –; Danny/Victoria in, –, –, ; ending of, ; grafittied trailer of Danny/Victoria in, ; Hindu figure in, ; melodrama and romance genres in, , –; and mimesis-as-play, , –; mise en scène in, , ; mixing of genres in storytelling techniques of, , – , , ; music in, , ; opening shots of, –; parody in, –; plot of, –; Rafi in, –, –, , ; reviews of, ; Rosie in, –, , , ; Sammy in, –, , , , n.; self-reflexive techniques of, , , , ; trickster/pícaro in, –, –,  Sánchez, Rosaura, n. Sangari, Kumkum, , – santería,  Satanic Verses (Rushdie): British Muslims’ versus British liberal intellectuals’ readings of, ; fourthspace in, , ; mimesis-as-play in, n.; New World narrative in, –; spectacular firstspace in, ; transformation of restrictive firstspace in, ,  Schwartz-Bart, Simone,  Sealy, Alan,  self-reflexivity: in Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, –, ; in Castillo’s So Far from God, , , ,



, , n.; in Chicana/o fiction generally, ; in Daughters of the Dust, ; and magicorealism generally, –; in Méliès’s films, ; and referential density, –; in Rushdie’s novels, , –, , n.; in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, , , ,  sexism and heterosexism, , –, , ,  Shame (Rushdie): bazaars in, –; female character in, –, ; fourthspace in, , , , , –; intertextuality in, ; mimesisas-play in, , , , , n.; narrator in, , , n.; parody in, ; spectacular firstspaces in, –; spectacularization in, , – ; transformation of restrictive firstspace in, – Shange, Ntozake,  Shohat, Ella, n. signifying monkey,  Silko, Leslie Marmon,  Sirias, Silvio,  slow-motion effect, , n. Smith, Zadie,  So Far from God (Castillo): and capitalism, , –, –; Caridad in, , , –, ; chapter titles of, , ; characters in, , , –, n.; Chicana identity in, , , ; critical response to, ; curandera in, ; Esmeralda in, –; Esperanza in, , ; faith systems in, –; Fe in, , , , ; Francisco el Penitente in, –; heterosexist and racist ideology in, –, ; La Loca in, , , ; lesbianism in, , – ; Menton’s analysis of, –; and mimesis-as-play genre, –, –; narrative style of, –; narrator in, , –, –, n.; parody in,

Postethnic Narrative Criticism

, , , ; santería in, ; and selfreflexivity, , , , , , n.; Sofia in, , , , ; telenovela plot line in, , n.; violence in, , –; whore/virgin paradigm in,  social class. See class Sommer, Dorris,  Spariosu, Mihai, n. spectacularization, –, , –, , , –, – Spivak, Gayatri, n. Steinbeck, John,  Stone, Norman,  strobe effect, , n. subaltern peoples, , , , , , , , , , , , n., n., n.. See also Other/Otherness subaltern studies groups, , , , n. suicide,  Swift, Jonathan,  Tan, Amy,  Taussig, Michael, – Thackeray, William,  Tharoor, Shashi,  Thatcher, Margaret, x, ,  third-eye vision, –, ,  thirdspace, –,  Thompson, Hunter S.,  Tin Drum (Grass), n. Todd, Richard,  Todorov, Tzvetan, n. Torgovnick, Marianna, n. Tortilla Curtain (Boyle), – tragic versus comic, , n. transculturative process,  tricksters, , , , , –, –, , , , , n. Trip to the Moon, –, , –n.



Index

University of New Mexico Press,  Uslar Pietri, Arturo,  Us/Them paradigm, , . See also Other/Otherness Utopia (More), n. Vakil, Ardeshir,  Vargas Llosa, Mario,  Véa, Alfredo,  ‘‘Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’’ (García Márquez), –,  Vespucci, Amerigo, , , , , n. Vietnam War,  Villa, Raúl Homero,  Villareal, José,  Villaseñor, Victor, ,  violence, , – Viramontes, María Helena,  Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., n. Walcott, Derek,  Waldseemüller, Martin,  Walk in the Clouds,  ‘‘Waste Land’’ (Eliot), , n. Weltliteratur, n., n. Westmoreland, General,  Wicks, Ulrich,  Williamson, Judith,  Wilson, Rawdon,  Wilson, Robert R., ,  Wilson, Woodrow,  Witch,  Woolf, Virginia,  Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas,  Young, David, – Young, Robert,  Yugoslavia,  Zamora, Lois Parkinson, , , n.