The Modernism of Magical Realism: Crisis or Identity

Magical realism casts a shadow over the question of modernism in Latin America.[1] Indeed, many critics have insisted on the identity of the two terms. Perry Anderson, for instance, makes such an equation in his insightful essay “Modernity and Revolution” (1984). Eschewing periodization and evolutionary accounts, Anderson proposes a “conjectural explanation” in which modernist techniques can be seen to emerge “at the intersection between a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialized capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent, or –insurgent, labor movement.”[2] Writing in the 1980s, Anderson suggests that these volatile conditions, which obtained in early twentieth-century Europe, continue to operate in the Third World, “in societies still at definite historical cross-roads” (“Modernity and Revolution,” 109). Anderson suggests that Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), although it was published almost half a century after the high modernist moment, draws from a similar “constellation” of forces: landed “oligarchies”; “rapid,” chaotic development; and the “permanent possibility” of “socialist revolution,” or its realization “in countries close to home—Cuba or Nicaragua.”[3]

If Anderson represents the tendency to identify modernism in Latin America with the magical realism of the sixties and seventies, Ángel Rama embodies a perspective in which magical realism appears as the telos of Latin American modernism. In his influential essay “Las dos vanguardias latinoamericanas” (The Two Latin American Avant-Gardes, 1973) Rama draws a distinction between two modernist orientations: a populist stance that takes inspiration from local sources; and a cosmopolitan attitude focused on formal experimentation. If the former aspires to communicate with “a social community,” often by drawing on indigenous and mass culture, the latter “intensified their link with the structure of the European avant-gardes.”[4] In effect, Rama overlays the question of national identity onto the familiar modernist dilemma: technical innovation or mass appeal. In Rama’s subsequent work, the tension between these orientations finds its resolution in magical realism or what he calls “narrative transculturation”: an aesthetic that relies on the modernist techniques of Faulkner, Joyce, Flaubert, among others, in order to express, not ignore, a distinctly national or regional cultural identity.[5]

The accounts of Anderson and Rama mutually shed light on what made Latin American magical realism such a powerful literary-aesthetic phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century. Rama rightly, in my opinion, associates magical realism with efforts to construct a cultural identity whereas Anderson demonstrates how this cultural project could present itself as a modernist, revolutionary phenomenon. In this way, magical realism resonates with perhaps the dominant political tendency at the time, namely, a form of populist, developmentalist modernization that sustained itself on the presumption of a cultural identity that superseded political disagreements. The accounts of Anderson and Rama establish the coordinates of what I would call the “ideology of magical realism”: an interpretive framework that portrays magical realist works as revolutionary because they express a distinct cultural identity.[6] When Anderson relates magical realism to its political context, he, like many others, insists on the significance of the Cuban Revolution, but I would argue that this ideology of magical realism does not express a socialist, revolutionary project but rather articulates in literary and aesthetic terms a self-conception that has a greater affinity with the developmental populism of Vargas in Brazil, Cárdenas in Mexico, or Perón in Argentina.[7] Globally, this magical realism forms part of the affinity between peripheral modernism and the non-aligned movement that Nataša Kovačević discusses in her contribution to this issue of Modernism/modernity Print Plus. As I have argued elsewhere, mid-century Latin American magical realism establishes the equivalence of epistemological commitments and ontological claims, with the result that political disagreements dissolve into appeals to who people are, to different cultural worldviews.[8] To put it crudely, One Hundred Years of Solitude is such a powerful work in the Latin American context because left- and right-readers can feel that, despite their conflicting political commitments, they are reflected in the narrative. Likewise, the economic and political policies of the developmentalist state depended on the ability to project a distinctly regional or national identity that overrode antagonisms internal to Latin American nations.

And yet, when we situate magical realism in the modernist moment of the 1920s and 1930s, a different picture of peripheral modernism in Latin American appears. By contrasting the “ideology of magical realism” with various essays by the Peruvian Marxist and cultural critic José Carlos Mariátegui, I want to portray magical realism as a force field of contrasting tendencies with distinct political implications. My point is not to insist on the cosmopolitan character of magical realism in contrast to its more national or regional orientation in the mid-twentieth century. And I do not want to simply draw a distinction between the politics of magical realism in metropolitan and in postcolonial contexts, the first being primarily reactionary and the other emancipatory.[9] And although I draw the distinction between these two versions of magical realism in reference to different historical periods, the image of a force field is meant to suggest that these contrasting tendencies coexist even if one becomes dominant over the other at a certain moment. Thomas Waller’s paper on Brazilian Concretism, for instance, perhaps points to a non-identitarian peripheral modernism in Latin America that is contemporaneous with the mid-twentieth-century “ideology of magical realism.” Most fundamentally, I want to propose that whereas the periphery appears in the “ideology of magical realism” as a distinct cultural identity relative to the core, an identity to which it purports to give expression, in Mariátegui’s conception the peripheral situation forms part of a global crisis of bourgeois society and the role of magical realism is to make palpable our participation and engagement with that contradictory totality.

We can begin to trace the contours of these different conceptions of magical realism by looking at their respective stances toward crisis. The Cuban Alejo Carpentier bases, in part, his account of lo real maravilloso in the preface to The Kingdom of this World (1949) on Oswald Spengler’s claims about the decline of the West.[10] Spengler notes that the breakdown of a culture is marked by a heightened degree of self-reflection, but Carpentier suggests that this corrosive reflexivity does not penetrate to the core of Latin American cultures. Insofar as “the Americas are far from exhausting their mythological riches,”  the region preserves “faith”: for instance, the “collective faith” that Mackandal, the leader of a slave rebellion in Haiti, would undergo a miraculous metamorphosis and thereby escape execution at the hands of French colonial forces.[11] In a related sense, Mariátegui concludes his essay “Reality and Fiction” (1926) with the claim that the “root” of the apparent “anarchy” of modern literature and of the “crisis of western civilization” lies not “in the excess of fiction but rather in the lack of a grand fiction that could be its myth and star.”[12] But, conspicuously, Mariátegui does not counterpose this lack of a fiction to an organic faith that can be found outside the west. Even when he turns his attention to a Peruvian poet, namely, Martín Adán, he considers his work in relation to the “pure nonsense” (disparate puro) that, Mariátegui claims, “signs the death certificate of the bourgeois absolute.”[13] On first approximation, “pure nonsense” seems to be an odd label to apply to Adán. Far from a Dadaist, he was an avant-garde poet firmly rooted in the classical tradition. But, in a “romantic, revolutionary epoch,” Mariátegui writes, “the formal tradition exists only as an inert set of dry, dead units” (“Defensa del disparate puro,” 112). Pure nonsense, precisely through its commitment to the classical tradition, puts on display the “dissolution” of the old order, but, at the same time, “it cannot remove itself from the ascent of the terms, symbols, and concepts of the new order” (112). “In this way, Martín Adan, obeying his rationalist, classicist orientation, traces a Marxist path in the landscape and, to use Adán’s own striking metaphor, “decides to unionize the poplar trees” (112). Pure nonsense, in other words, is a matter of the dialectical relation between order and disorder in the crisis of bourgeois society. The crisis is not something to be observed from the safety of a cultural identity found in the periphery; it must be worked through at every instance of the social totality.

In “Reality and Fiction,” Mariátegui links the aesthetic of “pure nonsense” to Massimo Bontempelli’s conception of magical realism. In his journal 900, Bontempelli called for a “letteratura novecentista”—that is, a twentieth-century literature—whose defining characteristics would be “realistic precision and magical atmosphere.”[14] Erik Camayd-Freixas has argued that Bontempelli, despite his temporary association with Mussolini,[15] inspired Latin American novelists because “his magical realism sought to overcome not only Futurism but also a primitivism without a past.”[16] But for Mariátegui the importance of Bontempelli’s work lies not in its primitivist orientation; rather, it represents a broader tendency in which fantasy and the implausible acquire a realist character. “[F]iction,” Mariátegui writes, “is not free” ( “La realidad y la ficción,” 194). It does not, therefore, “reveal to us the marvelous [lo maravilloso],” the Surrealist name for the unexpected irruption of irrational meaning (194). The “limitation” and the “drama” of fantasy is that it “only has value when it creates something real” (194). Fantasy can be neither self-sufficient nor definitively overcome. It must form part of a new “absolute,” a totalizing conception of the world, and as such, its validity cannot be reduced to specific cultural forms.

Mariátegui develops this conception of a modernist aesthetic in “Taking Stock of Surrealism” (El balance del suprarrealismo, 1930), a piece written in response to André Breton’s second manifesto. Contrary to the perception of this artistic movement in Latin America and elsewhere, Mariátegui underlines how surrealism has developed from its roots in the Dadaist desire to shock into a disciplined, historical form of commitment. For Mariátegui, futurism represents the fate of an avant-garde movement that refused to develop. Because of its “taste for the spectacular,” futurism has been “condemned to life in the foreground[17]” By constantly making noise to draw attention to itself, Marinetti has “ruled out the possibility of establishing a continuous, dialectical presence for futurism in Italian literature and history” (Mariátegui, “El balance del suprarrealismo,” 224). And, ironically, this constant provocation has not stopped it from being incorporated into the academy. Indeed, it may have contributed to this result. The close relation between futurism and Italian fascism, Mariátegui suggests, demonstrates not “the digestive power” of the latter but the “fundamental harmlessness” of the former (223). But if Surrealism has moved beyond the infantile phase of pure provocation, this does not mean that it has reverted to l’art pour l’art. “[T]here is nothing that the surrealists refuse,” Mariátegui writes, “so much as voluntary confinement in pure artistic speculation” (225). L’art pour l’art and avant-garde provocation appear as two sides of the same phenomenon from the perspective of Surrealism’s developed position, namely, “Autonomy of art, yes; but not the closure of art” (225). Mariátegui does not elaborate on this formulation in detail, but it is perfectly consistent with the thesis of “Reality and Fiction.”[18] Art closes in on itself when fantasy (fiction or the implausible) alienate us from reality. But it is only in the commitment to the implausible that art can reveal reality. It is only in the disciplined elaboration, not elimination, of the specificity of art, that Surrealism can disclose our situation and confront us with our engagement in a contradictory world.

For Mariátegui, the disciplined artistic stance of surrealism is also reflected in its disciplined political orientation. Just as they do not oppose “the facts of science,” the surrealists, “in the domains of politics and the economy, consider it childish and absurd to attempt an original speculation based on the facts of art. The Surrealists only exercise their right to nonsense [disparate], to absolute subjectivism, in art” (Mariátegui, “El balance del suprarrealismo,” 224). In politics and the economy, surrealist discipline means commitment to “the Marxist program of proletarian revolution” (224). The surrealist orientation to politics underscores, once again, the fundamental differences to be found between Mariátegui’s conception of “magical realism” and the “ideology of magical realism.” As I claimed above, by establishing an equivalence between ontological commitments and epistemological claims, mid-century magical realism tends to make political questions into a matter of who people are, into a question of their cultural identity. In so doing, the ideology of magical realism resonated powerfully with a political-economic project premised on neutralizing ideological disagreements in the name of a regionally specific form of modernization. “Pure nonsense,” by contrast, does not purport to give expression to a distinct cultural identity; rather, it dissolves a tradition already in crisis and, in so doing, anticipates a future form of organization. In other terms, “pure nonsense” (or magical realism) both discloses that the nature of crisis is unity-in-disunity, not mere fragmentation, and points beyond the global crisis of bourgeois society. But it accomplishes this by situating itself within crisis, not by identifying with a pre-existing cultural form that presumably emerges unscathed from the process of dissolution and reconstitution.

By contrasting Mariátegui’s essays from the 1920s with the more canonical formulation of magical articulated in the second half of the twentieth century, I have claimed that we should understand magical realism as a sort of force field simultaneously pulling toward identity and crisis. In conclusion, I would like to draw out the political stakes of the argument by briefly noting Mariátegui’s polemics with Victor Haya de la Torre. One of Mariátegui’s Peruvian contemporaries, Haya de la Torre caused a rift in the Peruvian left in 1928 when he transformed APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) into a militaristic political party and announced his candidacy for president. Insofar as it was defined by nationalism and populism, APRA conceived itself as a party whose unity was based on the presumed identity shared by the bourgeoisie, peasants and workers. In this way, Haya de la Torre’s anti-imperialist populism anticipates the political-economic project that would become hegemonic in mid-twentieth century Latin America. In “Punto de vista antiimperialista” (Anti-Imperialist Point of View, 1929), Mariátegui rejects Haya de la Torre’s call for a political party unifying the national bourgeoisie and the masses on the grounds that imperialism is “the best source of profits” for the national bourgeoisie.[19] As a political proposal, Mariátegui stresses, anti-imperialism is misguided because it mystifies and displaces the contradictions within Latin American social structures into a purely external opponent: it “does not annul antagonisms between classes, nor does it suppress different class interests” (“Punto de vista antiimperialista,” 120). APRA had claimed, “We are leftists (or socialists) because we are anti-imperialists” (120) but Mariátegui insists that anti-imperialism can only be fully intelligible and effective if we reverse the order of the terms: “we are anti-imperialists because we are Marxists” (124). Whereas Haya de la Torre purports to articulate an identity that is distinct from the imperialist West and then vaguely ascribes political and ideological content to that identity, Mariátegui suggests that imperialism gets reproduced in the internal structures of peripheral social formations. 

For Mariátegui, the value of magical realism thus resides not in claiming to de-link from the West and articulate a distinct cultural self-conception but rather in disclosing the contradictory character of bourgeois society in which the periphery unavoidably participates. I have focused my discussion in this limited space on Mariátegui’s account of magical realism, but I would suggest that the instances of this crisis-oriented version of magical realism multiply in provocative ways if we connect it to what the Warwick Research Collective, among others, call “critical irrealism,” a literary genre of which we can find many examples in the history of the modern capitalist world-system.[20] That is, the pull of the crisis-pole in the force field that is magical realism may have been overpowered by the identity-pole when the latter became associated in the mid-twentieth century with the developmentalist state in the periphery, but the pull did not disappear. And, indeed, the magical realist works we find in contemporary world literature, when they aren’t simply an exoticized commodification of cultural difference, perhaps are drawn towards that crisis-pole because we have once again entered into a global crisis of bourgeois society and of the form of modernization that made the developmentalist state possible. Under these conditions, perhaps José Carlos Mariátegui, rather than Gabriel García Márquez, should be a central point of reference if we set ourselves the task of thinking through the politics of peripheral modernism and magical realism.