Oates, Robert Stone, E. L. Doctorow, and others are emphatically implicated in any attempt to map out the specificity of postcontemporary culture and literature in the Americas and thus to gauge this transnational culture's distance from what might be called 'high modernism.' Whether or not one uses the term postmodernism, there can be no doubt about the fact that the position of women and men of color, Jews, gays and lesbians, and so on in postcontemporary society and their effect on our hemisphere is fundamentally different from what it used to be in the period of high modernism and the historical avant-garde. Put differently, postmodern theory ought never to be viewed as a homogeneous phenomenon (Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas) but rather as one in which political contestation is central. As Cornel West suggests, postmodernism illuminates 'the ragged edges of the Real, of Necessity, not being able to eat, not having health care, all this is something that one cannot not know.'
Seen in this light, postmodernism is an attempt to negotiate 'the ragged edges of the Real,' and to think historically; it either expresses what Fredric Jameson calls 'some deeper irrepressible historical impulse' (in however 'derealized' a fashion as writers from the -521- Americas might have it) or unsuccessfully represses or avoids history, like a bad dream, full of displacements, representations, condensations, and secondary revisions. Linda Hutcheon, moreover, suggests that postmodernist narratives are closely related to 'historiographic metafiction,' and includes texts that are 'intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages.' Hutcheon's position in effect links postmodernism with Louis Althusser's late Marxism and its rejection of the postulates of realism and Judith Butler's feminist deconstruction of the real.
Like many postmodern realists, Althusser reminds us that 'realism' is not a style that gives us an undistorted reflection of the world. Realism, in his formulation, represents the ideologically hegemonic way of conceiving and expressing our relationship to the natural and social worlds around us. In other words, as Althusser suggested in his classic essay 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1969), realism functions ideologically: it offers itself as a neutral reflection of the world when it is but one way of imagining a world. More recently, Judith Butler in her essay 'Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess' (1990) argues that fantasy is not to be equated with what is not real but rather 'with what is not yet real, or what belongs to a different version of the real.' In any case, this chapter is not a survey of the postmodern realist writers from the Americas, for the postmodern condition cannot account without strain for all the literary productions that follow. Rather, I have merely tried to explore postmodern realism as a space of affinities and alliances among diverse histories.
It is generally accepted that the (postmodernist) magic realist movement in the Americas led by Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, and, more recently, Isabel Allende has had a powerful influence on a diverse group of postcontemporary United States writers of color: Toni Morrison's Sula and Song of Solomon; Arturo Islas's The Rain God and Migrant Souls; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey; Helena María Viramontes's The Moths and Other Stories; and Alberto Ríos's The Iguana Killer. While the works of these United States writers of color have been widely praised for their oppositional, feminist, gay, and minority discourse poetics, and for their powerful supernatural lyricism, their use of (postmodern) -522- magic realism has received little attention in our largely Anglophonic Departments of Literature, owing to an inadequate understanding of a vast and rich literary and cultural movement in the Americas that began over forty years ago.
To be sure, the concept of (postmodern) magic realism raises many problems, both theoretical and historical. I will not retrace the rich polemical debate among Latin American and United States scholars over the concept 'magic realism,' for Fernando Alegría, Roberto González Echevarría, and Amaryll Beatrice Chanady have written the most cogent and useful critical surveys of the debate. Instead, my task is to make the very demanding argument about (postmodern) magic realism available to readers in the United States who have heard about its importance but so far have been baffled by it. To simplify matters and to save some space, I will focus only on Alejo Carpentier's 'Prologue' to his revolutionary novel The Kingdom of This World (1949) — arguably, the first magic realist text in the Americas — and on Gabriel García Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth (1990) — perhaps the latest exemplary postmodern realist novel.
For many scholars, magic realism as a concept appears in three different moments in the twentieth century. The first appears during the avant-garde years in Europe when the term was used by Franz Roh in his Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus (1925), and when André Breton proclaimed the marvelous an aesthetic concept and as part of everyday life. The second moment was in the late 1940s when the related concepts el realismo mágico (magic realism) and lo real maravilloso (marvelous realism) traveled, as they say, from Europe to the Americas and were appropriated by Arturo Uslar Pietri and Alejo Carpentier as a yardstick to measure, compare, and evaluate indigenous cultural art forms in the American grain. Whereas Pietri adopted Roh's term 'magic realism,' Carpentier, the more influential novelist and theorist, used Breton's version of le merveilleux and theorized in the 'Prologue' to The Kingdom of This World his famous concept of 'marvelous American reality.'
A third period of (postmodern) magic realism can be said to have begun in 1955 when Angel Flores published his influential essay 'Magic Realism in Spanish American Fiction.' This third phase, as Roberto González Echevarría suggests, continues through the 1960s -523- 'when criticism searches for the Latin roots of some of the novels produced during the 'boom' and attempts to justify their experimental nature.' As we shall see, there is a fourth phase or 'crack' as Toni Morrison, Arturo Islas, Maxine Hong Kingston, among others, expand the magic realist tradition in postmodernist and often 'signifyin[g]' ways.
Flores had argued that what distinguishes magic realism from other realisms is that it attempts to transform 'the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal.' Moreover, Flores emphasized the connections between magic realism and examples of European modernist aesthetics practiced by Franz Kafka in his novels and Giorgio de Chirico in his paintings. In 1967 Luis Leal joined the growing debates by refuting Flores's essay. In 'El realismo mágico en la literatura hispanoamericana,' he argued that magic realism was an exclusively New World literary movement. Included in his school of magic realist writers were Arturo Uslar Pietri, Miguel Angel Asturias, Felix Pita Rodríguez, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, and Nicolás Guillén. According to Leal, the basic difference among the competing schools of 'magic realism,' 'realism,' and 'surrealism' is the following: 'The magic realist does not attempt to copy (like the realists) or make the real vulnerable (like the surrealists), but attempts to capture the mystery which palpitates in things.' But Leal's essay ignores the profound impact European surrealism, modernism, and ethnography had on the generation of writers he analyzed, especially Alejo Carpentier.
Born and raised in Cuba, Alejo Carpentier made these connections in his 'Prologue' to his African Caribbean novel The Kingdom of This World. In the rhetorical question 'What is the history of the Americas but the chronicle of lo real maravilloso?' Carpentier suggests the ideology that lies at the center of his magic realist narrative: how to write in a European language — with its Western systems of thought — about realities and thought-structures never before seen in Europe. Carpentier asks for the first time in 1949 the following questions, which would influence generations of writers from the Americas: What is the African, Amerindian, and mestizola heritage of the Americas, and how can it function as a stylistics, an ideology, and a point of view? Years later, Robert Coover would note that the nueva-524- narrativa from Latin America 'was for a moment the region's headiest and most dangerous export.'
While Carpentier learned much from the Surrealists' experiments to explore a kind of second reality hidden within the world of dreams, the unconscious, political tensions that arose among the Surrealists themselves caused him to break away from them. Carpentier probably also went his own way because, as González Echevarría emphasized, European surrealism clashed with the Cuban's 'Spenglerian conception of man and history he had absorbed through avant-garde journals like the Revista de Occidente.'
Thus, in spite of his early fascination with surrealism, Carpentier never became a committed disciple of Breton. Unlike Breton and his followers, Carpentier argued in The Kingdom of This World, The Lost Years (1953), and Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) that the 'second reality' the Surrealists explored in automatic writing is
