merely part of everyday life in America. Furthermore, as a follower of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (in Spengler's universal history there is no fixed 'center'), Carpentier eschewed the Surrealists' Eurocentric doctrine of the marvelous and argued that all things of a truly magical nature are, in fact, found within the reality of the Americas — not the 'boring' cities of Europe. According to Carpentier, the 'discovery,' conquest, and colonization of the New World are magical events in themselves: 'Open Bernal Díaz del Castillo's great chronicle [True History of the Conquest of New Spain (1552)] and one will encounter the only real and authentic book of chivalry ever written: a book of dust and grime chivalry where the genies who cast evil spells were the visible and palpable teules, where the unknown beasts were real, where one actually gazed on unimagined cities and saw dragons in their native rivers and strange mountains swirling with snow and smoke.' For Carpentier, then, Bernal Díaz del Castillo's chronicle of the Spanish conquest of Mexico is an exemplary magic realist narrative because Díaz (unwittingly) had written about the clash of cultures — Old World and New World — and had described in thick detail the superposition of one layer of reality upon another.
Forming a background for Carpentier's theory and thematized in The Kingdom of This World is what he sees as the 'fecundity' of the -525- New World landscape. Carpentier's concept of lo real maravilloso can, therefore, be summarized in the author's own words: 'due to the untouched nature of its landscape, its ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the Black, the revelation inherent in the continent's recent discovery and the fruitful cross-breeding this discovery engendered, America is still very far from exhausting its wealth of mythologies. Indeed, what is the history of America if not the chronicle of the marvelous of the real?'
In short, Carpentier set up an antithesis between surrealism, on the one hand, and lo real maravilloso, on the other. As is clear from the 'Prologue' to The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier unfavorably compares Surrealism with a privileged New World aesthetic grounded in a reality that is inherently magical (voodoo, santería, and so on). To be sure, Carpentier's thesis rests on the claims that New World artists and people experience the marvelous in their everyday lives — what Raymond Williams called in a different context 'structures of feeling' — and therefore have no need to invent a domain of fantasy. Thus on the basis of local New World privilege, Carpentier rejects surrealism as sterile, and legitimizes, in near postmodern realist fashion, the mode of writing he elects: a 'chronicle of the marvelous of the real.' Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World is, therefore, emblematic of the kind of narrative experimentation we now take for granted in postmodernist American fiction: historical events move in reverse; characters die before they are born; and 'green' tropical winds blow away the New World landscape.
Although Gabriel García Márquez's use of magic realism includes Carpentier's familiar tropes of the supernatural — one of the foundation concepts of magic realism-his version differs from Carpentier's and inaugurates the rise of (postmodern) magic realism globally. As is well known, García Márquez's concept of postmodern (magic) realism in Leafstorm (1955), 'Big Mama's Funeral' (1962), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976) presupposes an identification by the narrator with the oral expression of popular cultures in the Latin American pueblo. In other words, as I argued in The Dialectics of Our America (1991), García Márquez's thematization of (postmodern) magic realism and the politics of the possible are usually expressed in his early stories about the rise and fall of Macondo through a collective voice, inverting, in a -526- jesting manner, the values of the official Latin American culture. More recently, García Márquez has written a postmodern realist novel, The General in His Labyrinth, that reverses his past attempts as a novelist to transform the ordinary into the mythical and magical, for in this controversial text he takes on the saintly image of Simón Bolívar, the Great Liberator of the Americas, by rendering this national hero as a man of ordinary, even crude, attributes.
In The General in His Labyrinth the postmodern real is at the center: it focuses on a real historical personage, Simón Bolívar, and is based, according to the author, on two years of 'sinking into the quicksand of voluminous, contradictory, and often uncertain documentation.' In other words, if Bolívar went out at night prowling the mean streets of Bogotá when the moon was full, then we can be assured that García Márquez, along with the assistance of the Cuban geographer Gladstone Oliva and the astronomer Jorge Doval, had made an inventory of nights when there was 'a full moon during the first 30 years of the last century.'
Of course, García Márquez avoids, like the plague, a conventional chronological narrative of Bolívar's life. Rather, in postmodernist fashion, he begins his narrative in medias res when Bolívar is forty-six years old, shrunken by an unnamed illness that will surely kill him. Rejected as president by the elite and the lumpen of Colombia — the new country he helped liberate — Bolívar leaves Bogotá for a wild, whirling journey by boat down the Magdalena River, eventually hoping to sail to London.
But the General never gets 'out of this labyrinth.' In the fierce light of death's shadows, Bolívar is defeated by the backwater elements, by the chicanery of his enemies (especially General Santander), by the rancor of his ambitious colleagues, by his 'persistent constipation' or by his 'farting stony, foul-smelling gas,' and by his own solitary nostalgia for his former revolutionary self. Embarking with his noisy retinue from port to port, city to city, safe house to safe house, the General endures either celebrations and fiestas in his honor or is hounded by an army of widows who follow him everywhere, hoping to hear his 'proclamations of consolation.'
While Simón Bolívar had 'wrested' from the Spanish colonists an empire five times more vast than all of Europe, and while he had led twenty years of war 'to keep it free and united,' he is at the end of -527- his life a solitary man, praying for the right moment when he might make a political comeback.
Like the labyrinthine journey down the Magdalena River, the structure of the novel is postmodernist and serpentine. Deconstructing its own 'return to storytelling,' The General in His Labyrinth twists and disrupts historical time and space until not only Bolívar but the reader cannot tell where he is. Like the postmodern arts of memory themselves, full of traumas and resistances of all sorts, are scenes from the General's earlier triumphant life: his utopian proposal to turn the huge continent 'into the most immense, or most extraordinary, or most invincible league of nations the world had ever seen'; his eternal temptations 'by the enigma' of beautiful women; his latent homoerotic desires for the Baron Alexander von Humboldt who had 'astonished' him in Paris by the 'splendor of his beauty the likes of which he had never seen in any woman.'
Just before he dies in December 1830, Bolívar proclaims that America is 'ungovernable,' for 'this nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants.' He prophesies, moreover, the postcontemporary perils of what Andre Gunder Frank called 'the development of underdevelopment': 'I warned Santander that whatever good we had done for the nation would be worthless if we took on debt because we would go on paying interest till the end of time.' In any case, the United States, in Bolívar's eyes, is 'omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.'
Arguably the most important of American writers, Gabriel García Márquez takes up the slack of Carpentier's lo real maravilloso and the traditional historical novel in his postmodern realism, and combines them into a genuine postcontemporary dialectical aesthetic. In The General in His Labyrinth, García Márquez presents the reader with a semblance of historical verisimilitude and shatters it into alternative, dizzying patterns, as though the form of historiography was retained (at least in its traditional versions) but now for some reason seems to offer him a remarkable movement of invention.
If it makes sense to evoke a certain 'return to storytelling' in the postmodern period, the return can be found in the wild genealogies and speculative texts of Toni Morrison, Arturo Islas, and Maxine -528- Maxine. In their novels and experimental memoirs, they shuffle, like Petra Cotes in One Hundred Years of Solitude, historical figures and names like so many cards from a finite deck. Recovering alternative American histories in the unwritten texts of history (songs, cuentos, and talk story), these postmodernist realists' texts resemble the dynastic annals of 'small-power kingdoms,' as Jameson puts it, and realms very far removed from the traditional whitemale American novel.
Toni Morrison's Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), like most of the
