By Any Other Name

WHEN THE COLOMBIAN NOBEL laureate Gabriel García Márquez died earlier this year, few obituary writers were able to avoid inserting a certain phrase into their lapidary efforts. The American novelist K Ford K wrote in the Huffington Post:

the world of magical realism was an epiphany … I suddenly realized that life was not the black and white, cut and dried reality I had learned in hometown America. A whole new world opened up for me in which the supernatural, the spiritual and the physical coexisted in an exotic mélange that changed my view of life forever.

Even those who chose not to quiver in homage persisted with the phrase. The Economist, for instance, carried this assessment:

It was not García Márquez’s fault if magical realism became a sterile canon, practised with success by writers of much lesser talent. But younger novelists were surely right when they criticised him for projecting to the world an archaic vision of Latin America, as an exotic and provincial place, incapable of successful modernisation, development and democracy.

Everybody was mourning, in other words, somebody named Magical Realism Márquez, in much the same way that Carnatic music aficionados might have mourned the passing of a Flute Mahalingam. Magical realism wraps itself around García Márquez much like the Iron Mask did around its mysterious victim. It may now be safe, more than six months after his passing, to begin picking our way through the obituary noises toward a simple thought experiment: will separating magical realism from García Márquez deliver us from a persistent misunderstanding, and allow a more meaningful conversation about the writer?

K Ford K may have genuinely experienced life-changing moments after reading García Márquez, but her assessment, even while appearing to say much of deep import about what makes the writer distinctive (“supernatural,” “spiritual,” “epiphany”), is really an incoherent and woolly-headed attempt at justifying reading pleasure. And to The Economist I would only say: it was not García Márquez’s fault that his name came to be associated with magical realism.

For their imprecision, one cannot but quarrel with those who favour the term “magical realism.” The articles quoted above, for instance, have it down as both a genre of Latin American exotica and a dying, drying canon. Those intent on defining it as technique tend to focus on yellow butterflies who follow characters around, sentient streams of blood adept at crossing the street, and maidens to the heavens ascending, producing thus a notion of literature by special effects, and turning García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, where these events occur, into its urtext.

This is rather reductive, for the author’s account of the convoluted lives of the Buendías of Macondo does a bunch of other things that these admittedly eye-catching bursts of narrative energy feed into—the novel directs much mischief at the idea of Latin America as a New World or Utopia, subjects those who wield power to parody, draws attention to writing and history and how they can fail each other, and plays more games with form and with its readers than we can list in one sentence.

The chorus of lamentation for magical realism this year demonstrates that those who insist on bracketing García Márquez with it have succeeded despite their obvious laziness. The term’s looseness causes it to fail the simplest tests of explanatory power, and usually spawns further imprecision. In one of my early forays into teaching, a senior asked me a rather starchy question about my “research interests”; I offered Latin America, and she began gushing rather alarmingly about “Márquez and his magic surrealism.” The other problem is an unforgivable sloppiness with history—“Márquez,” “Latin America” and “magical realism” often tend to become synonyms for each other. This has had the rather unfortunate side effect of casting the somewhat fractious brotherhood of novelists from the region who experimented with form—the Boom Generation—as a bunch of adepts dancing in attendance upon the “Magus of Magic Realism”—to borrow the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani’s hyperbolic description of the novelist.

If magical realism has muddled the dialogue about García Márquez between the media and the reading public, it might be worthwhile to turn to academia for antidotes, and for a reasonable assessment of the novelist’s work.

TO SURVEY THE PROVENANCE and life of the term “magical realism” in academia is an experience in textbook magical realism that few Latin American novels may be able to match. The German critic Franz Roh coined the term Magischer Realismus (“Magical Realism”) in a 1925 essay, to describe a particular tendency in Weimar Republic art. He may have seen it as a synthesis between Impressionism and Expressionism; the term also allowed him to make a distinction between such experimentation and the work of the Surrealists. The original magical realists—artists such as Franz Radziwill and Otto Dix—rendered familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, often enveloping them in an aura of mystery. Roh would eventually give up this term for the more staid Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity.

The term began its migration from the visual arts into the literary soon after. In 1927, the year García Márquez was born, the Spanish intellectual Ortega y Gasset published a translation of Roh’s long essay in Revista de Occidente, the influential journal of ideas that he had founded. The Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli also carried a translation in the journal 900 in the same year, which may have given the term some currency among Europe’s avant-garde.

In 1949, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier concluded the prologue to his novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) with a rhetorical question that offered a way of talking about the distinctiveness of the Americas:

Because of the virginity of our land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the Black man, the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund racial mixing (mestizaje), America is far from using up the wealth of mythologies. After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvellous real?

The phrase he used, lo maravilloso real, began sharing a conjoined life with Franz Roh’s coinage due to an exchange between two scholars—the Puerto Rican Angel Flores, and the Mexican-American Luis Leal.

In his 1955 essay ‘Magical Realism in Spanish-American Fiction,’ Flores bends over backwards to agree with the American scholar and translator Dudley Fitts’s dismissal, in a 1954 issue of The Hudson Review, of Latin-American fiction (“ineptitude, uncertainty, imitativeness, sentimental histrionics”). Flores adds to Fitts’s endorsement of Jorge Luis Borges a genealogy connecting the Argentine writer with a desirable no-flab modernism of the Kafka variety. “Nowhere,” he says, “is the story weighed down by lyrical effusions, needlessly baroque descriptions … The practitioners of magical realism cling to reality as if to prevent literature from getting in their way, as if to prevent their myth from flying off, as in fairy tales, to supernatural realms.” García Márquez’s best-known novel, which would, perplexingly, go on to represent the very antithesis of these words, was still a good 12 years in the future. Flores finds in the attention that writers such as Borges pay to the qualities of leanness and innovation the hope of a “genuinely Latin American fiction,” as opposed to the “ordinary flatulence” of his peers.

In response, Luis Leal pointed out that Flores had not acknowledged Roh or the ways in which writers such as Arturo Uslar Pietri and Carpentier had brought magical realism to Latin America. He dismissed the idea that Borges was a magical realist because the Argentine writer tended towards the fantastic; magical realism did not create new worlds, it discovered the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances. “The existence of the marvellous real,” he announced, “is what started magic realist literature.” For Leal, magical realism was an attitude, not a style. Carpentier found this telescoping of his idea into magical realism objectionable and wrote an essay in the 1970s, titled ‘The Baroque and the Marvellous Real,’presenting a historical argument for creating a vocabulary to transcribe a distinctive Latin American reality. Interestingly, the literary secession that Carpentier proposed seems to have got less attention than the opinions that Flores and Leal advanced.

Magical realism served as a mode of negotiation for scholars, such as Flores and Leal, who sought academic respectability in the United States. They used the term to remake Latin American fiction into a form distinctive and yet worthy of inclusion into a modern canon. Several such scholars of Spanish literature came to hold positions of authority in North American universities in the 1950s, and this seems to be a reason for the inexplicably long life of the term, both in the academy and in the public eye.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was the first successful left-wing action in a region known for right-wing dictatorships, and it had two consequences. It energised a new generation of writers, and ensured a peaking of North American interest in Latin America. The revolution overlapped with a period of relative economic well-being across Latin America, resulting in a publishing surge. These were the circumstances in which Boom writers such as García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa began to find an audience.

The global arrival of the Boom generation—we could peg this to Gregory Rabassa’s 1970 translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude—coincided in a fatal sort of way with the entrenchment of magical realism as a respectable way of talking about García Márquez and his peers, first in North America and eventually across the English-speaking world. An act of critical conjuring occured at this moment: the spare modernism that Flores had described as central to magical realism was forgotten so as to hold up One Hundred Years of Solitude as the chief exemplar of a genre conveniently redefined. Other acts of legerdemain would soon follow: neat lineages that framed Latin American magical realism as an adjunct to postmodern fiction; the discovery that magical realism was ubiquitous, and thus the basis for a literary League of Extraordinary Gentlemen featuring García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Günter Grass and Salman Rushdie, and occasionally also women writers such as Angela Carter and Toni Morrison.

Magical realism would go on to find even greater academic respectability when the acrobats of high theory decided to contribute to its canonisation. Fredric Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad and Homi Bhabha have each weighed in with what they think it reveals. The noted scholar of postmodernism Linda Hutcheon appeared to hit upon one ring to rule them all when she wrote that “the formal technique of magic realism, (with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled out by many critics as one of the points of conjunction of post-modernism and post-colonialism.” I like the audacity of this idea. I also like the fact that we can cross out magic(al) realism above and replace it with telenovela or Bollywood movie, and find that Hutcheon still makes complete sense.

A peculiar fetishism seems to drive the use of the term in the academy. The novel, alas, has always worked by throwing realism and fantasy together in some form—so this combination alone cannot account for the specific appeal of García Márquez’s work.

AMATEUR (driven by love, to reclaim the word’s original meaning) readers take erratic paths that may cause unpredictable stirrings and recognitions when they encounter a writer such as García Márquez. The attentive reader who craves further conversation after encountering Macondo should perhaps begin looking beyond media commentary and ordinary academic writing. Such conversation is to be found, invariably, among similar-minded cranks who may have the courage to produce something other than politburo-speak.

One eccentric is the Uruguayan academic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who made his reputation with a series of remarkable studies of early Latin American writers. He started, in 1966 (with Ford Foundation funds, and out of Paris because it was “the international capital of Latin America”) the influential magazine Mundo Nuevo, which published previews of works in progress by García Márquez and practically every other Boom writer. In 1972, he published The Boom of the Latin American Novel, an analysis that cuts through the nonsense around magical realism to assert that while the Boom was a publicity venture more than a literary event, it was based on a literary event, which he called the “new novel.” The origins of the new novel could be found in the essays and stories of Borges, and in the novels of his fellow Argentine and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, particularly his The Invention of Morel. The new novel, in Rodríguez Monegal’s opinion, was born out of an unspoken agreement between readers, writers and critics that “allowed writers to go as far as they liked with their writing”—a carte blanche for experimentation. This agreement came to a sad end because the writers behind the new novel were, for a variety of reasons, forced into exile, and their writing grew “artificial.”

It is possible to disagree with Rodríguez Monegal about this. The aha moment that led to One Hundred Years of Solitude occurred while García Márquez was living in exile in Mexico. Vargas Llosa has devoted an entire novel—Aunt Julia and the Script-writer—to uncovering the connections between exile and inspiration. García Márquez has talked of remembering the structure of vallenato—a genre of popular music—and borrowing it for his fiction, and of plundering from a grandmother his key narrative principle—that of telling even the most improbable stories “with a brick face.” Faced with the loss of an atmosphere of conversation with their readers, these novelists invested in acts of artifice by which this dialogue may be restored in some form: through improvisations with form and language, by throwing popular and literary culture together, and by revisiting the past to make visible the ways in which the official dialect of power may impoverish the present.

These responses to exile—choosing artifice over the artificial rigour of engagé realism—seem to connect every writer of the so-called Boom. Vargas Llosa’s 1971 study of García Márquez’s fiction—Historia de un deicidio, or History of a Deicide—extends this idea of artifice. This study, which did much to confirm García Márquez’s standing in the Spanish-speaking world, seems to derive its mojo from a quarrel with Jean Paul Sartre’s notion of the engaged writer. The writer is a god-killer; the novel, a “symbolic murder of reality.” A novel such as One Hundred Years of Solitude is “two things at once: a rebuilding of reality and a testimony of the writer’s disagreement with the world.” Exile may enable the deicide to discard the “real”, and to replace it, through a careful investigation of politics and ideological certitudes, with fiction.

The translator Edith Grossman, who rendered into English the novels Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth, identified a key element in this gift for artifice when she commented on García Márquez’s habit of avoiding subjectivity—one of the staples of the realist novel—at a PEN tribute in 2003.

He is a master of physical observation: Surfaces, appearances, external realities, spoken words—everything that a truly observant observer can observe. He makes almost no allusion to states-of-mind, motivations, emotions, internal responses: Those are left to the inferential skills and deductive interests of the reader. In other words, García Márquez has turned the fly-on-the-wall point of view into a crucial aspect of his narrative style in both fiction and non-fiction, and it is a strategy that he uses to stunning effect. It not only obliges readers to participate in the narration by placing them up on the wall, right next to the fly, but I believe it is also one of the techniques he employs to abrogate sentimentality, leaving only actions driven by emotions, and sometimes passions.

In Autumn of the Patriarch, García Márquez’s reworking of the dictator-novel genre, the technique resolves into a surveillant crackle as curious citizens stream into the defunct ruler’s decaying palace—thoughts and comments from the crowd take over, unfiltered and untagged. In The General in His Labyrinth, we see that Simón Bolívar, mythologised as a liberator in Latin America, was perhaps also its first dictator. This is achieved through an incessant in-and-out between the hero’s alternating petulance and mythopoetic self-regard, and the perspectives of those who have already suffered him for too long.

To follow the artifice in García Márquez’s fiction is to enlist in mischief, political or otherwise: for the reader to conspire and collaborate in producing a narrative that does precisely what it is not supposed to. The creator of Macondo brought to this interest in artifice a sense of fun, something that set him apart from the laboured, sometimes pretentious wheezes perpetrated by Anglo-American writers who saw themselves as postmodern. For an accurate description of this sort of reading pleasure, we may borrow the literary theorist Roland Barthes’s idea of jouissance—a transgressive, almost erotic release caused when the reader crosses over, in contemplating artifice, to become something of a writer. If, as Barthes says, “the text is (should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father,” then one or two generations of readers from Latin America and elsewhere will report that they first encountered committed bum-waggling in the fiction of García Márquez.

This gift for mischief extended into García Márquez’s public persona—in choosing to be a celebrant of his own amateur status, in his distaste for dogma. While Vargas Llosa and other Boom writers have been forthright about their distance from anything magical, García Márquez, interestingly, neither confirmed nor denied any interest of this kind. He made gestures towards the idea of magical realism, most notably in his Nobel lecture, only to turn the heat on the West for being accepting of literature from Latin America while dismissing the politics it comes from and returns to. On another occasion, he said, “The trouble is that many people believe that I’m a writer of fantastic fiction, when actually I’m a very realistic person and write what I believe is the true socialist realism.” We can sit up here, remember Stalin’s version of socialist realism and his willing henchman Andrei Zhdanov, and the requirement that the spirit of the Socialist Superman Stakhanov enter all of Soviet literature, and make of this what we will.

Artifice in fiction educates the reader, in that she or he returns to reality with the capacity to see through the artifice behind which power lurks. It also travels well, and despite the demands it may make on those rendering fiction into another language, is rarely lost in translation. García Márquez’s readership from beyond the region is testimony.

I FOUND MY FIRST COPY of One Hundred Years of Solitude on an unremarkable September afternoon in my first year at college—a few weeks after a professor branched off from a discussion of The Man-eater of Malgudi to talk of how José Arcadio’s blood crossed the street to find his mother. Changing buses at Bangalore’s Shivajinagar terminus, I noticed that the guy bang opposite the place, with two modest rows of paperbacks on a wooden bench had opened early. I had never found anything interesting there, and yet I stopped, and spotted the Picador edition of the novel at the bottom of a pile. The book was mine, after two minutes of bargaining, for a princely twelve rupees.

But I got around to reading it only two years later, when visiting relatives in Kerala. I woke up one night to find an aunt pounding her bosom, and cursing impressively, because she had heard the news of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu. She wailed then because she missed his handsome face, and later because they were forcing Sonia Gandhi to lead the Congress, because she was writing a letter to Mrs Gandhi to desist from such an error and look after her beautiful children instead, and because it suddenly struck her that I, due to my part Tamilness, was an eminent candidate for lynching or worse if I stepped out of the house, or took a walk, or caught a train.

House arrest ensued, and an interminable week of my aunt pounding her bosom in solitude, or sometimes in the company of other grieving women from the neighbourhood. I remembered the book I had ambitiously packed, and pulled it out to read. It went into my head like a song, aided by the sounds of lamentation in the next room, and equally by a sudden access of memory to the various convoluted family stories my mother had filled my childhood with, my aunt’s picturesque turns of phrase reminding me of when I had heard them last. They all came back to me: tales of a drunkard great-uncle who sold the teak rafters that propped the roof up to finance his habit, of a grandfather who disappeared every now and then to mysterious Malabar, of how my grandmother spent six months paralysed from the waist downwards until some man of god dreamed that she needed his healing touch, and came barefoot to our village to pray for her and she walked again.

My stories seemed to blend into García Márquez’s—his stories of a patriarch consumed by enthusiasms, of another who spent much of his time making little golden fish, of men and women eaten by insane desire, of men done to death in duels who did not go away politely, of a massacre that everybody forgot. Macondo, May 1991, and the environs of Manjadi PO, Thiruvalla-5, Kerala State, are inseparably linked in my head.

I did not find some strange new landscape in Macondo. I recognised instead the Bangalore of my childhood, and my mother’s market hometown in Kerala, and my father’s little village in Tamil Nadu, the idiolects of hundreds of people I had met and forgotten, and the narrative verve that links Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil, languages I had for some reason stopped paying attention to.

Salman Rushdie acknowledges a similar strange meeting. Writing in the New York Times after García Márquez’s demise, he said:

When I first read García Márquez I had never been to any Central or South American country. Yet in his pages I found a reality I knew well from my own experience in India and Pakistan. In both places there was and is a conflict between the city and the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, the great and the small … His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it—not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous “wonder tales” of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism.

Any reader who eavesdrops on the chatter around Latin American fiction will soon come across an idea uttered like an incantation: “Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children would not be possible without García Márquez’s One Hundred Years.” It is true that, to some extent, postmodern and magical realist modes powered the Indian English novel after Rushdie. Magical realism in this genre was some part curiosity (Irwin Allan Sealy’s Trotter Nama and Hero), some part spin (many read Amitav Ghosh’s first two novels, quite unnecessarily, as exercises in magical realism) and some part the plainly inexplicable (red earth or blue mangoes, anybody?). What is interesting is the way this fascination wore out among Indian English writers.

I did not know it then, but García Márquez had won over a public in Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil decades before my own moment of discovery. In 2013, the writer N Sukumaran published Thanimaiyin Nooru Andugal, a Tamil translation of One Hundred Years. But Tamil writers were digging into the author much before that. In 1995 the little magazine Kal Kuthirai (Stone Horse), edited by the somewhat reclusive writer Konangi, devoted a special issue to García Márquez: a labour of love that included translations of the first three chapters of One Hundred Years, excerpts from his other novels, the novella Innocent Erendira, and several of his stories, as well as a couple of interviews, interrupted now and then by gray-scale reproductions of the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s jokey composites of fruits and faces, and translations from Borges. I remember being entranced for weeks by the way these familiar stories danced so easily into Tamil, despite their being translations of English translations.

One day in 2007, in a corner of Bangalore’s Bookworm, I found a large pile of US journals from the 1970s devoted to García Márquez and Latin American literature. These had come from the library of the Kannada writer S Diwakar, who had seen fit to jettison this body of critical work. I looked hard for fiction from the region in that pile, and adjacent piles, and figured he was still holding on to that part of his collection. Diwakar is one of several writers who have translated García Márquez’s short stories into Kannada, and several other luminaries have worked on translating his novels, or adapting his work for the stage.

Much has been written about how Macondo’s creator continues to have an audience in Kerala. The Malayalam translation of One Hundred Years is now in its seventeenth reprint. In one of NS Madhavan’s short stories, a character discovers that the greatest Malayalam writer is one García Márquez. Interest in the writer connects Marxists, for whom he was sanctified by his proximity to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, and those who seek no ideological sanction, such as the writer MT Vasudevan Nair, who may have first brought news of the writer to Kerala in the 1970s, and gave television interviews in April this year to laud his capacity for connecting with the common reader. The chain stores DC Books put up posters with photographs of the writer and the Malayalam word vida—farewell—that flapped in their many outlets for weeks after his demise. Uncharitable persons argued that this gesture was ruined a little bit by their choosing to include directly below this the covers of his Malayalam translations on sale.

This fascination did lead to inspiration, as well as to mere imitation, but it would be both hasty and unfair to say that bhasha writers approached García Márquez in the spirit of copy-paste. The writer entered each of these languages so easily because there was in progress a conversation he

could join. In Malayalam, a reader familiar with Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s sense of whimsy, OV Vijayan’s challenges to ideology and orthodoxy in Khasakkinte Itihasam (The Legends of Khasak), or Paul Zacharia’s irreverent sideswipes at faith and tradition, will see in García Márquez’s work the opposition these writers have offered to heaviness and dogma, and their celebrations of artistic independence. Kannada readers may identify with García Márquez because they arrive fresh from conversations about what is local and vital with Srikrishna Alanahalli, and because they have encountered Poornachandra Tejaswi’s quarrels with modernity. This reader will respond to the Colombian’s gift for artifice because it is not unlike the impossible-to-paraphrase art of Devanooru Mahadeva’s Kusuma Baale. Anyone who has read Siddalingaiah’s autobiography, Ooru Keri (A Word with You, World), will find familiar the notion that García Márquez advances in his own autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale—that writing comes out of a joyous thieving from experience.

We can only speculate about the completely contrasting receptions that Macondo’s creator has received in these two worlds—among Indian writers who use English, and among those who write in regional languages. The bhasha writer may be responding to a more urgent political burden than his English counterpart: the need to explain and engage with the bewilderments of the present and the past. Received wisdom, whether traditional or modern, is usually more baroque in the bhashas, and reliably opens up more than one battlefield for the writer. García Márquez’s adroit responses to the pressures of wrestling with different centuries in the same moment puts him in instant fraternity with many bhasha writers, and probably explains the lasting regard he has enjoyed. Indian English writers, sadly, will have to wait a bit for any nation to turn its lonely eyes to them—perhaps because writing in English and writing in a bhasha are today two different forms of exile.

The journalist Nina Martyris wrote a piece in Forbes about how Indira Gandhi got Fidel Castro to bring García Márquez along to the 1983 Non-Aligned Movement summit in Delhi because she had read him and was a fan. I lie awake trying to imagine the conversation between the Czarina of the Emergency and the man who wrote Autumn of the Patriarch, and my mind liquefies on the hot tava of historical irony. There are other experiences of brain-fry. I ran into the revered professor who introduced me to One Hundred Years after what seemed like a similar span; when our conversation veered to what each of us was reading, he spoke with the same rapture of Paulo Coelho and The Alchemist. Last year, a moment of interest in the Malayalam film Amen led me to a television interview where its director, Lijo Pellissery, announced with a beatific smile that his inspiration for the film was “Márquez, the author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years.” Three questions later, the interviewer, who had done his research, said something about the romance between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, from the book that Pellisery had named first, but changed the topic politely when he saw the director goggling at him. At the launch of his second novel a couple of years ago, the journalist and writer Manu Joseph laid into the cliques that award literary prizes in India, and my heart warmed to the man, but I froze in mid hurrah because his next sentence was about the pretentious people who go on about “García Márquez and the Latin American magic realists.” And every year, when I press copies of One Hundred Years on my students, they come back, to the last man, to whine about it being “so complicated.”

García Márquez’s life in the subcontinent allows us to perceive the doubleness that is now his literary legacy. In one version, he is one of the prime movers in the paradoxical bid to return artifice to fiction while winning new readers over. In the other, he is Mr Magical Realism. Here it is his destiny to be read in a limited way—as a provider of easy thrills. Some would say that the author of a novel such as Love in the Time of Cholera may have actively chosen such a destiny. He is thus an unwitting parent to a genre we could well call Márquez-lite, to which committed prisoners of magical realism such as Isabel Allende and committed bumper-sticker artists such as Paulo Coelho are all contributors.

This doubleness is produced by the contradictory mechanisms which constitute World Literature—a domain that resolves into centre and peripheries and a discourse of debt. The term “magical realism” unintentionally reveals this mapping of centre and periphery if we give it a second glance. Those who make bold to write from the peripheries must run the risk of having their work defanged of political intent, and domesticated into quaintness and cliché at the metropolitan centre. If anything salvages the idea of World Literature, it is the fact that a writer like García Márquez may outrun these modes of capture while bearing fiction’s riches to readers and writers even at the very antipodes of Aracataca, Colombia.